21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

“The Forty Part Motet” is a traveling exhibition that is touring Japan by Janet CARDIFF, an artist whose work is in the museum collection. Based on the 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis’ The Forty Part Motet (Spem in Alium), this sound installation is a sculptural construction of space in which forty voices from a choir are played through forty speakers. The individual voices resound from each of these speakers arranged in an elliptical shape, while the multilayered overlapping of sounds creates the impression of being in the presence of a chorus of forty voices, offering viewers the experience of a fusion of sound and space.