On Tuesday, October 27, high school choirs from across the state participated in choral workshops and vocal master classes with Whitacre, Plitmann, and Steven M. Zielke, director of choral studies at OSU. The choirs then finished their day by singing the Whitacre piece titled "Sleep". The experience was truly memorable.

On Wednesday, October 28, a 115-voice choir-- the Oregon Youth Festival Chorus --comprised of top high school singers from around the state who were nominated by their choral directors; and the Chamber, men's and women's choirs from OSU, spent a full day in rehearsal with Whitacre and Plitmann to prepare for the Raise Your Voice concert
that evening.

While Oregon State University hosts a successful and well-attended high school choral festival each year, the opportunity to work with Whitacre and Plitmann was unique and generated much excitement. The finale public performance and benefit was the brainchild of Kari Whitacre, development director for Community Outreach who also happens to be Eric Whitacre's sister. The combined efforts of her brother, Eric, Hila Plitmann, (Eric's wife) OSU's Dr. Steven Zielke, Andrew Hancock, the festival coordinator and all the volunteers made this great festival a huge success. It was an unusual event to have the husband and wife team of Whitacre and Plitmann working together in choral and voice workshops -- and even more unusual for the two to appear on stage together in a public performance.

An accomplished composer, conductor and lecturer, Whitacre has quickly become one of the most popular and performed composers of his generation. The Los Angeles Times has praised his compositions as "works of unearthly beauty and imagination, (with) electric, chilling harmonies," while the BBC has raved ".what hits you straight between the eyes is the honesty, optimism and sheer belief that passes any pretension. This is music that can actually make you smile."

Sometimes referred to as the "rock star" of choral music composers," Eric Whitacre attended the Juilliard School, earning a master's degree and studying with Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano. Many Whitacre compositions have entered the standard choral and symphonic repertories and have become the subject of several recent scholarly works and doctoral dissertations.

Whitacre's works "Water Night," "Cloudburst," "Sleep," "Lux Aurumque," and "A Boy and a Girl," are among the most popular choral works of the last decade. To date, his published works have received thousands of performances and have sold well over 900,000 copies worldwide. As a conductor, Whitacre has appeared with hundreds of professional and educational ensembles throughout the world. And in the last ten years he has conducted concerts of his own choral and symphonic music in Japan, Australia, China, Singapore, South America and much of Europe, as well as at dozens of American Universities and Colleges. Most recently, Whitacre has received acclaim for "Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings," an award-winning, cutting edge musical, combining trance, ambient and techno electronica with choral, cinematic, and operatic traditions.

Soprano Hila Plitmann, a native of Jerusalem, is a Grammy Award-winning, operatic soprano. Known worldwide for her astonishing musicianship and gossamer voice, Plitmann regularly premieres works by today's leading composers, while maintaining a vibrant and extraordinarily diverse professional life in film music, musical theatre, and songwriting. The Los Angeles Times has called her a performer with "tremendous vocal and physical grace," while Entertainment Today has written "Plitmann has a vocal instrument that is simply unreal in its beauty." For her extensive soundtrack work as a soloist for the Hollywood blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, CNN said: "Plitmann's glissandi sail above the petty pulpits of earthly doctrine, with an ethereal ease that argues for (her own) pairing with (Kathleen) Battle or Dawn Upshaw." Plitmann has worked with many of today's leading conductors and has appeared as a headliner with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, New Israeli Opera and numerous other orchestras and ensembles in the U.S. and abroad. In 2007, she originated the role of Exstatis in Whitacre's groundbreaking electro-musical "Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings." This year she won the Grammy for "Corigliano: Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan" recorded with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra on Naxos records.                                                                                                                  

Raise Your Voice was also a proud participant in the Daniel Pearl Music Days!

Daniel Pearl World Music Days was created in response to the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl at the hands of extremists in Karachi, Pakistan. Danny's family and friends came together to work towards a more humane world, forming the Daniel Pearl Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and innovative communications.