Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque ('Light and Gold') is simultaneously one of the most admired contemporary choral works and a landmark in the history of digital music-making. Composed in 2000, it became in 2010 the first piece of music assembled from a virtual choir - a community of singers from twelve countries who had never met but sang together across the internet. Its sacred imagery, drawn from the nativity of Luke 2 and the luminous theology of John and Revelation, made it the ideal vehicle for this technologically unprecedented act of communal music-making.
The Composition
Whitacre set a Latin poem by Edward Esch that was itself a translation of an earlier English poem. The English original described 'warm and heavy as pure gold / and brilliant, / the tiny / new-born child' - imagery of divine light descending upon a baby in straw. Esch translated the poem into Latin to give it the sonic texture of the choral tradition: 'Lux, calida gravisque pura / velut aurum / et canunt angeli / molliter / modo natum' ('Light, warm and heavy as pure gold / and the angels sing / softly / to the newly born'). The Latin text is not drawn from the Bible or the liturgy; it is a contemporary poem in a classical language, but its imagery - divine light, angels, a new-born child in straw - draws unmistakably on the nativity accounts of Luke 2 and the light theology of the Johannine literature.
Whitacre composed the work in 2000. It is scored for SATB choir, typically six voice parts, unaccompanied. Its duration is approximately three minutes - brief by the standards of serious choral composition - but the compression is part of the work's effectiveness: it creates a single, sustained impression of luminous wonder rather than developing a extended argument.
Biblical Resonances
Revelation 21:23 - 'And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof' - resonates throughout the work. The 'light' (lux) of the poem is not natural light but divine radiance: warm, golden, descending from heaven upon the infant in the straw. The Johannine identification of Christ as light (John 8:12: 'I am the light of the world') and the prologue's theology (John 1:4-5: 'In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not') give the poem's imagery its theological weight.
Luke 2:7 - 'And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger' - is the nativity image the poem evokes: the child lying in straw, the angels singing softly. The Latin poem does not retell the nativity but inhabits its atmosphere - the same quality of hushed wonder before the divine presence made small and vulnerable that characterizes the best nativity art and music.
Musical Analysis
Whitacre's harmonic language is his most distinctive feature: he builds chords from closely spaced adjacent notes ('tone clusters') that create rich, shimmering sonorities, then resolves them into pure consonances in a way that creates a sensation of simultaneous tension and rest. This harmonic technique - sometimes described as 'suspended animation' - creates the musical equivalent of wonder: the ear is held in a state of uncertain expectation that is never fully resolved but never collapses into anxiety.
The work opens with a quiet, sustained chord - barely more than a breath - and builds very gradually through overlapping voice entries (a technique derived from the Renaissance motet) to a full-choral climax before subsiding again into silence. The arch structure (quiet opening, gradual building, sustained climax, subsiding close) mirrors the poem's imagery: light descending, brightening, then gently fading.
The Virtual Choir
In 2010, Whitacre made music history by assembling a virtual performance of Lux Aurumque from 185 individual video recordings submitted by singers in twelve countries who had learned the piece from recordings and performed it in isolation. These recordings were edited and mixed into a single video performance - the 'Virtual Choir 1.0' - in which 185 individual faces and voices performed the work simultaneously while never having been in the same room.
The choice of Lux Aurumque for this experiment was artistically apt: a piece about divine light descending upon a single child, performed by dispersed individuals who become a community through technology, replicated the theological content at the level of social form. The virtual choir was both a technological demonstration and a statement about the human need for community and shared song - needs that the internet had made possible to satisfy across distances that physical meeting could not bridge.
The Virtual Choir project grew to over 8,000 singers in its subsequent iterations (Sleep, Water Night, Fly to Paradise) and has been studied in music education, digital humanities, and community-building contexts worldwide.
Eric Whitacre
Eric Whitacre (born 1970) grew up in Reno, Nevada, and had no classical music training until he joined a university choir at age eighteen and immediately fell in love with choral music. He studied composition at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and at the Juilliard School in New York. His choral works - which include Sleep, Water Night, A Boy and a Girl, and the Five Hebrew Love Songs - are among the most frequently programmed contemporary choral pieces worldwide. He has conducted his works with major choirs and orchestras on every continent.
Legacy
Lux Aurumque is now one of the most performed contemporary choral works in the world. Its combination of harmonic beauty, emotional directness, and the iconic virtual choir performance has made it a touchstone for contemporary choral music and for discussions of how digital technology can create community. For listeners and performers with no particular religious formation, the work functions as a purely aesthetic experience of luminous beauty; for those attuned to its biblical imagery, it is a nativity meditation of unusual purity and depth.