Juilliard Music School

 

Model citizen: Composer Eric Whitacre, dashing star of high-school choruses worldwide, makes the big bucks

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His hair—shoulder-length, dyed blond, and carefully styled, giving the effect of a buttoned-up former surfer dude—takes up its own substantial part of his thoughts.

“My hair has become this thing we joke about sometimes, that it has a career of its own," he said. "Some days I’m just sick of it. I just want to cut it short, and now I actually have to have meetings about this shit with my manager and publisher and the modeling people about, like, should I cut my hair?”

You have very possibly never seen Whitacre’s flowing locks, nor heard his music, but he is famous. His “profile among choral enthusiasts amounts to a rock star’s adulation,” wrote Steve Smith in the Times last year. “To call Mr. Whitacre a phenomenon is to sell his rapid ascent short.” His lush and emotional music pushes the envelope of harmony and rhythm just enough to stand out in the insular world of high-school and college choirs and concert bands, where Whitacre’s work is simply inescapable. More

By Zachary Woolfe

April 13, 2011 10:39 am

 

Lincoln Center's 'striptease': It's the architecture!

lincoln-centers-striptease-its-architecture

For Lincoln Center, which had long been an island of culture closed off to its surroundings, the renovation to Alice Tully Hull exposed the building to the street so that, as arhitect Charles Renfro said, "going to the theater becomes theater." The vocabulary that both architects kept using replaced Belluschi's masculine muscularity with a more feminine warmth and transparency—"an architectural striptease," as Renfro put it. More

By Zachary Woolfe

July 30, 2010 7:39 am