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.