The Forty Part Motet in New York City after 9/11

Abstract

In Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001, 40Part), ‘a reworking of Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium (c. 1570)’, the forty voice parts of the motet are played back via forty speakers. Visitors walk through and around the encompassing speakers arrayed in eight groups of five. Still in constant demand, 40Part enjoys unparalleled success in the contemporary art scene. This article shows how 40Part became associated with New York City's rituals of remembrance and healing after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, and considers the politics of the installation's stagings as part of those commemorations. Here, 40Part took on a specifically comforting function that speaks to larger tendencies in twenty-first-century auditory culture, American cultural responses to trauma, and commemorative uses of music, which are built on white bourgeois sentimental attachments and the techno-social production of imagined spaces and times of privilege.

Cardiff offers a fourteen-minute bath of warm Renaissance counterpoint – a sauna for the mind. Physical and virtual space fuse. Normally, your ears will tell you where you are in the world, but not here.¹

The Forty Part Motet (2001; hereafter 40Part) is a sound installation by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff that ‘reworks’ Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium numquam habui (c. 1570).² Members of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir performed Tallis's motet in 2001, and the forty voice parts were recorded separately. In Cardiff's installation, the audio tracks are played back via forty speakers – one per voice – distributed in a large oval within the exhibition space. The speakers are arranged in eight groups of five that correspond to the eight choirs of Tallis's piece. This arrangement of 40Part allows visitors to move around the speakers as they select and try out different listening positions and combinations of parts – they can choose to linger next to specific speakers and focus on individual voice parts/singers, wander around, or stay in the middle of the room and listen to the whole choir. The installation's aural component is a fourteen-minute loop – eleven minutes of Spem in alium and three minutes of intermission – that runs continuously during visiting hours, so that visitors can potentially experience the piece several times during their visit.

Cardiff's work is arguably the most widely known and beloved sound installation to date. Ever since its creation in 2001, the installation has been in demand and on display around the world. Cardiff's reworking of Spem in alium is, for art critic Blake Gopnik, ‘one of the best works, in any medium, of the last decades’³ and, value judgements aside, the Art Newspaper describes it as one of the most ‘ubiquitous contemporary works of the past few years’.⁴ As Cardiff herself puts it, 40Part has taken on ‘a life of its own’.⁵ Despite its tremendous popularity, 40Part has received scant and mostly perfunctory scholarly consideration.⁶ Most references to the installation are limited to succinct descriptions that highlight the freedom of (musical) choice and of movement that Cardiff's installation grants its visitors and cite 40Part as exemplifying trends in sound installation art or in Cardiff's oeuvre.⁷

This sound installation is neither site-specific – to the contrary, it has been shown ‘in any conceivable kind of place’⁸ and, as its exhibition history shows, can be transposed into diverse contexts – nor ‘political’, that is, concerned with politics in the way the ‘critical sonic-spatial practices’ that Gascia Ouzounian has identified are.⁹ That does not mean, however, that there is not a politics to the forms of auditory-bodily engagement the installation encourages and to the ways curators have framed those engagements, and how audiences have experienced them, in particular contexts. I propose that the differentiated sonic environment that 40Part creates in each iteration of the installation not only engages its immediate physical location but also participates in a broader set of sociospatial and temporal relations for the duration of its display, by virtue of being located in that specific place. The installation enters into and animates social choreographies wherein the movements of visitors in, toward, and around the confines of the installation, as well as the temporary gatherings that occur there, are always implicated in the larger social relations and negotiations that are central to political and civic life and to its performance. In this sense, all the iterations of 40Part can be said to have political and social stakes. In this article, I examine 40Part's localized trajectory in New York City and show what was at stake – though rarely acknowledged – in an instance in which Cardiff's installation was called upon to do specific cultural work, and became entangled in complex psychosocial and material processes.

The installation was first shown in New York City on 14 October 2001. It was part of a mid-career survey of Cardiff's work at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Long Island City, Queens.¹⁰ The show coincided with the recent aftermath of 9/11, and ‘people started gathering in [40Part], and these audiences grew and grew and grew. There was never any sound except for the Thomas Tallis hymn.’¹¹ During autumn 2001, 40Part became a site of mourning and catharsis for museum visitors. This early reception of 40Part established it within the city's rituals of remembrance and healing. I will show how a decade later, in the early 2010s,¹² Cardiff's spatialized rendering of the Elizabethan motet was expressly recruited as a techno-social response to 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. It served to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 while recreating its own presence in the city in 2001 in MoMA PS1's September 11 (11 September 2011–9 January 2012), and it remained in the museum's sculpture room throughout the entire year as Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet (12 January – 10 September 2012), a single-work show that immediately followed the group exhibition. In 2014, 40Part was installed at Fort Tilden's military chapel, as part of the first edition of Rockaway! (June–September 2014), an arts festival that celebrated the then-ongoing rebuilding of the Rockaway Peninsula, in Queens, and the reopening of the Fort Tilden historical district after the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

This article interrogates the commemorative framing and uses of 40Part in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. I argue that Cardiff's installation was employed as a techno-social tool for comfort – in the case of Rockaway! it was explicitly conceived as part of a ‘relief effort’. In this context, 40Part served to channel and to soothe ethno-culturally specific and class-specific angst regarding modern ruination and social atomization that was a response to the scale and complexity of the violence of 9/11 and of Sandy and, in turn, to the difficulty of commemorating and processing these traumatic events in the city.

