Eric Whitacre signs with Boosey & Hawkes
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre signs a worldwide publishing agreement with Boosey & Hawkes.
"Whitacre is that rare thing, a modern composer who is both popular and original"
– The Daily Telegraph
"unearthly beauty and imagination"
— Los Angeles Times
The GRAMMY® Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has signed a new long-term publishing agreement with Boosey & Hawkes covering future compositions and a collection of works for chorus, orchestra and wind ensemble.
Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular musicians of his generation. His concert music has been commissioned by today’s most prominent ensembles – including the BBC Proms, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Los Angeles Master Chorale and The King’s Singers – and is championed by millions of amateur musicians and students around the world.
Whitacre is best known for his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs, which have united singers from over 101 countries in performance through user-generated videos. The ethos of the Virtual Choir is that singers of any ability or experience can join and that every video is included. Over 8,500 singer videos were included in Virtual Choir 4: Fly to Paradise.
> Fly to Paradise
Forthcoming events include all-Whitacre programmes with Distinguished Concerts International New York at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York (8/15 Apr), concerts with the Eric Whitacre Singers in London (5 May), the Flemish Radio Choir on tour in Belgium (16-19 May) and the Netherlands Radio Choir at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2 Jul). Whitacre leads Big Sing California at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (21 Jul) under his artist residency with the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Next season brings the first full concert performances of his major new work The Sacred Veil with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, setting poetry by Charles Anthony Silvestri exploring themes of love and loss (16/17 Feb 2019). Whitacre is also planning an ambitious new audio-visual project with NASA around his work Deep Field, inspired by the Hubble Telescope Deep Field images.
Eric Whitacre comments:
"It is both humbling and a great privilege to join the largest specialist classical music publishing company in the world, with its extraordinary catalogue of copyrights from Stravinsky to Copland and some of the most inspirational composers of our day. Boosey & Hawkes takes a global view. It respects and develops opportunities and audiences for music through all the media available to us. Working hand in hand with my management team at Music Productions, Boosey & Hawkes and the wider Concord Music family, I look forward to a stimulating and exciting future."
Janis Susskind, Managing Director of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers comments:
"We are delighted to welcome Eric Whitacre to Boosey & Hawkes. Eric is an outstanding musical ambassador in his multiple roles of composer, conductor and motivational speaker and an innovator in his thinking about ways to harness current technology in the service of art and community engagement. Eric’s global, inclusive outlook aligns with our own aim at Boosey & Hawkes to embrace new media and technology as a path forward for classical music. My colleagues and I look forward to working with Eric on a range of exciting music projects."
For further information and photos contact:
David Allenby (Head of Publicity and Marketing, B&H)
[email protected] +44 (0)20 7054 7253
Ethan Kelly (Publicity & Press Assistant, B&H)
[email protected] +44 (0)20 7054 7254
Claire Long (Eric Whitacre Manager & Producer)
[email protected] +44 (0)1753 783 739
NOTES TO EDITORS:
About Eric Whitacre
Born in Nevada, Eric Whitacre is a graduate of The Juilliard School where he studied composition with John Corigliano and David Diamond. His list of works includes prestigious commissions for, among others, the BBC Proms, the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Chanticleer, Julian Lloyd Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra, The Tallis Scholars, the Berlin Rundfunkchor and The King’s Singers. Eric’s first album as composer and conductor, released by Decca as Light & Gold, won the 2012 Grammy® Award for Best Choral Recording. The recording reaped a harvest of five-star reviews and topped the US and UK classical album charts within a week of its release. His second album for Decca, Water Night, again featuring the Eric Whitacre Singers, secured No.1 position in the iTunes and Billboard classical charts on the day of its release in April 2012.
A sought-after guest conductor, Eric has conducted choral and instrumental concerts around the globe, including sold-out concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. In addition to several collaborations with legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, he has worked with British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox. Eric was recently appointed Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale having completed a five-year term as Composer in Residence at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, UK.
The range of Eric Whitacre’s international reach increased in 2010 with the launch of his ground-breaking Virtual Choir, ‘Lux Aurumque’. The online project, inspired by a young singer’s video upload, was created by 185 singers from a dozen different countries. Within two months their joint recording attracted over a million views on YouTube and has now been viewed over four million times. The project grew in numbers with Virtual Choir 2.0, ‘Sleep’, and Virtual Choir 3, ‘Water Night’, with Virtual Choir 4 ‘Fly to Paradise’ receiving over 8,500 submissions from 101 countries. Released in July 2013, the film was launched as part of the Coronation Festival at Buckingham Palace and televised on BBC 1. To date, the four Virtual Choirs have registered over 15 million views.
A charismatic speaker, Eric has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies and global institutions including Apple, Google, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Nations Speaker’s Programme and two main stage TED talks.
> ericwhitacre.com
About Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes is the world’s leading publisher of contemporary classical music, with a blue chip catalogue of 20th-century masters including Bartók, Bernstein, Britten, Copland, Prokofieff, Strauss and Stravinsky alongside an eminent front list of composers that includes John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Harrison Birtwistle, Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean, Detlev Glanert, Osvaldo Golijov, HK Gruber, Karl Jenkins, Magnus Lindberg, James MacMillan, Steve Reich and Mark-Anthony Turnage. The company has offices in London, New York and Berlin and a network of agents around the world.
> www.boosey.com
About Concord Music
Concord Music is the independent, worldwide leader in the development, acquisition, and management of recorded music, music publishing, and theatrical performance rights. With offices in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, London, Berlin, and Cleveland, Concord Music has a diverse and vibrant roster of active recording artists, composers, and songwriters, and a vast and historic catalog of works by some of the most treasured names in music history.
Concord Music's master recording portfolio contains more than 10,000 active albums and includes no less than 265 GRAMMY® winners (representing approximately 6.25% of all the GRAMMYs® ever awarded) and 405 titles that have been certified by the RIAA as either gold, platinum, multi-platinum or diamond. Concord Music’s active labels – Concord Records, Fantasy Records, Fearless Records, Loma Vista Recordings, Razor & Tie (including the dynamic Kidz Bop brand), Rounder Records, and Varèse Sarabande – collectively release more than 100 new recordings per year across many musical genres. Concord Music’s historical labels, which are managed by its Craft Recordings team, include such storied imprints as Milestone, Musart, Nitro, Pablo, Prestige, Riverside, Savoy, Specialty, Stax, Telarc, Vee-Jay, and Wind-up.
Concord Music’s publishing business was transformed in 2017 when it acquired Imagem Music Group and integrated it with Concord’s existing publishing operation, The Bicycle Music Company. This combination resulted in a catalog of over 380,000 copyrighted works, spanning all musical genres and containing many of the world’s most celebrated compositions. Concord Music also supports a diverse group of current composers and songwriters who are continually creating important and commercially-successful new musical works. With the Imagem acquisition, Concord Music also added Boosey & Hawkes, the world’s leading specialist classical music publisher, and the legendary Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. In 2018, Concord Music added the renowned musical theatre library, Tams-Witmark to its publishing business. Boosey & Hawkes, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Tams-Witmark will remain as individual business units under the Concord Music umbrella.
Concord Music is the operating entity of Alchemy Copyrights LLC, an investment company that is owned by Barings Alternative Investments, Sound Investors, and seventy institutional and individual partners, including forty members of Concord Music’s management team. At the forefront of intellectual property valuation, acquisition and utilization, the Concord Music investment underscores the partners’ belief in the lasting and appreciating global value of superior original entertainment content.
> www.concord.com
ENDS
Photo: Marc Royce
