Eric Whitacre Keynote Speaker

Eric Whitacre, is a Grammy award-winning composer and conductor. He is currently Visiting Composer at Pembroke College, Cambridge University and is an Ambassador for the Royal College of Music in London.

He has drawn capacity audiences to concerts with many of the world’s leading orchestras and choirs in venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), the Royal Albert Hall and Buckingham Palace (London).

Insatiably curious and a lover of all types of music, Eric has worked with legendary Hollywood composers Hans Zimmer, John Powell and Jeff Beal as well as British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox. Major classical commissions have been written for the BBC Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin, The Tallis Scholars, Chanticleer, Cincinnati Pops, Kantorei, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, National Children’s Chorus of America and The King’s Singers.

His composition for symphony orchestra and chorus, Deep Field, was inspired by the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope and became the foundation for a collaboration with NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and 59 Productions. The film was premiered at Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida), has been seen at arts and science festivals across the world. Deep Field has been performed in concert on several continents, and with simultaneous film projection by the New World Symphony, New World Center (Miami), Brussels Philharmonic, Flagey (Brussels), Bergen Philharmonic, Grieghallen (Bergen) among other great orchestras.

Widely considered to be the pioneer of Virtual Choirs, Eric created his first project as an experiment in social media and digital technology. Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque was published in 2010 and featured 185 singers from 12 countries. Ten years-on in 2020, Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently – written for the Virtual Choir during the global pandemic that shook the world, COVID-19 – featured 17,562 singers from 129 countries. Today, his works are programmed worldwide and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries.

Eric has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies and global institutions from Apple and Google to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations Speaker’s Program. His talks at the influential TED conference in Long Beach CA received standing ovations.