A guide to contemporary classical musicMusicA guide to Meredith Monk's music
Monk's deeply personal compositions sound at once ancient and modern, like a folk music for the whole worldIt's one of the funniest moments on celluloid: Julianne Moore, playing performance artist Maude Lebowski, is in her Los Angeles warehouse/studio/residence, strapped into an elaborate pulley system. She swoops over the Dude and flings paint at a canvas, on which is an image of a splayed and paint-spattered female form. Apart from the harness, Maude is naked, leaving Jeff Bridges's Dude more bemused than ever at an unexpected display of performance art in action. "My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal," Maude says. "The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina."
American composer Meredith Monk told me that she wasn't annoyed with the Coen brothers for using her Walking Song as the musical accompaniment to this scene, when I talked to her for Radio 3's Music Matters. "I was laughing my head off", she said. I thought that Monk could have been offended at the gender and culture stereotyping that seemed to be going on in Carter Burwell (who wrote and supervised the music for The Big Lebowski) and Joel and Ethan's imaginations – as if Meredith's music was just the sort of stuff that a pseud such as Maude would listen to – but Monk, typically, saw and heard only reasons to celebrate, and laugh.
And quite right too. Besides, all that was 1998 and this is now, and Monk turns 70 on Tuesday. Not that you would know it to hear her voice today: that uniquely flexible instrument that is at the centre of her work as composer, performer, producer, and all-round unclassifiable artist. Listen to this, from her recent Songs of Ascension, and hear what I mean.
Monk's roots as a singer and composer are in folk and rock; you can hear her singing Greensleeves here in her early 20s. That was just before she began to experiment with the possibilities of her voice, as you can hear in Trance on the same album, Beginnings, out on John Zorn's Tzadik label. You'll hear her astonishing range, some extraordinary ululations and incantations, vertiginous leaps, drops, cries and other wordless acrobatics. They're all things that used to be called "extended vocal techniques" but Monk makes them sound completely natural, central, and essential. What Monk discovered, and what she went on to create with her own group of singers and instrumentalists in New York throughout the 70s and 80s was a kind of performance practice that was operatic in the truest sense of involving many different kinds of practice: theatre, lighting, film, movement, ritual, myth, and avant garde performance art. But descriptions like that can only take you so far: listen, watch and be entranced by Dolmen Music, Book of Days, or Vessel.
But what's significant about Monk and her work is what makes her different from many of the other composers who have appeared in this series so far: to talk of her only as a composer would be to diminish what she does and how she works. Music is only one of the elements she works in and with, although she has composed pieces for orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony and chamber ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, even if she told me about her frustration that orchestras have so little rehearsal time, and that the essential message of her music is something that needs time for its performers to understand, appreciate and interpret. But for so much of her output, it's difficult if not impossible to separate the piece from Monk herself, so integral is her voice and her work with her singers to what you hear.
But you can talk about Monk's music, its use of repetition, its drones, modal harmonies, its often wordless vocalising. All of that could align her with American minimalism, with folk music, or even as a kind of cousin of the so-called holy minimalists of Europe. But Monk's music is richer and stranger than any of those stylistic labels. It has always sounded to me – listen to this from Songs of Ascension – simultaneously ancient and modern. That's to do with the way she uses incantations that sound both like plainchant and oriental melodies, and the placeless-yet-everyplace vowel-sounds of her singing. But Monk's music isn't redolent of a nostalgic past, it is not an escape from today's world. It belongs in the present, because, as she says, she wants her pieces to give her listeners an alternative vision of concentration and attention amid the ever-diminishing and ever-increasing speed of the world around us.
Monk's is a music of connection, a bringing together of many different art forms and experiences (a process of fusion that she described as a deep "psychic need" for her to accomplish). It's a vision that's radically opposed to the fragmentation and deconstruction that so many of her contemporaries were up to at the same time, and the result is music that is at once deeply personal and unlike anything anyone else is doing, but which speaks simply and directly to those collective parts of our subconscious that are the deepest and oldest. At its best, Monk's music sounds like a folk music for the whole world.
Five key links
Songs of Ascension
Biography from Education of the Girlchild
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