When I first heard this music sampled for me I was amazed to discover that it was contemporary as its form and mode is of the classic tradition of choral music.
On first hearing the purity of the sound is such that it may well take your ears a little while, after recovering from being caressed in a whole new way, to register that the sounds are actual human voices; we have become so used to electronically produced sounds in recent years.
Whitacre's texts are many and various and include the poems of e.e.cummings and Octavio Paz set for, mostly, unaccompanied voices that shift and change and drift and rise and fall until a dreamlike almost hypnotic state is induced in the listener.
This is the music of dreams;the music of calm and contentment. It will remain with you long after the last note has dwindled away into a long echoing space