It may not have been a love story fit for an opera when Eric Whitacre and Hila Plitmann met in a Juilliard placement exam in 1995. “He seemed like a cowboy from the ’80s,” Plitmann laughs in retrospect. “He had long hair and two earrings . . . he had cowboy boots on. His bangs were not even humanly possible in terms of how high they were. I thought he was cute but, in a way, I wanted nothing to do with him.” Fifteen years later, I talk with Whitacre and Plitmann via Skype from their temporary home at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, where Whitacre is composer-in-residence and visiting fellow. Plitmann pauses and adds, “He was [an] incredibly charming and immensely talented ’80s cowboy.”
Both Whitacre, 41, and Plitmann, 38, completed postgraduate work at the legendary Lincoln Center conservatory; however, the roads they took to get there could not have been more different. Plitmann was born and raised in Jerusalem; Whitacre grew up in a small Nevada hamlet located one hour outside of Reno. Whitacre first discovered music after he was cast in a national ad for McDonald’s at age 14 (a commercial that features a two-second clip of young Whitacre with a tie, glasses, and perm—it’s still readily available on YouTube). Most of his $10,000 paycheck was squirreled away for college, but Whitacre was given one-tenth of that income to spend as he pleased. The money went into clothes and a synthesizer.
“I had decided next year I would be cool and the clothes would help,” he laughs. “When I think back, it’s like a John Hughes teen film.”
After his closet was restocked came the big investment: Whitacre purchased an Ensoniq ESQ-1 and an EMU Drumulator, “the very first pieces of what would become a lifelong fetish with electronic instruments,” he explains. Though at first he didn’t know how to use his new tools, Whitacre wrote scores of songs inspired by the likes of Depeche Mode and Alphaville. Through trial and error, he picked up a knowledge of counterpoint and formal structure by the time he graduated high school. The rest of the “McPaycheck” went, as intended, to studies at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Whitacre adds, however, that he went to college “only because everyone else was going to college. I didn’t have any grand designs or even know what college meant.” The second revelation came when he auditioned for the music department and was asked by conductor David Weiller to join the school’s choir.
“There was no way I was going to join,” Whitacre says. “I remember seeing the show choir in high school and I had never been more embarrassed for humanity than [with] those hideous outfits.” Fortunately, a friend convinced Whitacre to join as there were “a lot of cute girls in the soprano section” and a trip to Mexico planned for the end of the year. Though not a religious man, Whitacre’s life was changed the first day of rehearsal when the ensemble sang the “Kyrie” from Mozart’s Requiem. For the rest of his time at UNLV, Whitacre “ferociously devoured” the school’s music library, listening to recordings while following along in scores. By his junior year, he wrote his first choral work, “Go, Lovely Rose,” presenting it as a thank-you to Weiller—who, in turn, had the choir perform it at a convention and helped his protégé to see the work published. “Lovely Rose” was followed by what remains one of Whitacre’s most well known compositions, “Cloudburst.” As he describes it, “I sort of woke up one day and I was a composer.”
On the other side of the world, Plitmann was raised in a musical household. In her lightly accented English, she describes her parents as “art-seeking, music-loving individuals.” Her mother has a degree in musicology and her father sings and played violin. Plitmann herself began musical training early on with her parents encouraging her to play piano, “as good Jewish parents do.” Plitmann, however, was not as instantly taken with her instrument as Whitacre was with his. “I didn’t like practicing, as most kids don’t. . . . I was very much [an] extrovert, jumping on tables and performing.” Plitmann turned to singing after seeing several musicals and operas on family trips to London and joined the Ankor Children’s Choir. Like Whitacre, she connected with a mentor in her conductor.
“In a way, [he] changed my life. He was really strict but forced everyone to learn mountains of music and instilled this focus—this very terrifying focus—we had to have while we were rehearsing and performing,” she explains. “I discovered I really love, love to sing.” At the same age as her future husband was when he was filming McDonald’s commercials, Plitmann was cast as Flora in the Israeli Opera’s The Turn of the Screw, another experience that cemented her position in the operatic world as opposed to musical theatre. “The experience of being immersed in a Britten opera just made me fall in love with the classical singing world. I just couldn’t get enough of it after that.” Under the tutelage of voice teacher Nina Schwartz, Plitmann was just as ferocious as Whitacre at devouring all she could learn, from early music to opera to chamber works. Schwartz’s encouragement led to her pupil attending Juilliard for both undergraduate and graduate studies.
There, love blossomed between the cowboy composer and Israeli soprano. He suggested they “save electricity” by studying a recording of Debussy’s impressionistic—not to mention romantic—Pelléas et Mélisande together for a class on opera in the 20th-century. She “actually fell for it,” laughs Whitacre. He found her sense of humor made him laugh his head off “80 percent of the time,” and he was attracted to her kindness and generosity and an inner beauty inside and out that, along with an ethereally earthy soprano, helped Plitmann to earn a Grammy award in 2009. She was won over by his charm and talent along with a genuine ability to connect to other people, an asset that has led to Whitacre’s creation of the Virtual Choir along with several other keen negotiations of social networking.
