Finally, the cause of all this emotional heat strode on, to the sound of those peculiar whoops youth makes, like the mating cry of an exotic bird. He was tall, with a matinée-idol figure, a blond coiffure, and the thrilling, vibrant voice of the leadership guru or inspirational preacher. This was Eric Whitacre, current darling of the large audience that enjoys so-called “spiritual” music.  It’s a strange and unexpected thing, this recent craving for religious music, and it has created a pantheon of composers who easily out-gun secular composers in terms of popular appeal. There’s John Tavener, whose Song for Athene was performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. There’s James MacMillan, composer of fervently Catholic music, some for the Church, some – like his vastly popular Veni, Veni Emmanuel – for the concert hall. There are whole troops of Eastern European spiritual composers, including the mystically inclined and reclusive Estonian Arvo Pärt.  None, however, has had such a rapid rise and arouses such fervour as Eric Whitacre. His two choral albums have sold in truckloads, and his YouTube “virtual choir” has had two million hits. This late-night Prom showed why. The music is suffused with a sense of easy spiritual uplift. We heard an ecstatic setting of the single word “Alleluia”, a new piece inspired by the Olympics called Higher, Faster, Stronger, a dreamily soft piece entitled Sleep, a dramatically varied number based on Leonardo’s vision of a flying machine. Everything was maximally radiant and beautiful, and beautifully sung. And that was the problem. There were no blemishes anywhere, not a hint of darkness in Whitacre’s Day-Glo world. Everything had a peculiar weightless and unreal quality, like the musical equivalent of a stage set.  Was this a sign of insincerity? Not at all. The man positively oozes sincerity. Whitacre is so sincere I suspect he would glow in the dark. And that’s the problem. As Stravinsky so wisely put it, “in art, sincerity is the sine qua non which at the same time guarantees nothing”. Sincerity needs content, otherwise it shrinks to the bogus sound of the politician on the hustings who ends every statement with the phrase, “and I mean that sincerely”. In the case of Eric Whitacre, content of any kind is exactly what’s missing. To begin with, he avoids anything that might smack of belief. “I’m not an atheist, but I’m not a Christian either,” is about as close as he gets to a credo.  In itself this isn’t a problem. Plenty of agnostics have written fine religious music. And who’s to say the overtly religious composers such as Bach didn’t have their moments of doubt? What counts isn’t possessing certainties. It’s the serious engagement with the substance of belief, rather than the easy evocation of feelings. In music, this tussling with something difficult and problematic is symbolised by the composer’s tussle with a musical language.  For a great religious composer such as Bach, the musical language he was born into had the force of law, as unavoidable and exacting as religion itself. It wasn’t something he could just pick up and put down at will. The language had tough rules, and yet Bach never dropped any hint that he found them irksome. He actually relished the difficulty of writing counterpoint, and liked to make things even harder for himself. He would have agreed with Edmund Burke that “difficulty is our true friend”. The severity of strict rules is one thing that enabled Bach to “keep it real”. Another was the fact that his music sprang from a particular time and place.  We forget this, because we like to praise Bach for his “timeless” beauty. But there’s nothing timeless about Bach’s great Passions and cantatas. They are absolutely rooted in their own time. They are full of chorale melodies, those sturdy affirmations of the Protestant faith that Martin Luther designed to be sung by the ordinary man and woman. The counterpoint is in the tremendous North German tradition that stretches back through Bach’s great forebears such as Buxtehude.  Look at other great religious composers, and they all have that quality of being rooted in a coherent style, and in a definite time and place. Palestrina’s Masses breathe the air of Counter-Reformation Rome. Thomas Tallis’s English anthems show the stresses and strains of England’s break with Rome. Modern religious composers are deprived of this context, but the better ones try to find substitutes. Some, like James MacMillan, weave a sense of the dark conflicts in human nature into their music. Arvo Pärt has invented his own musical language, as tough and rule-bound as Palestrina’s.  Compare Whitacre, who doesn’t dirty his hands with such things. He and the many composers like him offer instant uplift with no emotional cost. Their radiant gestures feel weightless, because they have nothing to affirm, or deny. His is the perfect religious music for the commitment-phobe, which is surely why it is so popular. One can only hope that, in time, it meets with the commitment-phobe’s usual fate.
Eric Whitacre&rsquo;s 'spiritual&rsquo; sincerity offers his legions of young   fans instant uplift at no emotional cost