The virtual choir was the idea of award-winning     1     and conductor Eric Whitacre. Born in the USA on 2 January 1970, Whitacre began studying music at the University of Nevada in 1988. He fell in love     2     Mozart’s classical music when he sang for the university choir. Moved by this music, he said, “It was like seeing color for the first time.” He     3     from university in 1995, and then received a master’s degree in musical composition from the Juilliard School in New York in 1997. Over the next 10 years, Whitacre’s    4     compositions began to become quite popular among choirs and singers. This led to the    5     of the virtual choir. 

In 2009, Whitacre received a video of a girl who was singing one of his works.    6    , he asked his fans to     7     videos, which he then joined together into one performance. His first virtual choir, “Lux Aurumque”, had 185 singers from 12 different countries. It has received millions of     8     on the Internet. Since then, the virtual choir has become a worldwide phenomenon. Whitacre’s next     9     was the Virtual Youth Choir for UNICEF, which was first seen on     10     on 23 July 2014 in the UK. Altogether, 2,292 young people from 80 countries joined in to sing Whitacre’s song “What If”.