I would like to share a religious experience I had recently at the National Gallery of Canada. It was while I was attending the exhibition "Elusive Paradise: The Millennium Prize", and the exhibit which moved me and many others so much was entitled "Forty-Part Motet". The artist who created this remarkable work is Janet Cardiff, a native of Ontario who now lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta. In fact, of the many works in the exhibition by ten artists, five Canadian and five non-Canadian, Cardiff's was the winner of the Millennium Prize of $50,000.

This unusual work is a piece of aural art, a sound sculpture, not a painting. It consists of 40 separate speakers each projecting the voices of sixty different members of the Salisbury Cathedral choir, recorded in December 2000, singing a rendition of Thomas Tallis's motet "Spem in alium nunquam habui" - "I have trusted in no one [but the Lord]", 1575.

The central idea in Cardiff's work is to involve the listener in a way they could never be involved in a concert hall or in their living room. As she says in the brochure which accompanies the exhibition, "I wanted to be able to 'climb inside` the music, connecting with the separate voices. I am also interested in how...the audience may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space."

Thus the audience can simply sit inside the elegant Rideau St. Chapel preserved in the gallery and listen to the magnificent voices as a whole, or they can walk from one of the forty speakers mounted on head-high tripods to the next one listening as if they were standing in the midst of the choir and experiencing the richness and intonations of each singer in turn.

The effect of this innovation is spellbinding. When I walked into the gallery chapel in the middle of this fourteen-minute piece of music there was silence among the listeners as I have never experienced it in an art gallery before. Some dozen people were there in various locations and positions: some were sitting attentively on the two small backless benches in the chapel; one lady was listening intently from her wheel chair; a young couple was leaning back to back against each other on one of the benches with their eyes raised towards the fan-vaulting in the room; one man was resting on the kneeler of the altar rail; and another was walking slowly from loud speaker to loud speaker like a pilgrim praying the Stations of the Cross. I sat near the man at the altar rail so I could take in the awe in the faces of the others in the chapel before giving myself up to the experience they were all sharing.

We all felt we were inside the music in a way we had never been before, and that we understood as we never had before the meaning of the text of the motet, "Spem in alium nunquam habui." When the music stopped, no one moved. After several minutes some filed quietly out of the chapel, while others remained for a repetition of the music, which played continuously throughout the exhibition until its close on May 13.

Many felt as I did that if this is what paradise is like, we want to be there. If we could experience such enchanting sounds as these we felt that paradise is not so elusive as the title of the exhibition suggests. If "Elusive Paradise" or Janet Cardiff's "Forty-Part Motet" comes anywhere near your home, I urge you not to miss it. It may be the closest you will come this side of the grave to the Beatific Vision. Or should it be called the Beatific Audition?