Choral Listening Series -Recording #2
Lux Aurumque - Eric Whitacre (performed by the Eric Whitacre singers)
Listen to it once with your eyes closed, and at least once looking at the score. What a stunning work of art. This is the most famous of Whitacre's many choral pieces, but I encourage you to listen to other works of his as well.
Eric Whitacre has revolutionized modern choral music. One of his main compositional innovations is through the idea of using dissonance (crunchy harmonies) in a different way. This will be the main lesson for today: dissonance vs. consonance.
Crunches or clusters, which are many notes very close together, are also known as dissonance. Dissonant chords are typically used as a point of tension, which will usually resolve to a simpler, consonant harmony as a point of release. Whitacre's music, and particularly this piece, does the opposite.
Look at the beginning of the score; in the first 8 measures, we have four two-bar phrases on the word Lux. Notice the singers begin with a consonant harmony (C# and E), and move to a crunchy, dissonant split harmony on the second measure. Instead of going from dissonance to consonance, these phrases move from consonance to dissonance, releasing the phrase on an 8-part cluster chord. The reason this is so brilliant is because it now makes the simple, consonant harmony seem like the tense one. It needs to move somewhere.
The same consonant to dissonant pattern follows beginning in m. 9, using different harmonies on the word "calida", before he breaks the pattern in m. 13.
One more thing to notice in this piece: no one part is any more important than any other part. Usually, one part will have the melody or moving notes, and the other parts all have to balance to it. In our music, the sopranos usually get the melody. However, in this piece, there is no melody. Eric Whitacre uses a different style of composition that I like to call the "wall of sound", where all parts in equal balance together make the piece what it is.
