An artwork for the ear
Janet Cardiff talks about sound in such physical terms that one almost forgets she is describing something without tangible mass. Yet in conversation with the world-renowned Canadian sound artist, who is known for her acoustically immersive installations, words like “three-dimensional” and “sculptural” start to make perfect sense.
“Artists always have this thing that fascinates them, and for me it’s been the physical, spatial qualities of sound,” Cardiff, 58, said by phone from her home in British Columbia’s rural Okanagan Valley.
Cardiff rose to art-world prominence in the 1990s with her site-specific “audio walks” (created with her husband and creative partner, George Bures Miller). These poetic guides, narrated in Cardiff ’s own voice, have navigated listeners through the Alberta woods, Central Park, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark and elsewhere, giving listeners a simulated 3-D sound sensation.
Widely considered her masterwork, Cardiff ’s 2001 installation “The Forty-Part Motet,” based on Tudor composer Thomas Tallis’ devotional choral composition “Spem in Alium” (1575), makes its California debut Saturday, Nov. 14, in a co-presentation between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
The acclaimed 14-minute work runs on a continuous loop in Fort Mason’s recently renovated Gallery 308, marking the finale of SFMOMA’s off-site programming before the greatly expanded museum reopens next spring.
“George and I are both really interested in how sound can be like a virtual ghost, moving around a space, inhabiting it, so you can almost see it. It can envelop you,” Cardiff says.
Visitors to “The Forty-Part Motet” will encounter 40 black high-fidelity speakers on shoulder-height stands, facing inward in a large oval. Cardiff recorded the Salisbury Choir, including child sopranos, singing Tallis’ motet, which was originally written for eight separate choirs of five voices. She close-miked every singer, so listeners experience both individual voices, one part per speaker, as well as the polyphonic choral effect of the 40 singers in unison.
Cardiff also kept recording during a three-minute intermission in which you can hear the singers cough, clear their throats, chitchat.
“You get a sense of each singer as an actual person with their imperfections,” she says. “People are not perfect, but when they all come together and raise their voices in unison, it sounds pretty sublime.”
“It is an incredibly inspiring piece and has been shown in a wonderful range of spaces, from the very sparse to the sacred cloisters,” adds Rich Hillis, executive director of Fort Mason Center. “Experiencing this 400-year-old music in a formerly industrial machine shop with great views of the bridge will be really powerful.”
Cardiff, who splits her time between British Columbia and Berlin, originally worked in printmaking until discovering sound’s potential to tap more directly into people’s emotional states, “because it bypasses the intellectual.”
A friend of Cardiff ’s first gave her a CD of the Tallis music.
“We played it on two stereo speakers,” she recalls. “It was beautiful, but once I realized it was 40 different harmonies, I thought, ‘We have to do this on 40 speakers because then I think you could be right inside the music, almost like being able to be inside a painting.’ ”
Unlike the “frontal wall of sound” we are accustomed to experiencing in a traditional concert-hall environment, Cardiff says the “Motet” “confronts people with high-quality sound that hits your body from all around. It’s been fun watching people enter the space. Their steps slow down, their intellect turns off and they get this faraway look on their face. It really takes them someplace.”