By looking at what happened in, around, and beyond 40Part, and by attending to the discourses and the logics underlying its commemorative deployment as well as to the imagined communities and effective assemblies the installation conjured up or else foreclosed, I question the ethical and social implications of the staging of the installation in the context of the September 11 and Rockaway! exhibitions. These 40Part commemorative stagings were built on white bourgeois sentimental attachments and the techno-social production of spaces and times of privilege. Yet its curation and content muted the complicity of those attachments and privilege in contemporary violence, that is, in the realities and immediate context that the installation's spatialized renderings of Spem in alium were meant to transcend. This comforting and anaesthetizing function, although inseparable from the affections and significance of 40Part in its charged New York City commemorative iterations, was enabled by ideas about the transcendence and timeliness of Spem in alium that were embedded in the installation. It was also built on enculturated material orientations and a sensory training that manifests as philias towards specific types of sonic materials (in this case, early music vocality)¹³ and environments that are markedly white and that are, too, attuned to neoliberal ideals and practices.¹⁴ Whiteness and, particularly, whiteness's coalescence with classical music and specific late liberal modalities of listening (and of failing to do so) are a condition of possibility for and a major animating force behind the situated processes this article examines. One of main ways these white, neoliberal ideals operated in 40Part's cultural history in New York City was by omission, by exnomination;¹⁵ therefore, naming them is part of this article's groundwork.

The installation's descriptive entry in the MoMA catalogue – ‘the sublime glory that the divine has held in the imagination of believers for centuries is made palpable’¹⁶ – along with the specific framing of the installation in Take Two (MoMA, 2005–6), where 40Part was part of a thematic ensemble of ‘works that immerse the viewer in a total space as a means to provoke a sensory feeling and body-conscious response’,¹⁷ intimated a set of investments around Cardiff's ‘reworking’ of Tallis's motet that were summoned and amplified in 40Part's stagings in September 11 and Rockaway! First, there is a hyperbolic and vague profession of 40Part's transcendence (thanks to the supposedly transcendent nature of Spem in alium): the installation is deemed able to escape the mundane and the passage of time while bringing back, making ‘palpable’ – touching, present – Spem in alium. The Anglo-European Christian past and genealogy that 40Part summons and that visitors are seemingly invited to join is at once left unnamed and unmistakable. Simultaneously, the motet's spatialized rendering is approached as an intensely somatic and haptic, which is to say, bodily experience of a curated environment, of temporary inhabitation, wherein 40Part frames and works as a differentiated, extra-ordinary space in which visitors are invited to immerse, and to be affected.

In what follows, I first discuss the modalities of auditory engagement that 40Part advances. This reworking of Spem in alium enabled safe intimacies and privatized experiences, as well as, simultaneously, an impression of historicity and a sense of here and now – all of which were fundamental to 40Part's commemorative services in New York City. I will show how the prioritization of individual encounters with the music, of ‘transcendence’ over historical contextualization, of an encultured sense of comfort, and of an apparent sense of freedom in the how the visitor experiences the piece is what won the installation accolades for its commemorative work while concealing the politics of those priorities and their complicity with modern violence.

Listening in and to 40Part

Notable in the experience of 40Part is the fact that visitors can move through the space, from speaker to speaker, or remain still, choosing positions from which to listen to one or many voices. The notion that 40Part allows visitors to freely shape their own experience and, in particular, that this freedom of movement avoids situating, even trapping, listeners in the traditional concert audience position, permeates discussions of this installation as well as, ironically, prescriptions of how to engage with it.¹⁸ This understanding of how the installation functions is, I suggest, misleading. First, it confuses greater control over certain aspects of one's auditory experience (of Spem in alium) with freedom. Second, it makes it harder to recognize and to address the ways in which, in practice, 40Part's framings and reception are coded in white bourgeois ideals of contemplative listening. Lastly, when invoked as a truism, the notion takes for granted that being free to choose your own (listening) path solo while among others is emancipatory and intrinsically desirable, thus naturalizing values that, following Mack Hagood, are rooted in neoliberal understandings of the self.¹⁹ While the visitor is free (and encouraged) to move around and (has) to choose their listening positions, that freedom is relative – it is ‘freeing’ in comparison to stereo reproductions and live renditions of Tallis's motet – and is qualified. First, simply put, there is only so much a 40Part visitor can do – there exist limited possible engagements as well as implicit and explicit rules that, for instance, prevent visitors from singing along or from touching the installation's hardware. Second, the spatial arrangement of the installation and its sonic ‘substance’ encourage specific engagements and evoke, at the same time, a repertoire of contemporary audiocultural, somatic, mystic-spiritual practices and tropes; these, too, orient what visitors do with, think about, and get from the spatialized mechanical rendering of Spem in alium.

The installation also crafts a particular form of intimacy. It frames, and takes over, an acoustic space that is delimited by the inward-facing speakers. While experiencing 40Part, you are inside the oval and inside the voice parts of Spem in alium – as Cardiff has said, ‘when you walk into the space, the sound is so three-dimensional for you, that it is like walking into a piece of music’.²⁰ She chose ‘the intimacy of the voice of the singer’ to be ‘the essence of [Spem in alium]’.²¹ This work is, to paraphrase Anahid Kassabian, ‘one of those settings in which music is experienced through more than ears’,²² allowing for haptic and somatic engagements with music, hence its enveloping, ‘oceanic’ effects. As Cardiff explains, ‘no matter what, when you walk into this kind of music, and you're enveloped by forty tracks of 24-bit audio, you just feel the sound vibes. You can't refuse them; you can't refuse the voices coming in and out of your body.’²³

The arrangement of the forty speakers encourages visitors to get their ears close to the speakers.²⁴ Upon close hearing, the voices are rich in what Chion calls materializing sound indices (‘sound's details that cause us to “feel” the material conditions of sound source’).²⁵ The speakers’ emissions bring forth ‘vocalic bodies’, and allow visitors to indulge in what Connor would term the voice as an excess of the body.²⁶ This closeness owes to ‘a sense of safety in technology’ that facilitates a felt connection without having ‘to stand in front of that person’, as Cardiff puts it.²⁷ In the three-minute ‘intermission’ you can hear a warm-up arpeggio and listen to members of the choir chat, cough, and walk around (i.e., surrounding you) as wood and metal creak. After the conductor announces, ‘We'll go through it one more time’, there is an audible long hush and a moment of silence before the motet begins to sound again. The intermission enhances the sense that 40Part is recreating a performance in the visitors’ presence, thus advancing a sense of here and now, of synchronicity between visitors and the fourteen-minute loop.

