Voice of Season

Chalk up a win for classical music. Pacific Chorale composer-in-residence Eric Whitacre started out as a rocker, but singing Mozart changed all that.

“I stumbled onto the whole thing,” Whitacre, 30, said in a recent phone interview from his home in Sherman Oaks.

“When I went to college, at the University of Nevada back in Las Vegas, I got tricked into singing in choir. The first thing we did was the Mozart Requiem. That was the piece that changed my life overnight.”

He reset his goals and began composing serious music for chorus. His first piece written for the Pacific Chorale, “Winter, “ will be premiered Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The change took a toll, however. It took him seven years to get his degree.

“I had a lot of catching up to do,” he said. “I didn’t read music. I didn’t know a thing about concert or classical music. Part of the seven years was just catching up.”

To do that, he went to the library to read and listen to scores. “It’s the best education you can have.”

For all that work, his grades weren’t very good when he graduated in 1995, so he looked for a graduate school that didn’t require a GPA. The only one he could find was the Juilliard School in New York.

He sent off a portfolio, including a number of works already published. Juilliard admitted him, but the year began badly.

“My first year basically paralyzed me. I studied with [composer] David Diamond, very old school, part of that school that writes music nobody listens to. He shot me down totally, said my music was too accessible, too popular, too uneducated.”

Diamond may have been shooting him down, but others were commissioning works. So in frustration--and rebellion--he wrote “Godzilla Eats Las Vegas!” for his alma mater, UNLV.

“That really shook things up at Juilliard. I got a lot of flak for it. But I was doing it for myself, standing up for myself. It just kind of mocked the seriousness of concert music. That writing gets so stuffy.”

In fact, faced with a faculty partly consisting of entrenched serialists, Whitacre and a few like-minded composers formed a group called “The New Optimists.”

“We were just infuriated by the fact that they were destroying our future. They were making it so that people didn’t want to hear concert music anymore.”

Soon the school divided between the two camps.

“It would be funny to hear student recitals,” he said.

Life got better when he changed composition teachers his second year to John Corigliano, a fellow tonalist.

Whitacre had jump-started his composing career by writing wind symphonies for band, a form particularly derided at Juilliard.

“As a composer, especially as a beginning composer, it’s a chance to write a piece and have hundreds of performances of the thing, which is so unusual.”

In fact, one of his works--a suite for wind band called “Ghost Train”--has proved immensely popular.

“That single piece has been supporting me for seven years.”

He had discovered band music by accident walking one day by a rehearsal room at college.

“It was the loudest sound I had heard in my life. I sat there for an hour. Then I told the conductor I had an idea for a piece for them. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘You write it. We’ll perform it.’

“You have to use really clever orchestration with a band or it does sound [only] like a band. Generally, you have seven percussion back there, so there’s a lot of color. And you have a lot of brass--12 trumpets in one place--so you can do some unusual things.

“But that being said, now that I’m writing for orchestra, there’s nothing in the world like writing for strings.”

Whitacre doesn’t regard his Juilliard years as a total loss, however. “The classes in technical application--like ear training and theory--were the best I ever had.”

Plus, he met his wife, soprano Hila Plitmann, there. The two moved to California after he graduated in 1997 to pursue film and film music.

Once here, he heard a choral program by John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale broadcast on National Public Radio. Whitacre was impressed. He went to the group’s Web site and found that Alexander had already scheduled two of his works for a May 2000 concert.

The composer met Alexander and Pacific Chorale Executive Director Julie Bussell at a choral directors convention in March. The two mentioned they were thinking about having another composer in residence. James Hopkins held the post from 1996 to ’98.

“It was so cool the way it worked out.”

Whitacre’s “Winter” is a setting of three works by little-known poet Edward Eshe. He found them in a book of stories and poems that his father had given him several Christmases ago.

“They’re so beautiful and minimalist.”

*

Whitacre calls his style either “Dynamic Minimalism” or “Romantic Minimalism.”

“I like minimalist elements. But I like to move on before it starts to get boring.”

The work is unusual in that it employs a sitar.

“As I started working with the material, this one little [musical] gesture kept repeating itself over and over,” Whitacre said. “I’ve written enough works to have definitely learned not to dismiss that sort of thing.”

Soon he realized that the gesture had an Indian quality.

“My first instinct was, ‘Am I out of my mind?’ But I just kind of went with it. To their credit, when I called the Pacific Chorale, I said, ‘I know this is a Christmas piece, but I want to add a sitar.’ They said, ‘Sounds great. No problem.’ You couldn’t get away with that on the East Coast.”

When the work is heard Sunday, that doesn’t mean it will represent his last word on the subject.

“I have published works now that I’m still changing on the [music] stand. You keep growing as a musician. Next week you come up with something better.”

*

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIME

John Alexander will conduct the Pacific Chorale in the premiere of Eric Whitacre’s “Winter” on Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The program also will include carols and holiday favorites. $17 to $54. (714) 662-2345.