“It’s almost scary how he finds ways to connect to people, his fans, his audience,” says Plitmann, who has appeared on her husband’s popular YouTube channel to demonstrate pronunciation for Whitacre’s song cycle, Five Hebrew Love Songs—set to texts by Plitmann herself. “I believe there is an essence of it in the things he writes that maybe it doesn’t quite hit the scholastic [or] academic world in the way they like things to be, but it is absolutely genuine and thought filled and has a lot of form to it and structural building behind it.”
The husband-and-wife duo are frequent collaborators. Whitacre’s works, as seen on recordings for Hyperion, Naxos, and Decca (which Whitacre signed to exclusively last year) show a healthy amount of inspiration taken from Renaissance polyphonies blended with modern harmonies and vocal effects typical of Leonard Bernstein or John Corigliano (unsurprisingly, Whitacre studied with Corigliano at Juilliard). And Plitmann’s first professional opera experience with Britten has held an influence over her specialization in modern works by both her husband and his contemporaries. Ironically enough, Corigliano makes another guest appearance in their life story: his Mr. Tambourine Man netted Plitmann her Grammy.
Perhaps their most significant professional collaboration, however, has been Whitacre’s Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “a roar of youth, speed, and metal” (they neglect to mention trance, techno, manga, and anime influences, not to mention a 425-person chorus). Upon moving to Los Angeles after their marriage in 1998, Whitacre and Plitmann settled in Studio City, close to Pink Cheeks, a waxing salon whose staff is famous for slapping their Hollywood-caliber clients on the behind as they pull off the waxing tape. The idea of collaborating with actor, writer, and brother-like friend David Noroña on a documentary about Pink Cheeks turned into the formation of an opera. In the midst of planning a preliminary budget, Noroña’s wife asked why opera was no longer popular, an answer for which Whitacre had a lengthy response.
“I went on this rant that opera used to be written in the vernacular of the people—they were tunes. It was language they understood, the actual language,” he says. “I told the story about Verdi being so famous, like with ‘La donna è mobile,’ he didn’t teach the tenor the melody until the day of the performance. He taught them only the words [because] he knew if he taught them the melody, everyone in town would be singing it before the show.”
In a discussion between the two couples, with the idea of creating an opera that carried the spirit of Verdi’s time but in the context of the 21st-century zeitgeist—essentially making the art form seem new—Whitacre deduced that “what you really need is a rave opera.” The idea of source material came up quickly after, and Noroña and Whitacre volleyed old texts back and forth with the idea to do a West Side Story-like update. “I said, ‘What about Paradise Lost?’” Whitacre recounts. “‘What gets more epic than angels battling in Paradise?’ We were over the moon.”
Albeit Whitacre and Noroña were newcomers to writing an opera—especially a rave opera—they devoted two years to “stumbling in the dark,” as Whitacre puts it. “We had no story, just writing arias out of the blue. I would set them in Britten-meets-Brian-Eno–esque style.” Plitmann sang the coloratura material as it was being written (accompanied by heavy choral backup and techno beats) at colleges and boutique performance spaces in California and New York. The piece gestated and evolved, slowly taking on a form with the help of mentors like Stephen Schwartz, of Pippin and Wicked fame.
In its current—yet still evolving—incarnation, Whitacre’s Paradise Lost tells the story of a band of wingless angels abandoned during a war. Plitmann’s character, Exstasis (compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the New York Times) leads a group of rebels to find their lost wings with appropriately apocalyptic results. In its staged version, Paradise Lost gives Plitmann a chance to not only show off vocally, but physically. A number of production clips on Paradise Lost’s YouTube channel (paradiselost) show Plitmann proving her black belt mettle in taekwondo, a martial art the singer had wanted to learn and studied specifically for this part. “You should see her,” Whitacre beams. “It’s the most incredible thing.”
Beyond Paradise Lost, Plitmann and Whitacre have frequent collaborations as a singer-composer and singer-conductor couple (she appears on his latest CD, and his debut disc for Decca, Light and Gold). “We both can talk to one another in a way that’s a little too comfortable,” Plitmann explains of their working relationship. On the other hand, however, the comfort allows them to work harmoniously. “There is really a wonderful sense of him knowing what my voice does, not only when he is writing but when he is conducting.” Not a couple to leave their work outside of their home, Plitmann recounts many 3 a.m. sessions of trying out new material, a sort of modern classical John and Yoko. Though, with their lifestyles, there isn’t as much time for bed-ins.
“We did this concert with the London Symphony Orchestra two weeks ago,” Whitacre says of a recent conducting gig. “Hila sang Knoxville: Summer of 1915, [and] we didn’t actually have time to work on it together.” Though the couple got to work on the piece only half an hour before the orchestral rehearsal, the special connection they feel with one another as artists helps them ease into their roles in the concert hall. That’s not to say that sometimes there are the occasional arguments. “Israelis like to disagree,” laughs Plitmann.