Such intimacies are also brought about by the work of transductions that, following Stefan Helmreich,²⁸ go unheard – in this case, fifty-nine tracks were reduced to forty, three hours of recordings became the eleven minutes of music and the three-minute intermission, and the ongoing work of the software and hardware that bring forth the forty synchronized tracks and keep the loop going. They also depend, in part, on the visibility of the black speakers, what Cardiff refers to as ‘straight’ technology,²⁹ which does not distract from the experience, and, perhaps more importantly, depend on visitors’ own disposition and investments in feeling them.

Whether the visitor remains in place before one speaker, moves around, or stays in the middle of the space, they are listening and are there. The voice tracks of Spem in alium act both as the forum for and the object of listening. They envelop the visitor and furnish the focus of the visitor's auditory and motor activities. It is a private and individualized listening experience; the intimacy 40Part might offer to the receptive visitor entails a lack of reciprocity not only between installation and visitor, but also between visitor and visitor – during opening hours, multiple visitors can simultaneously pick and choose their own path/mix of voice parts ‘solo’ as, and because, the loop goes on. The installation's ‘virtual choir’ offers a particular blend of individuation and, to use Georgina Born's term,³⁰ aggregation that resonated with its New York audiences – as Heather White wrote in the Brooklyn Rail, the installation's ‘artifice’ is ‘somehow brave and, like urbanites avoiding eye contact, sometimes necessary. We can wend our way through at will.’³¹ This feature, along with Spem in alium's sensible pastness and avowed timelessness, was central to the installation's appeal, accessible spirituality, and deployment as a ‘place’ to gather (together but alone) in response to trauma.

Locating 40Part

Cardiff's 40Part specifies a place, and requires a site. The ‘particular mood quality’, the affective state that generates the very staging of a room, to use Gernot Böhme's expression,³² articulates with the installation's staging of Spem in alium in visitors’ experience. As part of the show's setup, room and installation are tuned up to each other in ways that foster specific engagements. In addition to benches for people to ‘sit’ and ‘to spend time with this piece’,³³ for instance, the P.S. 1 gallery's arrangement to house 40Part in 2001 included built-in interventions such as faux floors to cover the speaker wire as well as sound ceiling baffles and a soundproofed entrance to ‘block off the room’.³⁴ These interventions sought to adjust the acoustic properties of the room and make it more conducive to the contemplation of 40Part, in support of an aesthetic ideal that, because of Spem in alium and because of the installation's magnitude, has had a distinct weight in the circulation of this soundwork.³⁵ The site-specific equalization of 40Part is meant to ensure balance among the forty channels and that the overall ‘feeling’ is consistent with what Cardiff and her collaborators seek, and want the installation to (empathetically) profess. As Bures Miller explained in 2015:

Every space absorbs the frequencies in a different way so when it moves to a new place, tuning is required to make sure that it feels right, right being appropriate to the piece … [The installation at San Francisco's Fort Manson] is as good as it gets, the sound is so clear. I was tearing up and I've heard this thousands of times … [I]t always gives me a reaction. If I don't get that reaction, which is a tingling up and down my spine, then I know I have to make it do that.³⁶

In the catalogue of Cardiff's P.S. 1 2001 survey, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev explains her experience of 40Part at the Rideau Chapel of the National Gallery of Canada earlier that year. As the visitor crossed the museum's galleries and approached Cardiff's installation, ‘[y]our mind was transported away from true location – a contemporary art show in a museum – to somewhere else, perhaps a cloister … you were drawn by the voices … until you entered a reconstruction from a 17th-century … chapel’ (Figure 1).³⁷ However, this particular form of space and time travel to an indeterminate Christian past, ‘somewhere else’, was not what 40Part was meant to offer New York City museumgoers in 2001. ‘At P.S. 1, the work is installed in an entirely different context – the second-floor sculpture gallery, a large, solemn, minimal space, completely open to the imagination.’³⁸

Figure 1 (Colour online) 40Part at the Rideau Chapel at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo by Joanne Clifford. Reproduced with the permission of Joanne Clifford.

The timing of the survey of Cardiff's work, shortly after 9/11, along with the sculpture gallery's windows, which overlooked the city, framed the visitors’ responses to 40Part, thus annulling the neutrality of the gallery space. That neutrality was already, as Brian O'Doherty has shown, an illusion – ‘the white cube … stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions’ – and an operation.³⁹ In 2001, 40Part became, and was understood by the producers of the exhibit as, a service to the museum's community, as a site and channel for staff and visitors to grieve in the wake of 9/11. In the words of P.S. 1 founder and director Alanna Heiss, ‘Motet was a place where hundreds of people gathered, to be in a place together, and listen to that marvelous music individually and as a group, in the way that Janet had organized it. We mourned individually and together.’⁴⁰

If the ‘sublime “empty” space of voices and speakers of 40Part in the Kunsthalle’⁴¹ was not empty – because it never is – in 2001, the staging of Cardiff's installation in both September 11 and Rockaway! was expressly charged: 40Part was ‘there’ to mark milestones and thus to contribute to its New York City visitors’ processing of two complex traumatic events, and it was also deployed as part of ensembles of artworks within which the spatialized rendering of Spem in alium was intended to articulate, to do, and to mean particular things.

