Eric Whitacre

Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor, Eric Whitacre, is among today’s most popular musicians. A graduate of The Juilliard School, his works are performed worldwide, and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united well over 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries. Among his recent accolades and awards, Eric received the Richard D. Colburn Award from the Colburn School and an Honorary Doctor of Arts from Chapman University (CA). His long-term relationship with Decca Classics has produced several no.1 albums which have enduring success.

Eric served consecutive terms as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and currently holds the position of Visiting Composer at Pembroke College. He’s also an Ambassador for the Royal College of Music in London and is proud to be a Yamaha artist. A long-term relationship with Decca Classics has produced several no.1 albums which have enduring success. Recorded with vocal supergroup VOCES8 and released in 2023, Home features Eric’s work The Sacred Veil  alongside other works spanning his thirty-year composition career.

Eric’s newest composition, Eternity in an Hour, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in London as part of the BBC Proms in September 2024. Written for choir, string quartet, piano and electronics, it’s the first time Eric has simultaneously conducted and played live electronics on-stage. The piece combines acoustic performance with live synths and real-time sampling and manipulation of the acoustic instruments. In 2025, The Pacific Has No Memory, commissioned by revered violinist, Anne Akiko Meyers, received its premiere performed by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to be followed by Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Insatiably curious and a lover of all types of music, Eric has worked with legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, as well as British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox.

A widely respected conductor, Eric has worked with the world’s leading choirs and orchestras including the Minnesota Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2024, he conducted Mozart Requiem alongside his own pieces with The Louisville Orchestra. His collaboration with Spitfire Audio resulted in a trail-blazing vocal sample library which became an instant best-seller and is used by composers the world-over. Major classical commissions have been written for the BBC Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin, The Tallis Scholars, VOCES8, cellist Julian Lloyd-Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Chanticleer, National Symphony Orchestra/Kennedy Center, Kantorei, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, National Children’s Chorus of America and The King’s Singers.

His composition, Deep Field, was inspired by the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope and became the foundation for a pioneering collaboration with NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and film-makers 59 Productions. The film was premiered at Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida), has been seen in concert halls and at arts and science festivals across the world. His long-form work The Sacred Veil, a profound meditation on love, life and loss, was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by the composer.

Widely considered to be the pioneer of Virtual Choirs, Eric created his first project as an experiment in social media and digital technology. Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque was published in 2010 and featured 185 singers from 12 countries. Ten years-on in 2020, Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently – written for the Virtual Choir during the global pandemic that shook the world, COVID-19 – featured 17,562 singers from 129 countries. Previous Virtual Choir projects include ‘Glow’ written for the Winter Dreams holiday show at Disneyland© Adventure Park, California, and the Virtual Youth Choir, a major fundraiser for UNICEF.  To date, the Virtual Choirs have registered over 60 million views and have been seen on global TV. Eric launched his Virtual School with its first course “The Beautiful Mess: Masterclass in Composition and Creativity”.

A charismatic speaker, Eric Whitacre has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies, in education and global institutions from Apple and Google to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations Speaker’s Program. His mainstage talks at the influential TED conference in Long Beach CA received standing ovations.

Promoters please note: We update our biographies regularly and ask that they are not altered without permission. For updated versions, please e-mail: Amelia Monaghan