Monk, Meredith

views updated

Meredith Monk

Vocalist, composer, choreographer

“The center is the voice, and the center is the I music. I use center in the largest sense of the word, because I feel that when I do a theater piece now, I’m an orchestrator of music and image and movement,” Meredith Monk explained to OPERA America in October 1984. “I have tried, in my music, to go back to the beginnings of the voice and deal with it as an instrument in the most direct way possible. Some of the things I’ve discovered I came upon by simply working with my own voice.” Vocalist, composer, and choreographer Meredith Monk has often been described as a Renaissance woman of the arts.

Born in Lima, Peru, where her vocalist mother was concertizing, Monk was raised in New York City and Connecticut. She received formal training in piano, ballet, modern dance, and eurhythmies from an early age. Monk has credited her years at Sarah Lawrence College, and classes with modern dance choreographers Bessie Schonberg and Judith Dunn, with releasing her creativity. In a profile in Music Journal (1979), she reminisced that “I was encouraged to work with a feeling [and] let the medium and form find itself. It seemed that finally I was able to combine movement with music and words, all coming fom a single source.”

Monk was introduced to the choreographers who became the leaders of the post-modern dance movement by Dunn. She joined the Judson Dance Theater, a loosely organized experimental group that sprung from classes by Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham Studio in 1964. The Judson dancers gave concerts of short works at the Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village and in other locations. Her best known works from the Judson concerts were mixed-media pieces, such as 16mm Earrings, which she performed with projections at the Billy Rose Theatre Festival of the Avant-Garde in 1969.

Monk experimented with the limitations created by specific locations in many early works created for her own troupe, The House. Juice: A Theatre Cantata in 3 Installments (1969), for example, was created for performance at three different locations—from the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum to The House’s Soho loft. Her more recent works do not depend on externals, however. Her 1973 Education of the Girlchild is a pure performance tour de force as Monk takes 45 minutes to regress from an elderly woman to a young child using movements and vocal sounds.

Music became more important in Monk’s work as she assembled her troupe and taught them her vocal repertory. Quarry (1976) was the first of many works to be described as an “opera” since the abstract images of World War II were presented in a score that included solos, duets, small groups, and a large chorus, as well

For the Record…

Born November 20, 1942, in Lima, Peru (where her mother was performing); daughter of Theodore Glenn Monk and Audrey Zellman (a vocalist). Education: Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1964.

Studied piano, ballet, and modern dance as a child; member of experimental Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s; founder of her own dance troupe, The House, 1969; has presented experimental dance performances and mixed-media operas; has also given solo and ensemble vocal concerts.

Awards: Obie and Bessie Awards for sustained achievement; six medals for composition from American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Addresses: Home —New York, NY. Office –The House Foundation for the Arts, 325 Spring St., New York, NY 10013.

as dance sequences and a scale-manipulating film. Recent Ruins (1979), another mixed-media opera, depicted archeologists from the future unearthing New York. Its film sequence, Ellis Island, was broadcast separately on the Public Broadcasting System and on European television and was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle in 1982. Based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War writings, Specimen Days (1981) presented a look at the past, focusing again on civilians in war. The Games, created with Ping Chong in 1983, was an alternative view of the Olympics of the future commissioned by a West Berlin theater group and presented in the United States at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Its large chorus and massed movements were in sharp contrast to the smaller scale of Turtle Dreams (Cabaret) (1983). The latter work, with its five soloists performing isolated Cha-Cha dances, was described by Newsweek as “the precise sensation of being a foreigner, wholly cut off from the activities that consitute ordinary life around us.” The magazine quoted her as demanding “the constant shift of perceptions, the shifting of balance, the multidimensional experience—that’s what I want in my theatre. It has mobility.”

Monk’s feature-length film, “Book of Days” (Tatgo-Lasseur Productions in association with TV Sept [France], 1989) uses the fourteenth century as a metaphor for the present world. The work, to be given its United States premiere on the Public Broadcasting System series “Alive from Off-Center,” is, as she described it in The House literature, “a film about time—future and past—an abstract treatment of the sadness and joy of daily life.”

Monk’s concerts and recordings have been focused on the voice. At a May 1981 “music concert with film,” she screened excerpts from Ellis Island and presented a solo version of Education of the Girlchild. She has given recitals for solo voice accompanied only by her finger rubbing a water glass, a chilling effect that she used on the recording Our Lady of Late (1973). As L.K. Telberg described it in Music Journal, “it is set, quite ingeniously, against the bourbon pitches heard as Monk rubs her finger against the rim of a glass goblet in which the water is gradually descreased (and the pitch lowered) by sipping. “Monk analyzed it in an unpublished memo, “Notes on the Voice,” as “the naked voice, the female voice in all its aspects; gradations of feeling, nuance, rhythm, quality, each section another voice (’character, persona’), each section a particular musical problem, area of investigation.”

Her Songs from the Hill (1976) is a trio for women, premiered with House members Andrea Goodman and Monica Solen. In a 1976 review, John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times that she had “perfected her own technique to emit amazing varieties of sounds rarely heard from a Western throat, full of wordless cries and moans, a lexicon of vocal coloration, glottal attacks and microtonal waverings that lie at the heart of all musical culture.” In Dolmen Music (1979), Monk added three male voices and a cello for the 40 minute work. As recorded, it was given the German Music Critics’ award for Best record of 1981. Fayum Music, originally the score of a film about Egyptian Fayum portraits, was composed for vernacular instruments—the voice, hammered dulcimer, and double ocarina.

Monk now performs and records with pianist and keyboard artist Nurit Tilles. She discussed their recital in December 1988 with Stephen Holden in his “The Pop Life” column in the New York Times: “I’m working with a much more delicate palette, using the voice as a transparent kind of instrument. Some of the songs, I call ‘click songs,’ because they have percussion and melody going on at the same time.” She is developing a work for the Minnesota Opera’s New Music-Theater Ensemble and is composing a score for the Jose Limon Dance Company.

Monk has received both an Obie (from the Off and Off-Off Broadway critics) and a Bessie (from dance critics) for sustained achievement, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her music has received six ASCAP awards for Composition.

When OPERA America paired Monk with Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in the first issue of its newsletter, Opera for the 80’s and Beyond, it was recognizing her importance in music and music-theater. The newsletter quotes her on her own definitions of the art forms: [Her aim is to create] “an art that is inclusive rather than exclusive; that is expansive, whole, human, multi-dimensional. An art which seeks to reestablish the unity that exists in music, theater and dance…. I want an art which reaches towards emotion that we have no words for, that we barely remember—an art that affirms the world of feeling in a time and society where feelings are being systematically eliminated.” Monk has found that her voice and her art forms, in live performance, film or recordings, can create the world she envisions.