The Forty-Part Motet

BY CHARLES ANDERSON

Last updated 11:09 03/03/2010

ANDREW GORRIE

LISTEN UP: Julia Holderness listening to the Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet work at the City Gallery.

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In a downstairs space in Wellington's City Gallery, five people sit and five stand. It is an open space with plain wooden floors and white walls. On a bright day, light streams in through a single window cavity across the room. It is silent for now.

Then the chatter begins. The sort of idle chatter that occurs when something is about to transpire. The voices talk unconvincingly about a favourite piece of music written during the fall of the Soviet Union or how there is one page of music that is unable to be performed absolutely perfectly.

The voices come from 40 speakers, carrying 40 individual voices of members of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir in Britain. Forty seemingly unassuming speakers that are all facing inwards at the spectators, who are waiting patiently for something to happen. The voices fade, the conversations between speakers stop. And then it begins – Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet.

What one does in this situation is as individual as the crisp tones that emanate from each speaker. In front of me, one woman stands up and stares at the clumsy wiring protruding from the back of each of them, seemingly admiring the form of uninspiring everyday technology as if it was in itself something of an artwork.

A middle-aged man with a straw hat and a pastel shirt leaned against a pillar with arms crossed, head down and eyes closed.

To listen to that choir sing Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium is to have something wash over you that you cannot completely explain. There are chills, goosebumps, even tears for some. You feel something. And that, of course, is everything.

You hear the voices jumping back and forth like some sort of angelic musical ping pong, building to a mighty crescendo. For 14 minutes you get taken away, if you so choose; even if you do not.

It is easy to lose yourself in thoughts – to close your eyes and remember the most appropriate circumstance in your life that would most adequately suit a soundtrack of this magnitude. Then open them to find the "choir's" audience has slowly swelled with people who have entered halfway through the score and are not too sure what to make of it. They look around awkwardly and behave as they usually would in a normal art exhibition – refer to their pamphlets or lengthily scan the room with their eyes.

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But if you take the time, take that 14 minutes to sit and let the music, if you can refer to it with such a diminutive word, pass over you and through you.

When the sounds subsides and the chatter resumes, stand up and make your way back into the gallery's foyer. Turn and look back to see a woman with a slight smile around the corner behind you. Then wait as she looks up, sees you looking at her and says: "Wasn't that wonderful."