September 11, 2011

September 11 was organized by MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Two-thirds of the seventy works exhibited had been produced prior to the attacks, and only one directly addressed 9/11. The curatorial decision to ‘reflect upon [9/11] obliquely’ was, according to Eleey, a reaction against the exploitation of 9/11 and of its memory and an attempt to offer New Yorkers, at least art-literate New York audiences, ‘another way of thinking about what happened and reflecting on the event's continued presence in our lives’.⁴²

Like the other works gathered in September 11, 40Part was selected because of its ability to ‘transcend the specificities of its epoch, form, or content to address September 11’.⁴³ The re-creation of the installation's own presence in New York following 9/11 had, too, an explicit purpose: ‘[T]he echoes of the Motet resounding once again in that room will invite us to consider what has changed in the intervening ten years, and what history has allowed to remain substantially the same.’⁴⁴ The exhibition catalogue reflects Eleey's ideas and use of Cardiff's installation in two dimensions. The same image of the installation is reproduced on two facing pages, representing that time has passed and suggesting that the reworking of Spem in alium and, although unseen, the motet endure and stay the same.⁴⁵ The juxtaposition is modeled on before and after photographs, but it violates their most emblematic aspect and their function: there is no change.⁴⁶ It is only when these two images are juxtaposed to the ubiquitous before and after photos of the New York City skyline that the duplicated image of 40Part and the space in between acquire meaning.

Despite the mixed responses to September 11,⁴⁷ 40Part was welcomed (Cardiff's installation would remain at MoMA PS1 as a single-work show immediately following the group show) as was its integration in the remembrance of 9/11. Jonathan Beer's review for Art-Rated largely ignored September 11 as an ensemble to focus on 40Part.⁴⁸ He wrote that Cardiff's installation ‘provide[d] a transcendent refuge amongst works that offer a more direct connection to the painful realities surrounding 9/11’.⁴⁹ If 40Part spoke to MoMA PS1 visitors in 2011, it was arguably because it allowed them to bracket disturbing material and political realities while experiencing a sense of continuity and relief in the face of 9/11's continued presence in the city, country, and elsewhere in the form of the ‘war on terror’. Part of the function of 40Part was to create this comforting sense of continuity through repetition: not only the repetition of the fourteen-minute loop within which to acoustically immerse oneself, to be ‘surrounded by voices’ and ‘suddenly part of a fluid, undulating and surprisingly physical space of sound and emotion’ during exhibition hours,⁵⁰ but also the iteration of a sixteenth-century motet that, by ‘returning’ in the 21st century, suggests the resilience of white Anglo-European Christian culture, a continuity between ancestors and heirs to that culture by means of site-specific cross-temporal contact.

Because 40Part's inclusion in September 11 was predicated on its having been there in 2001 and its service to the mourning process had been coincidental, the fact that the installation exudes and indexes white Christianity was easier to overlook than if no such connection between the installation, museum, and 9/11 existed. While unplanned and by virtue of a temporal coincidence, such initial connection was not arbitrary: not any multi-channel sound installation and not any piece of pre-existing music would have resonated with PS1 workers and visitors in the aftermath of 9/11 in the way 40Part did.⁵¹ The formal specificities of 40Part were crucial to the installation's ability to provide that service in that particular setting. Those qualities included those of Spem in alium, which tied in with pre-existing sets of cultural meanings and practices (e.g., the use of Western sacred choral music for mourning rituals) and responded to the mood of the moment (the motet's ‘anxious’, soprano-heavy central sections may have been particularly poignant at the time). While the installation format – its enclosure and safe intimacies – afforded a sense of (non-committal) congregation.

While 40part was not selected because of Spem in alium's ethno-cultural import per se, that was central to its values and functions in September 11, starting with the notions of transcendence and universality that rendered unnecessary to qualify whose history, whose past Tallis's motet reckons and got substantiated by its 2011 repetition, with the notions that ensure whiteness operates unaddressed and, in this case, unheard.⁵² Neither the show's producers nor the visitors who appreciated 40Part in September 11 necessarily conceived of the installation's inclusion as a statement in the context of, for instance, framings of 9/11 as an attack on Christianity and the West. However, not just and not as much the presence of the installation but, in particular, the specifically comforting and reassuring functions it performed and was intended to perform in September 11 were a different manifestation of the same naturalized conflation of whiteness and Americanness;⁵³ the fact that it could play such a role may be symptomatic of the glaring overrepresentation and dominance of the white minority in the leadership and audiences of New York City's art museums.⁵⁴

In September 11, 40Part offered visitors a shelter within the contemporary art museum, arguably an already shielded locale. To produce that sense of relief, the idea of trans-historicity (i.e., 40Part/Spem in alium's timelessness) was as important as the installation's evocation of longed for, calmer historical times (i.e., its pastness) in which there were neither planes nor skyscrapers.⁵⁵ The ‘solicitous displacement’ of 40Part, as Eleey has called it,⁵⁶ into 2011 enabled and reinforced that double longing for a realm of permanence ‘out-of-time’ and for idealized remote pasts. On the other hand, the re-creation suggests another, more specific, negotiation between times as a means to memorialize and to cope with the trauma of 9/11. For visitors who had experienced the installation in 2001, re-experiencing 40Part might have ‘enacted the emergence … of “a” memory’.⁵⁷ In that sense, the installation potentially allowed some visitors, notably, MoMA PS1 workers,⁵⁸ a specifically recollective ‘peak experience of intensified affect’ in ways similar to how Ben Anderson describes the practice of listening to recorded music to remember.⁵⁹ As distinct from the private practices Anderson analyses, however, September 11 visitors did not choose 40Part, nor did they have it installed or press play – the curator did. Still, and regardless of visitors’ previous experiences, 40Part's self-referential iteration ten years after its initial installation served to ‘fix, freeze or frame an event’.⁶⁰

