Interested in exploring the possibility of joining a virtual choir while Serenata Singers is in recess? This might be worth looking into.

Sheltering in place gives us a lot of freedom to explore new solo repertoire and work on technical kinks that might go overlooked during busy teaching and performance seasons, but it also deprives us of one of the fundamental joys of being a musician: making music with others.

Eric Whitacre is rising to the challenge of the times with the sixth installment of his Virtual Choir. Whitacre’s Virtual Choir project began in 2009 when, inspired by the YouTube video of soprano Britlin Losee singing his “Sleep,” Whitacre asked his blog followers to do the same: record themselves singing their own voice parts on “Sleep” and post the videos to YouTube. Producer Scott Haines volunteered to compile the videos into a single Virtual Choir, and the result not only moved Whitacre to tears, but also launched a movement that was to last more than a decade.

Virtual Choir 1, launched in March 2010, featured the faces of 185 singers singing Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque” in front of their computer screens in perfect blend. The video garnered more than 1 million hits in its first two months and has now been seen by more than 6.3 million people to date.

Subsequent installments of Virtual Choir went on to see more than 20,000 singers of all ages from 124 different countries sing Whitacre’s “Sleep,” “Water Night,” “Fly to Paradise” and “Deep Field” as part of such celebrations as Buckingham Palace’s Coronation Festival Gala and the film telling the story of the Hubble Space Telescope’s discoveries of thousands of never-before-seen galaxies some 12 billion light-years away in its Deep Field images. (See all of the Whitacre Virtual Choir videos on Whitacre’s Virtual Choir site here.)

As virtual choirs have become perhaps the defining musical collaboration product of the COVID-19 quarantine, Whitacre has written a new piece for Virtual Choir 6, “Sing Gently.” If you’re interested in joining thousands of singers from around the world in what is sure to be a global choral extravaganza, sign up now by clicking here.