The Forty Part Motet & Thoughts on Choral Singing

Thanks to my friend Rachel, I visited the Cloisters on the final day of Jane Cardiff’s stunning installation “The Forty Part Motet“. I’m sure I had a very different experience than what Cardiff imagined when she set up 40 speakers around an empty room, each one playing the voice of one of the singers of the Salisbury Chorus performing Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Allum.

Cardiff meant for listeners to move freely about the space, sampling the piece from the vantage point of the different singers in the choir, then stepping into the center to feel them all hit you at once.

“While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.

I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”

But on this last day of the exhibit, the crowds were too large to allow for free movement without disturbing others. Thus, I stood in one place for the entire piece, and then to listened to it 7 more times from 7 different vantage points in that glorious space. Only once did I make it to the center of the room, but found my favorite spot was in the back in front of a baritone, where I could feel the music starting far away then moving towards me, till finally I was in the music.

But no matter where I stood, I experienced an incredible feeling of community with the others around me, as we all were transfixed by the hauntingly beautiful voices and themes of Tallis’s music. Even small children were stunned into glorious silence, their wriggling stopped, their heads upon their parent’s shoulder as they stared dreamily upward.  As I looked around the room, the swell of the music combined with that feeling of shared emotion literally drove me to tears. I have rarely felt so connected to a roomful of strangers as I did in the midst of that music.

As a choral singer, I should be able to say that I experience this feeling of collective joy frequently, but the truth is that I don’t. When I’m singing, I’m usually too focused on getting the notes and the entrances right, counting along with my finger on the score, reading the notes I’ve written along the staff that remind me to slow down, or speed up, or watch my pitch, or the little eyeglasses that tell me to look at the conductor for an ending or change in tempo. It is rare that I experience the swell of emotion that comes from the experience of being in the midst of a collective voice.

But then it happened – on the very same evening as my visit to the Closters – when, as chance would have it, I was performing the Durufle Requiem with my chorus in our annual winter concert.

I had been standing at the back of my section for the rehearsals, a piece of cotton in one ear so that I could hear my own voice in the crazy acoustics of the space, afraid that I would be off pitch, knowing that it only takes one slightly off note from anywhere to throw me off, trusting only the organ to keep me from going sharp or flat.  But just before the performance, my fellow Soprani begged me to squeeze in between them so they could hear me – since I had only recently sung the same piece with the Cornell Music & Medicine Chorus, I knew it relatively well and had the entrances right, and they were counting on me for that.  So in the performance, I did as they asked. And whether it was because they got the entrances from me, or I got the pitch from them, or we all finally had had enough rehearsal to know the piece well, it was the best performance we’ve ever given.

And there were moments – not enough, but a few – where I felt confident enough in my singing to let myself listen for it, and there it was – that swell of emotion that comes from shared vocalization. That point in the Kyrie when we echo one another , then join in together. The soaring highs of the Libera mi. And those moments in the In Paradisum when we sopranos totally nailed our group solo.

Those moments of joy in choral singing really only come when you are confident enough in the music to let go and feel. And I got there because, between the two choruses and two performances, I had finally had enough rehearsal to get to that place.

I’m going to remember this next season, and dedicate myself to really learning the music early on. Woodshedding, we call it. The rehearsing you do on your own with the score and a piano or rehearsal CD to really learn the music. It’s  a lot of hard work, hours really, outside of the hours already spend in group rehearsal.

But the payoff ? It’s glorious.