Eric Whitacre

I KNEW this would work!

There were a lot of great comments, and now we can address some of the logistical stuff:

1) For the sheet music, can someone with Finale or Sibelius skills (or bow-staff skills) make four separate PDFs of the vocal parts of sleep? One for soprano, one for alto, one for tenor, one for bass. Make sure they are completely separate files, send them to me, and then I can post them here legally. If someone wants to make midi files, just for part learning, totally cool.

2) When you make your video, wear headphones. This was a great idea proposed by both Johnathan and Will.

3) As for tempo, sing along to the Polyphony recording of Sleep, available either on iTunes or streaming from my MySpace site. Use only that recording, or it won’t match up.

4) When you load your video to YouTube, use the words Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir in the title, and in the tags, and include your voice part in the title as well. Also, in the tags, put the exact phrase “soaringleap.com.” We’ll be able to find all of them easily enough.

5) For this experiment, just sing with a healthy, clear sound, and long, beautiful vowels. I know the cutoffs and entrances are going to be all over the place, but this is just the experiment, or as they say in the business world, “proof of concept.” For the next one (the original, premiere piece that I’ll compose) we’ll do it a little bit more like the YouTube Orchestra, and I’ll even make a video of me conducting. If this Sleep experiment goes well, we might be able to get YouTube involved. (Woo Hoo).

All y’all rock.

EDIT: Let’s create a tentative deadline for submission of videos – June 30. That should give everyone time to learn their parts and post their performances.