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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2023

MARÍA EDURNE ZUAZU Open the ORCID record for MARÍA EDURNE ZUAZU [Opens in a new window]
MARÍA EDURNE ZUAZU*
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Researcher, Spain
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Email: [email protected]
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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.

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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 22 - 48
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund. A postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities enabled me to finish writing this article. I am also grateful to Emily Wilbourne, Karen Henson, Benjamin Piekut, Irina Troconis, Anne Stone, Tess Rankin, and Catherine Provenzano for their useful feedback and support at various stages, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and generous engagement with this piece.

References

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