“I didn’t catch the signals early on,” explains Whitacre. “Hila has an intense kind of process before she goes to perform. Not being a performer, I don’t have a performer’s mentality—I hate being left alone in the green room. Hila has a real thing. She needs to be alone. She eats a banana and she does stretches. It’s beautiful to see someone focused like that.”
“It’s also neuroses,” she interjects.
“Whatever it is,” he replies, “it’s essential to what you do. . . . We have learned to not fall into places where we get at each other. It’s easy when you are close, when you love each other, and it’s easy to say the wrong thing.”
It’s touching to see this duo discuss the small details of their relationship, details that most couples—performers or not—work out on a daily basis. It has become especially resonant with their other main collaboration, their five-year–old son Esh. Talking to Whitacre and Plitmann about how they manage parenthood is like speaking to any pair of working parents.
“Your life will change; that’s what they all tell you,” he nods.
“We hope we are not completely screwing him up in the process,” she adds of the constant trips Esh takes with his parents for business. “It all comes from good intentions.” They have tried to lessen the blow that comes with a toddler accruing frequent flyer miles by bringing certain traditions on the road, such as a bedtime ritual that remains constant regardless of where the family actually goes to sleep. Things will change when Esh begins school, but that’s a bridge Whitacre and Plitmann plan to cross when they get to it. “At some point we have to accept [that] this is our life: we are two performing artists and we love it.”
As their son grows, however, so do his parents’ careers. “Having [Esh] has taken a bigger hit on Hila’s than on mine,” Eric says. “Hila has really carried the burden of trying to juggle two careers. She has very, very generously allowed me to have my thing.” Such a juggling act, however, has not kept Plitmann from making her own set of impressive recordings, from Paola Prestini’s Body Maps to an extensive discography of Olympian works by David Del Tredici (not to mention the aforementioned Corigliano work). Like her husband’s networking skills, Plitmann is attracted to the independently run classical outfits, like Prestini’s Vision Into Art Ensemble, because of their “incredibly genuine, original, [and] non-apologetic” art. Connecting to ensembles and composers has been the foundation of Plitmann’s career, and beyond Whitacre there are certain composers to whom she constantly turns.
These two powerhouses of 21st-century classical music are also enjoying the benefits of 21st-century connectivity. As Verdi once famously told his followers, a correspondent could easily send a letter addressed to “Maestro Verdi, Italy” and it would reach him. For a period in the last century, composers and performers were not nearly as accessible. But now with the advent of the Internet—and, more importantly, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the like—artists like Whitacre and Plitmann are making themselves readily accessible to fans and students.
Verdi’s accessibility lives on through these communication tools. Student Britlin Losee sent her a cappella video of Whitacre’s 2000 work, “Sleep,” into the YouTube ether, and the link was quickly brought to its composer’s attention. “Ever since I heard your song ‘Sleep,’ I have been addicted to your music. Music is my life, it is my heart, it is everything. And you touched me in a way . . . [that] when I compose I just hope that I can be as different as you are and be as unique as you are and show that passion and emotion,” Losee announces on the recording before singing the soprano line with a nervous yet clear tone.
Floored by the gesture, Whitacre had a “thunderbolt” of an idea and asked his fan base (which currently totals nearly 45,000 on Facebook, over four times that of Renée Fleming) to buy the same track on iTunes, sing their respective choral parts, and upload it. “Initially there was an issue, ‘if we all sing to the album you can hear it.’ So then I said, ‘Everybody wear headphones.’” The video was then cut together by fan Scott Haines and, like many of Whitacre’s other projects, the composer sought a way to make it bigger. He made a conductor track for “Lux Aurumque,” which starts with Whitacre going over notes on the music—“What we’re going to do is teach the audience how to breathe,” he says of the opening crescendos—and diction. Sheet music was offered as a free download and virtual choral artists auditioned for the soprano solo (given to Melody Myers).
In total, 185 voices representing 12 countries were compiled and the video went viral, thanks in part to Distinguished Concerts International New York (an organization that also has a hand in Whitacre’s Paradise Lost). DCINY will also help Whitacre take the virtual choir one step further, with the goal of amassing 900 virtual choristers. A live version of the event at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall will be performed in April, in between March and June concerts of Paradise Lost, once again featuring Plitmann as Exstasis.
For all of the digital communications that dominate Whitacre and Plitmann’s lives, however, the two make it a priority to have one-on-one time on a regular basis. “We are big fans of couples’ therapy,” Whitacre says. “What we discovered [is] it’s not only communication, it’s communicating what you want. When you are a couple, it gets so hard to say what we want. ‘Here is what I want . . . ,’ ‘Let’s figure that out . . . ,”’ Plitmann says without missing a beat before her husband adds, “It’s when you aren’t telling the other person what you want—that’s when the ‘fun’ begins.”
