Choir goes contemporary with focus on 34-year-old composer.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

The way one-time rock 'n' roll musician Eric Whitacre puts it, he got his first taste of classical music when he joined the college choir to pick up girls.

``I was tricked into singing in the choir with a promise of cute girls and a trip to Mexico,'' Whitacre said by phone the other day. ``I joined. And it changed my life.''

Well, no kidding.

Whitacre, who's now 34, didn't just meet girls. He also developed a deep love for choral music and went on to become one of the most-performed young composers in the nation.

The Los Angeles Times has called his compositions ``works of unearthly beauty and imagination (with) electric, chilling harmonies.'' The Philadelphia Inquirer has called him ``the hottest thing in choral music.''

The Eugene Vocal Arts Ensemble will sing some of Whitacre's work in Saturday's "Contemporary Sounds" concert, including ``Cloudburst,'' inspired by a Northern California rainstorm and based on text by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and "hope, faith, life, love," based on text by e.e. cummings.

The concert will feature choral music from contemporary madrigals to the pop sound of the Beatles.

The 30-voice Vocal Arts Ensemble is the A-team version of the larger Eugene Concert Choir, which has 90 members. It is conducted, as is the larger group, by Diane Rettallack, and takes on more challenging fare.

Whitacre wrote "Cloudburst" in 1992.

"It was my second classical work after I started writing concert works," he said. "It was just an idea that I had.

`I had been up in Northern California and had seen this extraordinary cloudburst that just drenched the valley we were in. I was very moved by it and tried to write a piece to celebrate that event."

"Cloudburst" features some unusual instrumentation: The singers are called on to make storm noises with their hands and bodies.

"It's like asking a child in a kindergarten game to make a rainstorm by snapping their fingers and rubbing their legs to make the sound of wind," the composer said. "The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how stunned the audience seems to be by it.

`It is such an elemental gesture."

Whitacre has enjoyed the kind of career that attracts the word "crossover." He is taken seriously by serious musicians and he's popular with pop music fans.

"More and more the two sides have been converging," he said.

Whitacre first studied music at the University of Nevada, where he joined that choir. He completed his first concert work, "Go, Lovely, Rose," at age 21. He went on to the Juilliard School, where he studied with John Corigliano.

He is currently at work on an electronic music opera - titled "Paradise Lost" although it has nothing to do with the John Milton poem - that he says builds bridges between the classical and pop realms.

His music is "for normal music lovers," Whitacre said.

And who's that?

"People who don't perform in musical ensembles. That tends to be a lot of young people. Which is exciting, to have classical music appealing to people who are under 21.''

The Vocal Ensemble's concert will open with "The Coolin',' a piece from Samuel Barber's "Reincarnations."

Barber, a neo-romantic composer who created lushly melodic work, is best known for his 1937 Adagio for Strings. The Adagio has shown up on the soundtrack of movies from "Platoon" to "A Clockwork Orange."

"Reincarnations" is a setting of Irish poet James Stephens' transcriptions of Celtic poetry.

The ensemble will also perform six madrigals - the "Fire Songs" - by Morten Lauridsen, an American composer with Danish roots who grew up in Portland.

A professor of composition at the University of Southern California, he attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. He worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout on a tower near Mount St. Helens before heading to USC.

Musicologist Nick Strimple describes Lauridsen as ``the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, (whose) probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered.''

The evening wraps up on a lighter note, as the ensemble moves on to choral arrangements of pop tunes from ``Fields of Gold,'' familiar to Sting fans; ``Java Jive,'' ``A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square'' and ``Operator,'' as done by Manhattan Transfer; and the Beatles' songs ``Blackbird/I Will,'' ``Lady Madonna'' and ``Drive My Car,'' as done by the Swingle Singers.

And Whitacre, by the way, did pick up a girl in his choirboy days.

``I got one girl, anyway,'' he said. ``We've been married now for eight years. She's also a classical musician.''

CONCERT PREVIEW

Eugene Vocal Arts Ensemble: Contemporary Sounds

What: Performance of choral and pop music of the 20th century

Where: Hult Center's Soreng Theatre, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Tickets: $10 to $28 (682-5000)

Free preview: 12:15 p.m. today in the lobby of the Hult Center; bring a lunch or snack

CAPTION(S):

Eric Whitacre is `the hottest thing in choral music,' so says the Philadelphia Inquirer.