Muziek ≈ architecture : sorting out the nonsense

Music and architecture are bound to each other in all sorts of ways. As far as we can make out the only sensible thing ever said about the relationship between music and architecture comes from Paul Valéry who noticed that the one thing music and architecture have in common is that the person undergoing them is necessarily immersed in both. In other words music and architecture are immersive spatial arts in a way that none of the other arts can fully claim to be. That is an interesting point of departure and is rather beautifully illustrated by the artist Janet Cardiff, in her project called Forty-Part Motet (2001) where she recorded each voice in Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium nunquam habui, individually so that people wandering around the room while the music was playing would variously experience the whole choir or a single voice, depending on where they stood in the room.