‘Playing’ 40Part again made its 2001 run in P.S. 1 the past event. The re-enactment compromised the separation between present and past to, in turn, cope with the trauma of 9/11 while avoiding its complexity. Re-enactment, as Marita Sturken has shown, ‘is a crucial factor’ in ‘responses to traumatic events’.⁶¹ Instead of looking to recreations of dramatic events, Sturken analyses forms of re-enactment that tend to be overlooked,⁶² and shows how those repetitions allow for responses to trauma that are comforting, even as they foreclose an alternative range of emotional registers (e.g., anger) and political engagements.⁶³ These repetitions provide ‘a sense of control and containment’, and partake in a therapeutic approach to memorial culture.⁶⁴

While it is unclear whether the sounds of Cardiff's installation came to act as ‘mnemic materiality’ (if they made visitors remember),⁶⁵ 40Part effectively worked as an ‘affective catalyser’⁶⁶ in September 11. It offered a place to listen and to feel intently, an opportunity for a contained emotional release as well as for ‘safe’ proximities with the voice parts and the co-present visitors, just as Heiss said it had in 2001:

I have never had such a visceral reaction to a work of art, contemporary or otherwise. The Forty-Part Motet gives me goose bumps.⁶⁷

Each person in the room was transfixed with a strange kind of reverence – I stood enraptured; mouth agape as I glanced around to see the reactions of others. One woman sat down heavily on the bench, overcome, others walked among the speakers in a contemplative trance.⁶⁸

The role of 40Part and the attitudes that underlay how it was used in 2011 become clearer when considered vis-à-vis the other two soundworks in September 11, works to which Cardiff's installation was set against in terms of physical placement in the museum and of the meanings and affects that each work animated and was intended to convey: Stephen Vitiello's World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd (1999/2002) and the main theme of The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000). Winds is a six-channel mix of recordings that Vitiello had created on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower after Hurricane Floyd in 1999. In September 11, Vitiello's work could not but call attention to the missing Twin Towers. Winds was ‘the only thing in the show that really is the thing itself, and it almost overwhelms’; Eleey ‘buried it in … the basement, away from the rest of the show’.⁶⁹ The role of 40Part in September 11 relied on the putative otherworldliness and timelessness with which Spem in alium endows the installation, and on the rerunning of the piece as it marked off a distinction between the then-present experience at MoMA PS1 and a moment that was brought about as a past. Winds, in contrast, was thought of as, and sounds, thing-y; the significance of Vitiello's installation hinged on an assumed direct and earthly bond with the former WTC. If 40Part exuded ethereal antique and offered a ‘transcendent refuge’, Winds conjured up the crude materiality of modern ruination and advanced ‘the feeling … that you are standing in the midst of the building as it sways and creaks with moments of wind and a plane passing’,⁷⁰ an impression of immediacy with the no-longer-existing site that, not unlike Cardiff's installation, took visitors away.⁷¹

September 11 had as a backdrop ten years of (global, national, local) bad-faith politics and racialized violence that were, notably, embodied in and emboldened by the 2001 USA Patriot Act. More immediately, it had as context the killing of Osama bin Laden earlier that year, the very concrete affective responses that followed, and the tone these set for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 in the city.⁷² As a constitutive outside, these were fundamental to September 11, and, like 9/11 itself, were made present through allusions in the exhibition. In an oblique but hardly subtle gesture, the theme from The Patriot was broadcast in a gallery located on the opposite side of the room where 40Part was housed. As Eleey explains:

I wanted something that could sit in the background … something that would quietly spectacularize the experience of the exhibition itself. I chose John Williams's theme from Roland Emmerich's film The Patriot (2000), set during the American Revolutionary War … Some visitors might notice the sacred music on one side of the exhibition and the nationalist anthem on the other, bleeding into the spaces around them.⁷³

In this oppositional role, 40Part was, to use Hal Foster's term, ‘not-quite-transcendental’; it was intended to signify in a way similar to the other, more recognizably referential artworks and juxtapositions in September 11, as Foster elaborated in his critique of the exhibition,⁷⁴ which focused on visual artworks. We could think of Williams versus Cardiff/Tallis as another way of acting out and containing unsettling realities within the curated environment of the museum. The opposition between The Patriot's theme and Spem in alium could set up a contrast between those who engage in banal nationalism as a response to 9/11 (i.e., people identified with The Patriot) and those (presumably, MoMA PS1's visitors) who dis-identify with populists’ naivety and find comfort in 40Part. This move, whereby the liberal art-literate class seems to remove itself from – or simply does not acknowledge itself in – the nation's militarized patriotism and violent history, was enabled by the exnomination of early British Christian vocal music, which is to say, by the avoidance and/or failure to identify and to question whiteness as fundamental to September 11's investments in the reworking of Tallis's motet.

