Remembering Cleveland: Thomas Tallis - Spem In Alium
Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, reviewed entirely in blank verse, because why not?
A memory from Cleveland's old museum:
Two seats surrounded on all sides by voices,
A forty-speaker space to replicate
Their ghostly coughs and whispers vectored in.
Then silence. From one backward corner chimes,
The first pure tone of Tallis' tune to God,
And filling fast that space, twice anti-phone,
Adorned all round in painted Renaissance,
Emerged that polyphonic déclarée,
That sound-spirelli puzzle masterpiece.
An earthbound teardrop stopped in time,
Its convex hex a panoramic host
Of ancient eyes cast over and around,
All men who died when Tallis' sound was new.
Indeed, the first to shed their hoary tears;
For them, this wasn't science. This was God.
At center sits a face-flushed man alone,
His wilted sunflower body bent in two,
Surrendered sadly to the choral wind.
What thought he, there, in tragic acquiescence,
The fearful past's illusions on his back?
Perhaps he glimpsed religious ecstasy,
The same which seized contemporary men?