jpbitter

[jpbitter]

October 31 2021, Forty Voices

Two days ago I spent the afternoon at the Beaux-Arts and had as close to a spiritual experience as I suspect I will get this year. I wandered through an exhibit on sound and modes of communicating—conceptually interesting, but slightly missed the mark in its awkward cobbling together of such varied works, which obscured its original aim. All except one: a glowing, triumphant climax of the show, an immersive piece by a Canadian artist called “Forty Part [something]”... my memory fails in light of its grandeur. 

An eerie background choral song drifts through the exhibit as a whole, adding a third-dimension of aural inquiry. At first, it seems imagined—both too angelic and faint for reality. Progression through the works, however, proves the sound’s reality, and eventually the gallery halls open into a massive, bright-white room with a deafening rendition of an unrecognizable Catholic-sounding song. (Later searches revealed this song to be “Spem in Alium,” a forty-part motet composed by Thomas Tallis in 1570). Forty speakers, arranged in an oval, fill the room, with space to meander around and between them. Each speaker plays just one voice, recreating the arrangement of the original recording and its spatial topography. 

While it sounds simple, its effect is other-worldly, almost completely beyond words. Specters of voices move through the room with the song; the speakers are suddenly incarnations of humans. A maddening cognitive dissonance arises: this sound (so pure, so deeply human) is only being replicated, parroted, by machines, and yet never has a performance been so moving. 

Run along the speakers in circles, reverse directions, pause along one or two to learn their secrets, then sit on the bench in the middle and let all the sounds cascade upon you. Gaze up at the glass ceiling and envision the hand of God parting the clouds and bestowing this gift. Tear up if you must—everyone else already has. 

This piece consumed me and unlocked me. I spent the rest of the day in a half-conscious rapture, the bleakness of the real world now fully revealed. Everything, for the rest of the day, became too mundane and completely unimportant. I stood dazed on the bus, not caring to observe unspoken public decorum. Yet, later, when I tried to describe the whole experience to my partner, words completely left me, and I stood frantically babbling about the whole affair outside of their understanding. One by one, they agreed it sounded “interesting” before making vague and non-committal assurances to see it for themselves. I tried to take them a month later but the exhibit had gone: it remains my own.