As staged in September 11, 40Part did as much to contain and to comfort as it did to obscure, to make questions unavailable. The experience that 40Part offered tapped into a public desire for comfort while allowing for a sense of active participation and an embodied experience that was contained, literally and figuratively, within the installation. The show meant to mark the anniversary of 9/11 was, necessarily, a commemorative endeavor. And yet, this did not figure in how September 11 was conceived of and presented – its commemorative drive was withheld. Eelco Runia has identified an affliction particular to the study of history and, hence, to ‘infected historians’: while ‘history is pervaded with the desire to commemorate’, ‘the discipline’ ‘is held back by the fear that somehow is a bit improper to give in to that wish’.⁷⁵ A similar wariness was at play in the conception of September 11. Part of the sense of ‘impropriety’ had to do with a flawed politics of 9/11 memorialization that the producers of the show (and the particular public they imagined) did not want to participate in. Commemoration was not something the show was imagined to be doing; instead, it was something the show was exploring ‘against the backdrop of 9/11's anniversary’.⁷⁶ And yet, ‘the public desire to participate in communal mourning and grief’⁷⁷ permeated September 11's staging of 40Part, and the unacknowledged ways it not only summoned a necessarily select ‘public’ and satisfied desires within the installation's confines but was also inflected by fears and fantasies about actual and imaginary communities and realities beyond the room. In some ways and despite its counter-commemorative intentions, September 11 was not unlike many other commemorations wherein, following Runia, ‘the question “who are we that this could have happened?”’ is unproductively ‘answered in an identity-enhancing, yes, self-celebrating way’.⁷⁸

In its installation in the Rockaways during the Hurricane Sandy recovery, 40Part was again called upon to provide relief in the wake of a violent and traumatic event. Though in a very different context, the installation's soothing effects and great popularity again short-circuited reflections on the complex underlying causes and manifestations of this violence, in this case climate change, the inequitable responses to it, and the cultural codes that determine what feels comforting.

‘It will remain in place’

Many of New York's gallery-owners and gallery-goers decamp to the Hamptons come July, but this summer one of the area's best arts festivals … is taking place within the five boroughs … it is Ms. Cardiff's transcendent reworking of Spem in alium … installed in the fort's chapel … that is the best reason to head there soon.⁷⁹

Rockaway! was a free public arts festival co-organized by MoMA and the community-oriented local arts organization Rockaway Artist Alliance (RAA);⁸⁰ it had been conceived by the then MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and iconic punk singer-songwriter and artiste Patti Smith, both of whom were residents of the Rockaways at the time. The reason for the festival was ‘to celebrate the reopening of Fort Tilden and recognize the ongoing recovery of the Rockaway Peninsula’⁸¹ in Queens, after the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The sacredness of Spem in alium – hence, that of Cardiff's reworking of the motet – was emphasized by placing 40Part in a site for Christian liturgy. The installation was explicitly there as part of a festival and was itself an attraction. Fort Tilden is a historical and recreational district, and the Rockaways are a summertime destination for many city residents looking for a staycation.⁸² Some of the contradictions particular to 40Part's usage in September 11 were amplified in this final iteration of Cardiff's installation in the city to date. In part, these were more apparent because, in Rockaway!, 40Part was brought into ‘the ground’, to ‘the urban fabric or landscape’ that had been damaged by the hurricane,⁸³ and the material realities of the area's yet-unfinished recovery compromised the sense of stability and resilience that 40Part, in synergy with the then just restored Fort Tilden chapel, sought to offer.

The chapel is a Series 700 building, a temporary and movable structure mass-produced in the 1940s; it was installed in 1941 and relocated to its current position somewhere between 1945 and 1955, as the fort was restructured to accommodate nuclear weapons.⁸⁴ The chapel is one of the ‘remnants’ of the post.⁸⁵ While historic Fort Tilden was reopening, the restoration of other of the Rockaway Peninsula's public locales and residential areas was ongoing, as Rockaway! explicitly ‘recognized’.⁸⁶ That process was itself unevenly experienced and paced. For residents of the Rockaways, the recovery from Hurricane Sandy was vastly different for homeowners and those renting in the private real estate market than it was for tenants living in New York City's Housing Authority buildings, right across the peninsula from Fort Tilden – Leigh Graham calls this ‘a tale of two recoveries’.⁸⁷ Writing in 2018, Graham notes that ‘there is reason to think that Sandy has put the Rockaways “on the map”’.⁸⁸ That was foreshadowed in Rockaway!, a show that drew thousands, and that art critics and ‘to-do’ recommendation lists alike deemed to be ‘certainly worth a trip to the last stop on the A train’.⁸⁹ At the opening, there was what Nate Freeman described as a ‘mob inside’ 40Part in the chapel.⁹⁰ Cardiff herself ‘remarked [to Rockaway Times] that Fort Tilden might no longer be one of New York's best kept secrets’.⁹¹

I do not intend to overstate the festival duplicities vis-à-vis the complex material and social realities of the Rockaways, which had been further complicated by the hurricane and its recovery, and tie in with New York City's racialized economic inequalities and sociospatial practices of consumption and dis/emplacement. Nor do I want to exaggerate Rockaway!'s complicity in those inequitable practices – in any event, any such complicity would be unintentional.⁹² I am interested in 40Part's role in how those tensions were negotiated. The implicit values and commemorative frameworks that 40Part mobilized, along with the experiences it offered as a specific listening environ, worked to smooth over contradictions the installation itself amplified. It was meant to provide a sense of comfort that is deceptive in a number of ways.

