Spem in alium followup post

On Wednesday evening I made a comment on Facebook about having had a cool idea I didn't have time to write about as I was late for bed, but which would require the assistance of forty friends. Since then, I've had two people saying they were intrigued, but no one guessed what it was. Perhaps I should have said forty friends and a prayer shawl.

I've talked beforehand about Spem in alium nunquam habui, Thomas Tallis' forty part motet. liv first got me interested in it six years ago, curiously just after I'd heard it (but not reacted to it) on the soundtrack to the film Touching the Void. Initially, I wasn't all that whelmed by it, but it grew on me, and in February I bought myself a copy of it. I think this is the only classical choral music I've ever bought; choral music doesn't do much for me.

As I said in my previous posts I would probably need help to appreciate this piece of music; listening to it, you just hear a wall of sound and can't make out the individual parts, except whichever happens to have the highest notes at the time (and occasionally others). So I printed out the score, and attempted to follow it, but my music-reading skills are too rusty to manage a piece of this complexity; I need to work through it with a musical instrument. Sadly, it appears now I have permanently broken my Music 4000 keyboard, my viola skills are too rusty to combine playing and following, and my plan to use the piano at my parents' place last time I was there didn't happen; I'd forgotten bluepork and his family would be there.

I briefly tried a plan B:

( View piccy )

...but the keyboard was too small, and too clumsy to be much use, so I settled down to study the score instead:

( View piccy )

I still don't have much idea of what's going on in the individual parts—that will still have to wait until I get access to a proper keyboard a chance to go through these—but there doesn't seem to be much duplication between parts: there really are forty voices all doing different things. Occasionally these all come in together forte after a brief silence and knock your head off; sometimes, though, Tallis brings them in staggered over the course of a bar, resulting in a gradual swelling of sound that is also moving in a different way.

It rapidly became apparent, though, that it's simply not possible to appreciate this piece properly without surround sound: it's set for eight choirs of five voices each arranged in a horseshoe shape (for best effect, with the listeners in the centre). Heard properly, you get themes of music working their way around the circle, but also sometimes antiphonally bouncing back and forth between choirs or pairs of choirs on first one side of you then the other, then switching to behind you and in front of you.

But how and where could I possibly get to hear it like that myself? It strikes me as the kind of music likely to be performed in a church, which is generally somewhere I can't enter, for religious reasons. Indeed, the words form part of Christian prayer. However, that prayer is based on the Book of Judith, a thoroughly Jewish text, and there's nothing theologically problematic with it.

Thought association led to the idea of then performing it not in church but in shul, and I had the crazy idea of replacing the Latin text with Hebrew, either from the Hebrew version of the Book of Judith if it can be found in it,^* or translated afresh if not.

* Wikipedia tells me there's two recensions of it, neither attested before the Middle Ages, so the original Hebrew the Septuagint version was translated from may be lost. In any case, the words aren't in the English translation in my copy of Ancient Jewish Novels.

I then had the even crazier thought of performing it instead as a flashmob in a large open public space! So, any singy people like to help me rounding up enough people to do this?

(Note: this will not be for now: I'll not be allowed to listen to music for a year after my mother dies, so this will be a project for the further off future. Oh, who am I fooling; like I'll ever get forty people (or even thirty-nine) signing up to perform a notoriously difficult piece of music!)