Bring 40-Part Motet to DC!

Sound artist Janet Cardiff’s critically acclaimed installation The Forty Part Motet is at the High Museum in Atlanta until Jan 2015. From the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet is a mesmerizing reworking of a 40-part choral piece by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505-1585). The installation features the voices of 59 singers (adults and children) performing Tallis’ Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1556), which translates to In No Other is My Hope and is perhaps Tallis’ most famous composition. Each voice was recorded separately, and all voices are played back in unison via 40 individual loudspeakers on tripods (one speaker for each choral part). The audio component features a 14-minute loop – 11 minutes of singing and three minutes of intermission.

http://www.high.org/Art/Exhibitions/The-Forty-Part-Motet-By-Janet-Cardiff.aspx

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Maryland

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“An Unkindness,” Meditative Debut at Corcoran, through February 23

Mia Feuer, Washington sculptor, offers a meditation on petroleum extraction and the environment. From the Corcoran website, “Feuer’s new project for the Corcoran is a haunting vision of nature consumed, transformed, and twisted by human need. Inspired by the artist’s experiences in the oil-producing landscapes of the Canadian tar sands, the Arctic Circle, and the Suez Canal, An Unkindness explores the relationships between human infrastructure and the natural world.” See more at: http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/mia-feuer-unkindness#sthash.hawHjiG2.dpuf

Upside down tree in reclaimed oil sands

2014 DC Design House Announced

The stately home at 4600 Linnean Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, 20008 in Forest Hills was just announced as this year’s location for the 7th Annual DC Design House benefiting Children’s National Health System, and will be open for public viewing April 12 – May 11, 2014. Built in 1929, the 2014 DC Design House is a six-bedroom, five-full and two-half bath estate with a three-car garage and pool situated on a two-third-acre home-site. The stone house offers three levels and approximately 7,929 square feet of living space for 24 designers to transform. The home includes original elements such as crown molding and wood flooring, as well as custom cabinetry in the living room and formal library.

Forty Part Motet at National Cathedral?

Perhaps National Cathedral can attract Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation, which was presented at The Cloisters in NYC in 2013.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icoutF9py1M

Regarded as the artist’s masterwork, and consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, continuously played an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (1556?/1573?) by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585). Spem in alium, which translates as “In No Other Is My Hope,” is perhaps Tallis’s most famous composition. Visitors were encouraged to walk among the loudspeakers and hear the individual unaccompanied voices—bass, baritone, alto, tenor, and child soprano—one part per speaker—as well as the polyphonic choral effect of the combined singers in an immersive experience. The Forty Part Motet is most often presented in a neutral gallery setting, but in this case the setting was the Cloisters’ Fuentidueña Chapel, which features the late twelfth-century apse from the church of San Martín at Fuentidueña, near Segovia, Spain, on permanent loan from the Spanish Government. Set within a churchlike gallery space, and with superb acoustics, it has for more than fifty years proved a fine venue for concerts of early music.

Washington National Cathedral: Seeing Deeper

An extraordinary spiritual opportunity to experience a unique architectural space Washington National Cathedral: Information about Seeing Deeper.

Folk Art Museum Focus of WSJ Article on MOMA’s Renovation Plans

Timing was prescient on a recent visit to NYC as I was able to see the scale and location of the narrow American Folk Art Museum, only 13 years old, butting up against MOMA and slated for demolition (my photo), and then reading the opposing opinions in a recent WSJ:  “…A solution had seemed imminent. Last May, following an outcry over its plan to demolish the American Folk Art Museum, a highly admired architectural gem in the path of its latest expansion scheme along 53rd Street, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had hired the New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

There was a huge sigh of relief. These are architects known for tackling the most intractable design problems with creative ingenuity. They were key players in reimagining the abandoned railroad tracks that are now the world-famous High Line Park; they deftly made the sprawling Lincoln Center more hospitable to people and connected to the city; they are art-world familiars, having started their practice with high-concept museum installations more inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement than by the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier. Surely if any one could, they would be able to find a way to reconcile the intensely crafted cast-bronze facade of the American Folk Art Museum with the inscrutably sleek glass and steel of MoMA….”  Read the full article here http://on.wsj.com/1fw7lBQ and additional counterpoint article published same day.