Although visitors’ responses to the installation were positive, ‘the people’ did not decide to place 40Part in Fort Tilden as part of a festival honoring local hurricane recovery because that was what the community needed; it was the curators who made that decision. From the vantage point of the installation's trajectory in the city, recruiting 40Part for the cause made sense: MoMA owned an edition of the work, 40Part is a beloved work likely to boost the critical and public response to Rockaway!, one of the available spaces was a church, the installation was already associated with processes of healing/remembrance and responses to major human/material trauma because of September 11,⁹³ and, most importantly, 40Part would add ‘depth’ and a touch of solemnity to the festival, endowing it with what Peter Tregear would call ‘theological gravitas’.⁹⁴ Considering ‘The Ninth after 9/11’, and, more broadly, the extensive practice of the ‘pairing together of mainstream orchestral music and the memory of loss’,⁹⁵ Tregear points to the radical lack of connection with the events at stake as fundamental to the allure of those musics, whose use invokes ‘the power of art to transcend the moment’:⁹⁶

[T]he function of music in such circumstances seems to lie precisely in its presumed otherworldliness … Precisely because it avoids a direct relationship with a historical event … commemorative music is perhaps supremely placed to lend a sense of transcendence, of sublime consolation, to an occasion that might otherwise be thought to eschew it.⁹⁷

Echoing the currently established musicological rejection of the notion that some musical compositions exist outside of time, Tregear notes that the use of Beethoven in social rituals of remembrance has more to do ‘with the potential for [certain groups] to use it as a kind of aesthetic emollient’ than with any ‘innate redemptive quality in his music’.⁹⁸ Much as each of those uses, as Tregear points out, might bank on ‘music's lack of referentiality’ to invoke the transcendental powers of, for instance, the Ninth, those practices are also referential; they are following a pattern, invoking other acts of commemoration as they mobilize recognizable and established codes. Spem in alium is not the Ninth, and in 40Part the listening environment and the modalities of engagement in which the visitor enters come to the foreground; these conditions are fundamental to the transcendental underpinnings of the experience, one that is, as distinct to a concert – whether experienced live or as a broadcast – private. But it is Spem in alium that signals solemnity and religiosity, as emphasized by the chapel location, and that distinguished 40Part not only from other of the Rockaway! works and experiences, but also from the overall feel, auditory and otherwise, of the festival.⁹⁹ If, broadly speaking, the wish to ‘transcend the moment’ is, for Tregear, an ‘understandable response to tragedy’, in the case of the decidedly not somber or mournful Rockaway! it was the more (im)material underpinnings of otherworldliness, the ‘beyond nature’ quality of Spem in alium that – paradoxically coupled with 40Part's iterability and its markedly material auditory environ – might have been central. These have a specific allure in marking a milestone within the (ongoing) recovery after Hurricane Sandy, while acknowledging the prospect of future so-called natural disasters, which until recently were commonly referred to as ‘acts of God’.¹⁰⁰ This, in turn, invoked a particular sense of resilience, a term that was particularly present, through multiple and contradictory notions, in Rockaway!

Along with Cardiff's installation, the installations From the Series Brick Farm by Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas and Patti Smith's The Resilience of a Dreamer, the only site- and occasion-specific work, were the headliners of Rockaway! Smith's was the centerpiece and, alongside 40Part, the most popular. The Resilience was installed in Building T9, once a locomotive repair facility that had been deteriorating prior to Hurricane Sandy, and reopened in its original ruinous state:

Having witnessed personal belongings of Rockaway residents being destroyed and washed away during Sandy, Smith will install a gilded four-post bed with pure white linens in a long-abandoned building that lacks windows and parts of its roof. The bed will wear down physically, yet remain in place, a symbol of courage and resilience.¹⁰¹

The material persistence (and environmentally induced decay) of Smith's installation made explicit the rhetoric of resilience that animated the festival,¹⁰² a sentiment that echoed the popularity of the term in urban planning and, specifically, in envisioning the prospects and morphology of the Rockaways (and of New York City at large).¹⁰³ As distinct from what resilience entailed for urban planners – for example, a reinforced boardwalk to resist flooding – or its more general meaning – the capacity to retain or return to the status quo – Smith was referring to a spirit, to a Geist. Although, properly speaking, the bed was not ‘resilient’, it retained a certain presence while undergoing a slow process of entropy, of ruination (the length of the festival was shorter than the time it would have taken the bed to decompose structurally, to wear down to unrecognizability, which would have added a grim layer to the ‘symbol’), thus tendering those visitors who had made the daytrip to Rockaway! a potentially rewarding taste of ‘authenticity’ and voyeuristic distance vis-à-vis the harsh realities and prospects on which The Resilience's sublimated, staged decay was bargaining.¹⁰⁴ Within this context, 40Part invoked a sense of resilience similar to the one it suggested in September 11, but at the Fort Tilden chapel, Spem in alium was more apparently engaged – and reified – as a place to visit, as sanitized heritage ruins to contemplate. As happens with the commemorative uses of certain Western art music, the rationale for the heritage protection of ‘ruined sites or things’, as Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir point out, ‘rarely refers to an inherent value’ these might have ‘but to our need for, and right to, historical rootedness and belonging … In other words, heritage is mostly valuable because it is useful to us’.¹⁰⁵ If, arguably, both the imaginary and the de facto ‘us’ – both the musically imagined community and the actual temporary gatherings (i.e., visitors co-present at specific moments and engaged in their own private experiences) – that the spatialized rendering of Spem in alium could accommodate and comfort fell short in terms of inclusion,¹⁰⁶ questioning to whom it is useful and what it is useful for has additional implications when considering Rockaway!

