The work is a 40 channel sound installation which brings together performances made by individual karaoke singers to form an unlikely collective reinterpretation of Janet Cardiff's work '40 Part Motet', which itself reconfigures Thomas Tallis's work 'Spem in Alium'.
40 Part Motet for Karaoke uses Cardiff’s original configuration of a forty channel sound work, arranged in eight groups of five singers, but replaces the original recording of the choristers with popular songs performed the individual karaoke singers.
The work foregrounds the result of private and amateur acts rather than those of the choristers. In Cardiff’s work, Tallis’s composition is the sole score performed, whilst in the new work a playlist of popular songs is used, and includes; Fly me to the Moon, by Frank Sinatra; Let it be, by The Beatles; Angels, by Robbie Williams; and Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen.
Listen to streams of tracks here: Motet Karaoke