At 60, this groundbreaking composer, singer, director and choreographer is still defining the cutting edge
By Erik Philbrook
For almost 40 years, Meredith Monk has personified the word "modern." As a cutting-edge composer, singer, choreographer, director and creator of new operas and musical theater works, films and installations, she has continuously pushed the envelope, defied categorization, invented new forms and transcended genre limitations. The fact that she has built her work around the most ancient of instruments -- the human voice -- is a testament to her prodigious talent.
Monk, who turned 60 last year, is an American original and an international icon who remains at the vanguard of modern music. She recently released a recording of mercy (ECM), an important new musical theater work; performed at the world premiere of her first-ever symphonic work, Possible Sky, commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas for his New World Symphony in Miami earlier this year; and, in September, helped inaugurate the opening of Carnegie Hall's new Zankel Hall with a performance of selections of her work. She is also embraced by avant-garde and rock music fans alike. The Icelandic rock star Bjork has covered her composition, "Gotham Lullaby," and the new music website, www.acidplanet.com, recently presented a remix contest, offering DJ's a chance to remix a selection from mercy.
Monk's adventurous musical career began in earnest upon graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, where she had supported herself performing as a folk singer and with a rock group called the Inner Ear. It was then that Monk began experimenting with her voice as an instrument. Fortunately born with a gifted voice, her energies were spent exploring in what new directions she could take it.
"I come from a long tradition of singers," says Monk, who has a three-octave voice. "I'm a fourth generation singer in my family, so I really had something that I could work with that was just given to me. It was really about finding all the voices within my voice and all the possibilities of producing sound and voice as sound. I think early on I realized that I didn't want to have words in the songs because I felt that the voice itself was a language and that within it was limitless possibilities of color and texture, breath and gender, age, landscape and character."
Early in her career Monk tried her hand at choreography and discovered that her true interest lay in breaking from the traditional technical aspects of the art form, so it was only natural that she would try the same approach with her vocal explorations. She perfected a form of intimate vocal chamber music, sometimes with instruments, but often without, sometimes with words, but often without. Monk's music is less intent on communicating than just being, reaching for primal sounds that allow the listener to experience her pieces on both a conscious and subliminal level. The breadth of sounds Monk has been able to pull from her voice is nothing short of astonishing. A list of adjectives used to describe Monk's voice over the years could fill a book, but would most certainly include "gorgeous," "hypnotic," "meditative," "plaintive," "percussive," "mystical," even "awe-inspiring."
New World Symphony Founder and Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas and Meredith Monk in rehearsal for her symphonic work Possible Sky.
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After college, she moved to lower Manhattan and entered the avant-garde musical
environment where Philip Glass and Steve Reich were flourishing and began to
develop a series of multimedia works featuring solo voice with little accompaniment.
In 1968, she founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary
approach to performance, and later formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
to expand her musical textures and forms.
Starting in 1981, she released her first album, Dolmen Music, on the ECM New Series label, who have released many of her more than a dozen recordings. Except for Turtle Days and her film score, Book of Days, most of her work since then has been devoted to her Vocal Ensemble, which has become the perfect vehicle for her increasingly intricate and layered vocal pieces.
Although somewhere along the way Monk's approach to the voice became known as "Extended Vocal Technique" and it became a school of study, she continues to confound some critics who often struggle to find words to describe Monk's music. It may have something to do with the fact that Monk's wordless compositions are performed almost entirely with human voices and that same intimate quality belies their sophistication.
"I think that my work is very formal," says Monk. "Compositional structure is something that is extremely important to me. Sometimes people don't realize how intricate the forms are because they sound organic. I always say that making a piece is a little bit like making a soup; you have these vegetables and you put them in water, and they're simmering and for a long time the carrots are still carrots and the peas are still peas and the tomatoes are still tomatoes. Then they start simmering and it starts boiling down and now it's a soup and all those elements are blended together. They're not what they started as. But I love it when they're still the vegetables."
Monk's intrepid spirit as a composer has won her many awards throughout her career, including the MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1995, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three "Obies," two Villager Awards, a "Bessie" for Sustained Creative Achievement, the 1986 National Music Theatre Award, sixteen ASCAP Awards for Musical Compo-sition and the 1992 Dance Magazine Award. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Boston Conservatory. In addition, her music has been heard in numerous films, including La Nouvelle Vague by Jean Luc Godard and The Big Lebowski by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Her latest music theater work, mercy, a collaboration with visual artist Ann Hamilton, received rave reviews when it premiered at the American Dance Festival in July 2001 and subsequently at the Wexner Center, Royce Hall, the Walker Arts Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. ECM released a CD of the work in November 2002. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said, "what this intensely-moving, drop-dead gorgeous, can't-be-categorized fluid piece of meditative music, movements and milieu presents is an immersion into the process of transcendence."
In April of this year, Monk joined Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony in Miami for the World Premiere performance of Possible Sky, her first-ever symphonic work, commissioned by Thomas.
Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble in concert. |
Monk had never before attempted to compose for such a large group of musicians. "I have to admit that I was a little skeptical," she says, "because I've written so much for the voice and I've always kept my instrumental writing deliberately simple so that the voice could have its complexities and textures. I've really thought of my instrumental writing more as a kind of carpet for the voice to be able to leap from and turn around and to come back down on."
Characteristically, Monk approached the project by thinking outside the box. "I was very interested in not doing forms that already existed," she says, "but to find my own form, you know, with this big body of human beings playing."
In the few rehearsals for Possible Sky, Monk focused on pulling new possibilities, new sounds, and new techniques out of the young musicians in the New World Symphony. "I'd bring them something that sounded really unusual vocally and the instruments would often make it sound more conventional. So the challenge was to get that idiosyncratic personal quality out of the instruments."
Thematically, Possible Sky deals with compassion and hope and Monk says that it is a direct response to the world that we're living in now. "In the early 80's I think there were a few pieces that I made that were a mirror of what we lived in and I was stating the problem or showing the world as it was as like a warning," she says. "But then a number of years went by and I realized that I'm just much more interested in these timeless, fundamental aspects of human nature and the nature of the world. I feel really strongly about art being an alternative and that art actually offers the power of healing in it and that's much more what I want to do with my work."
Monk's music is published by Boosey & Hawks. For more on Monk, visit Meredithmonk.org.
