by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Rainy Day Afternoon Nos. 1-40
Somewhere, somehow, the music is still playing, the way the rain falling on the museum the afternoon I was there is still falling, somewhere, somehow.
The music is Thomas Tallis’s motet Spem in alium, sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir and rendered by the conceptual artist Janet Cardiff into The Forty Part Motet, and installed in a Castilian chapel at the Cloisters, the conglomeration of several actual medieval European chapels and cloisters on the rocky northern tip of Manhattan island.
Tallis was a Renaissance English composer who managed to write successfully under four different monarchs, varying his approach to suit the religious predilections of each.
Spem in alium, written for forty singers, has forty different vocal lines or parts. Most vocal music has four parts: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. Most audio recordings today are made in sixteen or twenty-four parts (tracks) and reduced, for “stereo” playback, to two channels: left and right. Cardiff’s installation uses technology to maintain fidelity to the original parts. Forty singers, male and female, were recorded individually on forty different tracks. For playback, forty state-of-the-art speakers are mounted on stands at head height and arranged in an oval about forty feet long (so I would guess). As the recording plays the forty voices come and go, rising and falling, separately and together, loud and soft, so that the music moves about the oval; and listeners, too, are free to move about the oval, following the shape of the piece as the spirit moves us.
I’d heard Spem in alium sung twice live by the Tallis Scholars, each in a remarkable setting. The first time, at the Jesuit church of St. Ignatius on Park Avenue in New York, the singers stood in two columns along the aisles and passed the music back and forth, so to speak. The second time, at Westminster Abbey in London – during the memorial service for the poet Ted Hughes – they stood in rows up near the altar, concert -style, and the profound orderliness of the piece and the performance, beautiful as it was, seemed at odds with Hughes’s looser, wilder, order-defying poetry.
Last Friday it was raining hard in New York. There was no reason to walk through Fort Tryon Park other than to go to the Cloisters, and the weather served to make devotees of those of us who did go.
The sound of forty voices could be heard from the admissions desk, but I couldn’t bear to plunge right in. So I went quickly through the museum, a favorite place of mine, keeping an eye out for religious miniatures — the Bury St. Edmunds cross, with the Hebrew prophecies of the Messiah carved into a piece of ivory a foot tall; a sandalwood coffin of Dives the size of a child’s ring finger — in anticipation of a piece of writing I am putting together.
And then I was in the oval, having timed my arrival roughly for the three minutes of silence between each play of of the 12-minute recording. And then the voices were coming at us. We were several dozen people in rainy-day deshabille. A bearded man followed the score on his iPhone. A couple clutched each other sculpturally. A woman in her thirties, artfully made up and dressed all in black, cocked her head to one side: a singer with a habit of hearing voices that way, her ear trained for concentration.
I was near some speakers that were putting out soprano voices. I heard what composer and conceptual artist alike want us to hear: the human quality of the voices, the interplay among them, the layered humanity of the whole.
The forty speakers, putting out forty channels, made this possible, just as they made it possible to circumambulate the work, following the sound around the oval.
But I found that the technology worked in a less dramatic way, too. The oval, inviting movement, made it possible to move, and so to relax, rather than having to sit at attention in a church or a concert hall. And the recording — and the knowledge that it was playing over and over again, all day long — made it possible to listen to the work rather than to seek to capture it aurally once and for all. Sure, I was missing much of it, but I would be able to hear it again in a few minutes.
I did hear it again. This time, some friends happened to walk in. We mimed hello, gave Spem in alium a thumbs-up four hundred years on. When the music ended we chatted for precisely three minutes. Then the music started again, forty twenty-first century human voices. This time I left the oval partway through, and went out into the rain, which was still falling.