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Spem in Alium: There is Hope in Our Soul.
Last winter at the MOMA in NYC, we stumbled upon the most exciting art installation: in an otherwise empty room, forty speakers five feet off the ground were arranged in a wide circle in eight groups of five. After a little while, music started to flow out of one of the groups, then another, then another, turning around the room, swapping between opposite groups, or meshing from all directions at the same time. Each speaker was one voice, in an a capella performance, each cluster composed of a soprano voice, an alto, a bass and a baritone. You would be sitting either in the center of the circle, enjoying the complex multiphony of the ensemble, or you could go near one of the speakers, trying to identify which one was singing, catching the details of a particular voice in isolation.
You had to stay in your squeaky pew last night, at the performance of the same 40 part motet by actual live human beings, the singers of the Schola Cantorum and of the Pacific Collegium, at SS Peter and Paul church in North Beach. And you would have spooked them quite a bit if you were to approach your ear to focus on one voice in particular. Yet, as different as the experience of the music was, it was as enjoyable: the same whirlwind of sounds dancing around you, near or fear, coming and going, surprising you here and disappearing there. The 8 groups of 5 voices encircled the audience in the aisles of the church, with the conductor standing in the middle, making very large caricatural gestures to be seen by all.
The song, Spem in Alium, is a 16th century motet by British composer Thomas Tallis. Spem in Alium means "hope in other", spem sharing a root with words such as esperance. As the verse goes: "I have never put my hope in any other but you, God." Sixteenth century means archaic modes and harmonies that fell out of favor in the well-tempered classical music you'd be most familiar with, and thus sound actually surprisingly fresh and modern. It does not hurt that the two choirs were composed of more than a few people who looked fresh and modern, even hip, themselves. Both groups had a professional level of talent, and if there were a few imperfections, they only added charm to the performance: religious music is supposed to remind us of the humanity and fallibility of the performers after all.
Spem in Alium lasted about 10mn of the two hour performance (including a 20mn intermission) which covered other works by Thallis and William Byrd, another composer from the same period, sung by either one of the choirs, or both combined, in the traditional choir-by-the-altar layout. The Latin of the lyrics, with the soft consonants almost liquid in the singers' diction, and quite a many alliterations in s, created an eerie whispery beat not unlike the sound of slippers shuffling on a hardwood floor. The acoustic of the church turned out to be much better in the back, which we discovered when the choirs offered us an encore as we were on our way out.
Last night program will be performed two more times: tonight at St Mark's Episcopal Church, in Berkeley at 8pm, and tomorrow at 4pm at the Mercy Center, in Burlingame. It is a very rare opportunity to see this piece played live. Otherwise, the Janet Cardiff piece we saw in New-York, pictured above, is part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa.