If there’s one thing you shouldn’t pass up this holiday season, it’s the opportunity to experience The Forty Part Motet at the Fort Mason Center on San Francisco’s waterfront. While an otherwise-featureless room containing nothing but a bunch of faceless speakers pumping out a recording of a 16th century choral music work sounds about as appealing as being forced to attend choir practice when you’re a teenager, Janet Cardiff’s epic sound installation has to be one of the most profound pieces of performance art I’ve ever witnessed.
The Canadian artist wanted to find a way to “climb inside” complex music, to hear all the separate parts in a way that isn’t possible when you experience a live concert or regular recording. So she picked on one of the greatest choral works ever created — Spem in Alium, a sacred motet written for a whopping 40 individual vocal lines by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis around 1570 — and collaborated with the august Salisbury Cathedral Choir in 2000 to record each individual part separately. Visitors to the installation wander around a room in which 40 speakers standing at ear level on skinny tripods arranged in a large oval shape pump out the music. There is one speaker for each vocal line, so you can either stand in the middle of the space and feel the entire piece washing over you. Or you can sidle up to a specific speaker and hear a solitary voice sing their part, and then move on to another voice.
And here’s why the work made such an impression on me: In the wake of the appalling terrorist attacks in Paris, Cardiff’s installation gave me an unexpected feeling of sadness and hope. As I listened to the specific voices coming out of the separate speakers, I could hear the unique beauty — and, every now and again, the falterings — of each one. It was as if those impassive noise-emitting cubes suddenly came to life! But then, taking a step back, the individual voices that seemed so pronounced with my ear up to a speaker merged together into a perfect, seamless whole. All I could think as I was hit by Tallis’ soaring polyphony was about the power of the collective spirit to come together and overcome challenges and tragedies like the one that unfolded in Paris the other night.
The Forty Part Motet is just one of the many performing arts events going on in the Bay Area this week. Here are a few more that caught my eye:
Now through Saturday, Dec. 5: Explosión Cubana: Una Noche Tropical at Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco
Cuba is changing fast. With Netflix and AirB&B already doing business with the until-recently-contraband Caribbean island and a gazillion U.S. tourists on the verge of a stampede, it might not be too long before the popular idea of Cuba as a run-down, rum-soaked paradise of hot nightclubs and cool vintage cars might become divorced from reality. CubaCaribe and Dance Mission Theater intend to keep the popular idea real with their joint effort to evoke the cigar-smoke-spirit of Havana’s famous Tropicana nightclub right in the heart of The Mission. The cabaret-style soiree explores the evolution of Cuban music and dance with the help of members of the Alayo Dance Company, headed by CubaCaribe artistic director Ramon Ramos Alayo, and live music from Patricio Angulo. Dinner is part of the show too, with Cubano delicacies like pork, plantains and yuca — all fried, best washed down with mojitos — on the menu.
