Since I live with a New School staffer in a New School building, I was able to get a New School ID card yesterday. One of the things I can do with this card is get into MoMA for free, so I went there today. I went primarily to experience Janet Cardiff’s “40 Part Motet,” which has been at MoMA for several months but is closing on March 21. It’s a room containing a recorded performance of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, a choral piece for eight five-person choirs. Each of the 40 vocal parts is different. Cardiff recorded a performance of the piece, and the room contains, in a big circle, 40 speakers on stands, with one vocal part emanating from each speaker. You can either sit in the middle of the room and listen to the piece, hearing different voices come from different parts of the room, or you can walk around the room and listen to individual voices. It’s an 11-minute piece and it’s a great experience.

More about the piece here, here and here.

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I also wanted to see a new exhibit on Edvard Munch, the first American exhibition of his work in almost 30 years. It blew me away. “The Scream” is not there, although there are two early lithographs of it, and there are other works that include the same famous setting, with its blood-red sky. It’s strange to see them; it’s like the stage is set for something spectacular but the star hasn’t yet appeared. His work is so emotional.

I like this quote about “The Scream”:

The power of “The Scream,” I think, owes much to an intellectual resistance that it overcame in the artist. A similar resistance explains the popular tendency to treat that icon of unhappy modern consciousness as a joke in cartoons and inflatable toys. Laughter dies in the face of the supremely matter-of-fact original. It is the touchstone of Munch’s definitive quality in his great years: a self-abnegating submission to emotional truth.

The Munch exhibit runs until May.