Finding Symmetry: The Music and Photos of Composer...

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Finding Symmetry: The Music and Photos of Composer @ericwhitacre

To see more of Eric’s photos follow @ericwhitacre on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music on Instagram.

“I spend a lot of time taking photos up – at the sky, at trees, at flowers, at buildings,” says Eric Whitacre (@ericwhitacre), a Grammy Award-winning classical composer and conductor, and photography enthusiast.

Much of Eric’s visual work leans toward geometric compositions – starkly structured elements and pieces of architectural wonders, often presented in dramatic contrast. “A huge part of that is my music brain,” says the 45-year-old musician, who gained notoriety in 2010 for his Virtual Choir, a project that featured 185 singers from around the world. “I think there’s a big crossover between photography and music, and one of the things in music is just this endless search for symmetry and balance and patterns.”

Eric’s musical background can be traced to his childhood in Nevada, where he began playing instruments at a young age. “I thought I was going to be a pop star,” he says. “I still want to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode.” At the time, he couldn’t read music nor had much familiarity with the classical world he now inhabits. That would change when he got to college, where he had a musical epiphany. “I started singing with this choir,” he says. “We sang this piece by Mozart, his Requiem, and that was it. I was hooked.”

Soon after Eric wrote his first classical piece, which was subsequently published. Before he knew it, he was conducting on his own and went on to receive his master’s degree from the Juilliard School in New York.

“I sort of woke up one day and was a classical composer and conductor,” he says. “It’s like a dream. It felt like I was hearing my true name for the first time.”

Today, Eric is based in London, where he writes music and takes photos in his spare time. The density of his adopted home city has been an enormous creative inspiration for his photography. “You feel really closed in,” he says. “It’s like a rat’s maze a little bit, and so they’re kind of aspirational. In some ways, the photos are a way for me to express where I am emotionally at the time.”

In addition to his architectural and landscape photos, Eric often posts sheets of songs he is writing. “It’s not even music. It’s just shapes and ideas, and it’s all about looking for formal structures.” Sharing those brief sketches with a larger community of artists, musicians and regular fans has been tremendously beneficial.

“I can picture them in my mind, so I have faces I can actually see when I turn around and look out at the audience. It’s everything. It’s a gift, really.”

–– Instagram @music

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