It would take a huge force of effort for me to be an art-blogger. I walk around Chelsea and think, “maybe I’ll write about so-and-so’s show” and then I’ll get back home and think, “eh, why bother?” Even with my meager four-class-a-week teaching job, the idea of finding time to say something coherent and interesting about a work of art seems daunting. I mean, maybe if I were getting paid…
An artwork that I’ve been meaning to write about is a piece now on view (I think) in MoMA’s contemporary collection: Janet Cardiff’s A Reworking of Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis. This is a “Sound Piece.” “Sound Piece” usually means walking into a room and setting off motion detectors that play creepy, atmospheric music and sounds of people whispering, but in this case it means something good.
You walk into a large room and arranged in a huge circle are 40 speakers on stands about the height of your head. It looks like some strange ritual, like you’ve happened upon a coven of speaker-people.
If you happen to walk in at the beginning of the piece all you hear is silence. As you walk up to the speakers you hear voices, the voices of people muttering, having little conversations, coughing— just general ambient sound. You realize that every speaker is playing an individual human voice and you think, “that’s pretty cool, I guess.”
And then slowly all the speakers start singing and it’s amazing.
What they’re singing is a forty-part choral piece written in the Renaissance by the English composer, Thomas Tallis—forty unique parts! Each voice is emanating from its own individual speaker. All the parts meld into this incredible wash, you feel enveloped. Sometimes, just the tenors are singing and then, all of a sudden, the sopranos will join in and then all 40 speakers are “singing” at the top of their lungs and feel a type of religious ecstasy.
What’s great about Cardiff’s piece is that you can walk around the circle of speakers and put your ear up to each one and hear a single, isolated voice. You begin to understand how the work, Spem in Alium, is constructed, how stunningly complicated it is. When you step into the center of the circle, it’s an ethereal wash of sound, when you step up to a single speaker, it’s an isolated voice, sometimes singing something very simple-sounding. Often, you step up to a speaker, and it’s not singing at all—it’s resting. It’s an experience you would never have if you went to a concert of the same work or bought the CD.
Basically, all Early Music is fantastic. At one point, I bought a bunch of early choral music and it’s all great, so Cardiff is basically just tweaking a work of art that’s already amazing. But she’s tweaking it in a very ingenious way. So it’s worth a listen.