The Rockaway! brochure made clear that this was not the first time 40Part had been ‘there’, temporarily available for New Yorkers to visit in the wake of a major catastrophe; it also made clear that Rockaway! was not MoMA PS1's first response to Sandy, which had been particularly destructive in Queens, the borough where the museum is located. Biesenbach elaborated on this in another piece of Rockaway! promotional material:

Together with Volkswagen, MoMA PS1 was able to establish the VW Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach, immediately following Hurricane Sandy. Rockaway! is an ongoing effort to continue museum and cultural support in the area. I feel strongly that Volkswagen Group of America is our greatest partner to achieve this important work.¹⁰⁷

It would be disingenuous to single out MoMA PS1 and Rockaway! for their reliance on, and promotion of, corporations and industries that, in terms of imagining better or at least livable futures for more humans (and non-human animals) and, specifically, in terms of climate change, we might consider to be bad actors. For the purposes of this discussion, though, the unsurmountable ambivalences of Rockaway! as a (cultural) ‘relief effort’ speaks to the material implications of relief that are also present in more abstract and individualized forms of comfort.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, the fact that those social and material implications are not necessarily appraisable and counter-intuitive for the comforted is key; in other words, what were 40Part visitors not, or not encouraged to be, listening to?

Descriptions of 40Part as a ‘unusually potent balm’ or a ‘sauna for the mind’¹⁰⁹ speak to an engagement of 40Part as a form of what Mack Hagood calls soundscaping – the ‘technological fabrication of physical and psychological space through the aural’¹¹⁰ – and are, in turn and following Sarah Sharma, symptomatic of a spatially biased understanding not just of the installation but also, crucially, of the conditions of transcendence. These require ‘having distance’¹¹¹ and a place to take time away and, due to its particular atmosphere, to moor oneself. Sharma's critique of what she identifies as ‘slow places’ and the ways these operate is useful to understand the work of 40Part whenever deployed or engaged as a ‘transcendent refuge’:

There is a dominating sensibility within this discourse on slowness that being a ‘good’ political citizen requires transcendence. Transcendence pervades in both taking the necessary time out and abstracting oneself from the energy and traffic of everyday life. But this traffic conditions the very possibility for some to transcend. Slowness does not and cannot acknowledge its material preconditions or the diversity of demands that sit outside its concrete edifices and sacred spaces … slowness hides the rhythm of material relations, the very condition of its possibility.¹¹²

The sense of comfort that 40Part could provide is time-sensitive because the installation ‘is there’ for a number of hours a day during a limited run; as most sound installations, 40Part dwells and, as such, the relationship between installation and site, like that between installation and its visitors, is more similar to a rental agreement. While that was the case with all 40Part iterations in the city (and is arguably the case elsewhere),¹¹³ this was more apparent at Rockaway! because it was explicitly a festival and because, with respect to the recovery, it was short-lived and it came and went in media res – ‘People have been visibly moved when they have experienced this piece … We are sorry to see it go.’¹¹⁴ During the festival, 40Part was free and open to visitors from Thursday to Sunday – times when more day-trippers visit the Rockaways.¹¹⁵

Conclusion

This study has approached 40Part as a cultural artefact that participates in auditory culture and that has a social history. In so doing, it advances a more nuanced approach to the spatiality of sound installations and to how these enter and animate – not just comment on – social choreographies and topologies that are political, in part, because the ways in which these participate in temporal economies. Sound art installations such as 40Part are experiences for audiences – notably, art-literate audiences – to consume during their leisure time; not only do sound installations take (specific people's leisure) time but also, with exceptions, tend to have opening days and hours and are ‘in place’ temporarily. Taking into account that the site a sound installation defines is meant for its intended audiences to spend time doing and feeling something other than what people do and feel elsewhere, notably at the workplace and at home, and, hence, recognizing sound installations’ attunement to the experience economy – the fact that much of their allure is, as is the case with 40Part, connected to the rehearsal of new forms of audience participation is, too, fundamental to and symptomatic of such connection – is key to understanding the significance and uses of 40Part in New York and I believe is also key to approaching sound installations as situated auditory-cultural and artistic phenomena at large. In this study, in particular, it allowed for a critique of 40Part's entanglement with white bourgeois sentimentality and consumption practices that extends into the material (re)production and obliteration of social inequalities. Part of the soothing and healing properties attributed to 40Part had to do with the racialized impression that this immersive installation and its ‘pure’ sounds were the spiritual and somatic other of an antsy contemporaneity. Drawing, particularly, on the work of Sarah Sharma and Mack Hagood, this article questioned for whom and what for 40Part could possibly serve as a ‘sonic refuge’ and how does this function within – rather than outside, ‘beyond’, or as a way to counter – the realities that make it possible, desirable, and exclusive.

The association of Spem in alium with simpler, more ‘natural’ times and, in turn, a framing of 40Part's experience as slow-paced and mooring were manifest from the beginning in the New York City reception of the work. In its staging as part of the commemorative rituals of these two, markedly modern, disasters,¹¹⁶ Cardiff's installation came to be ‘percolated through intangible conceptions of history, identity and sense of belonging’¹¹⁷ and to invoke a sense of trans-historical resilience, wherein the avowed timelessness of Spem in alium worked as a proxy for the resilience of white Anglo-European Christian culture. Such work hinged on the material and symbolic aspects of the multi-channel audio installation's rendering of Spem in alium, as these were mobilized in a time of cultural reckoning, and as these were positioned within the city's existing architectures of memory and erasure. The installation's usage in September 11 and Rockaway! was imbued with, and sanctioned by, sentimental attachments, aesthetic judgements, and values that did not quite transcend, as much as obliterate their own complicity in those, less spectacular, underlying forms of racialized and neoliberal violence that 9/11 and Sandy had intensified, and become compounded with, in the city. Because white dominance and neoliberal disinvestments arguably are the flipside of some of the specific affinities and techno-social tendencies that I suggest were central to the possibility of 40Part offering comfort as deployed in 2011 and 2014, and they are, too, central to what is ruinous about modernity.