If you — like the rest of us — are trying to get a handle on what, exactly, the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center is about, you should probably start with Janet Cardiff’s “sound-art installation” “Forty-Part Motet,” as the festival itself did on Thursday evening.
In remarks at the opening reception, Jane Moss, the relentlessly imaginative vice president for programming at Lincoln Center and the creator of the festival, first said that what it is really about is to serve as “an antidote to the midterm elections.” But then she got serious and held up the installation as the ideal metaphor for what the festival is trying to achieve: a focus on the personal interior spaces “where all music starts.” Whether wildly out of touch with outwardly gaudy times or right in tune with them (I bring up Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” on hearsay, since I have yet to see it), Ms. Moss has fastened on the notions of spirituality and transcendence to assemble a varied, multicultural three-week array of mostly sacred music.
“Forty-Part Motet,” which will occupy the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rehearsal and Recording Studio of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time Warner Building through Nov. 13, uses the 40-part motet, Thomas Tallis’s astounding “Spem in Alium” of 1573. Ms. Cardiff has more or less isolated the 40 voices, and each is fed to an individual speaker in a surround setting. Listeners are invited either to immerse themselves in the wash of sound from a central location or to wander around within the web of voices, shifting their concentration as whim suggests.
The experience is obviously meant to be absorbed and appreciated in a receptive and uncritical frame of mind. But the critic in for a penny is, alas, in for a pound, and mundane considerations necessarily intrude.
First, as you approach individual voices, you are reminded that even in a fine choir, not all of the individual voices are equally fine, and the unevennesses prove distracting. (The choir here is from the Salisbury Cathedral in England.) In addition, you sometimes happen on mute sexless, ageless speakers during extended rests, and whatever suddenly breaks the silence — whether man, woman or child — comes as a surprise and, thus, another distraction.
Maybe noncritics can ignore (transcend?) all of this. But I would recommend remaining near the center and trying to take the music in as a whole.
The 11-minute work runs repeatedly, with three-minute intermissions, from noon to 8 p.m., and later on nights when performances take place in the nearby Rose Theater. Spoilsports not welcome.
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