On a recent sunny morning in Lower Manhattan, Matthew Leifheit heard applause.
It wasn’t for a live performance, but for many old ones — the source material for “No Time at All,” his sound installation that continues through June 30 at the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village.
Culled from 53 VHS tapes, the piece is a continuous mix of music and songs performed by gay men’s choruses from 1985 to 1995, complete with the distortions and degradations that occur when magnetic tape ages and deteriorates.
The piece runs 65 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of silence, a quieting that tells as much of a story as the golden baritones. There are seven “recitals,” as Leifheit calls them, that play every day through June from speakers nestled within the memorial’s 18-foot white steel canopy.
Leifheit, 37, said he deliberately included music from concerts that took place in the middle of the darkest early years of the AIDS crisis before the use of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) in the United States. It was a decade, he said during an interview at the memorial, when many gay chorus members “were reckoning with what they were going through, through music.”
Leifheit said the project’s title refers to how the passage of time might feel to people who remember going to so many funerals — and to the haste with which AIDS killed many of the men whose anonymous voices carry through the memorial.
Documenting the loss, and musical joys, of those early AIDS years was his artistic attempt to “dramatize the absence” and honor chorus members who “are still with us and thriving.”
To date, Leifheit has digitally preserved over 46 hours of performance footage. It took him about two years, mostly by tracking down video tapes at L.G.B.T.Q. archives across the country. A few chorus historians have also shared digitized clips and full performances.
Footage from the predigital age isn’t exactly plentiful: According to Leifheit, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco has only 10 VHS tapes of performances by the local gay men’s chorus from the decade he explored.
A Brooklyn-based photographer and educator, Leifheit grew up in rural Wisconsin, where he sang in school choirs in the ’90s and early 2000s. He said he likely became aware of gay men’s choruses from an unlikely source: a 2002 episode of “Will & Grace” that featured Matt Damon as a straight guy eager to join a gay men’s chorus.
In his youth, Leifheit said he knew about AIDS and that “there was a lot of death happening.”
“But I didn’t have friends who were dying,” he added. “I wanted to see if I could come closer to what that felt like through this experience of music, which is such an emotional and bodily art form, especially choral music.”
Visitors to the AIDS Memorial will recognize many of the songs he excerpts in the installation, which he named after a number from the musical “Pippin.”
Among them: “Not a Day Goes By,” a ballad from the Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” sung by the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus, and “It’s Raining Men,” the Weather Girls’ 1983 dance hit and gay anthem that the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. performs “like it’s written by Wagner or something,” as Leifheit joked.
Then there’s “Silent Night,” performed by the Windy City Gay Chorus in Chicago, wearing tuxedos and red carnations. Leifheit’s excerpt is from a training video the chorus used to teach its members to perform the Christmas carol in American Sign Language.
“I wanted to know what it would sound like for a group of men who were fearing for their lives to put on a Christmas show,” he said.
Gay chorus groups have been around since at least the 1970s. Stonewall Chorale, the nation’s first lesbian and gay chorus, dates to 1977. The first gay men’s group has its roots in San Francisco in 1978, when a group of men sang at a vigil following the assassination of the gay rights leader Harvey Milk.
By 1982 there were 14 groups in the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses. (“Chorus” was preferred over “choir,” with its connotations of Christianity.) Today, there are over 250 around the world, including for transgender people and others under the queer umbrella.
Dave Harper, the AIDS memorial’s executive director, said Leifheit’s artwork offers a message of “grief and joy and resistance” that aligns with his organization’s goal of documenting and honoring AIDS activists, even amateur tenors.
“Singing in a chorus was super political,” he said.
Leifheit said he felt honored to have been asked to make a listening station out of a public park that doubles as a sacred space in a neighborhood that looks almost nothing like it did 40 years ago, when a bed in the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital — the AIDS Memorial is on the hospital’s former campus — was for many people a final sanctum.
“I’ve seen, like, finance looking guys who seem like they want to take a phone call in here, but then they get distracted and are reading the texts” about the installation, he said. “One of the most powerful ways to encounter an artwork is if you’re not expecting to have the experience of art.”
Leifheit doesn’t know where his installation is headed next. He hopes that as it travels, the keepers of gay chorus history will be inspired to dust off their old VHS recordings and have them digitized and archived for future researchers.
In the meantime, Pride Month is here, and singers, many lost to time and a virus, have concerts to give at the New York City AIDS Memorial.
“I’m wondering if maybe we need to turn it up a couple notches,” he said.
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