>>53625397
The defining characteristic of his pieces is the ‘mood’ creation - not a bad thing in of itself - but this ethereal sustained melancholy is present in the vast majority of Whitacre’s works – and it is what people expect to hear in a Whitacre piece. His compositional technique consists of changing chords very slowly and adding a few notes here and there. I’m being facetious, but I think the nub of the problem is that Whitacre’s works feel like they were written on the choir voice setting of an old Casio keyboard – a collection of very nice sounding chords, covered in lashings of reverb. People will disagree with me, but it doesn’t get away from the fact that it’s just chords. Nice chords.
It isn’t bad music by any means, it’s just not very interesting and I’m not convinced it rewards repeated listening and performance. It strikes me as music for teenagers, heavy with the pathos and melancholy that people of that age often have. There are good works by Whitacre (Sleep for example is both affecting and interesting) and certainly better works by composers of a similar ilk (Lauridsen, Łukaszewski etc).
What Whitacre does well is that his music makes people interested in contemporary choral music. From there, they should go on to find more interesting avenues of discovery. They probably won’t though.