It's Her Party: Four Decades of Meredith Monk

Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=374
Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney
by Mary Staub



Since early childhood, sound and movement have been interlinked for Meredith Monk. Coming from a tradition of singers—her mother sang in soap commercials in the 40s, her grandfather was a bass-baritone—song was first nature to Monk. Movement, on the other hand, came less naturally. As a child, Monk was physically uncoordinated due to an eye challenge and so, starting at age three, she took Dalcroze Eurythmics classes to learn to get in touch with movement through music.



Years later, in the mid-1960s, after studying both voice and movement at Sarah Lawrence College, and performing gesture-based works in New York City churches and galleries, it was Monk’s more arduously developed language, movement, that taught her something about her mother tongue, voice.






“In working with my physical limitations I was able to find a movement style that was very much my own,” says Monk. “I think coming from physical limitations is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to find a personal style. I applied the same working process to my voice, where I had a more virtuosic instrument from the start, and found I had a huge range to work with.”



Monk has since then developed an eerily unique voice vocabulary that works in rhythms and tonalities atypical of Western musical traditions, and which oftentimes cannot be reproduced by others.



“Some of the vocabulary you really have to have in your bones, intuitive details, that even my ensemble [doesn’t] replicate,” Monk says. “But I don’t try to make other people sound like me; I write music that tries to use their individual color and texture of voice or music.”



Monk’s resulting compositions are highly textured arrangements that convey different colors, genders, ages, characters, landscapes, realities. Furthermore, already from day one, much of Monk’s work has been site-specific, adding yet another dimension to her creations. Monk’s one-woman performances in galleries and churches from the 1960s have since evolved into richly layered spatial and musical compositions, sometimes involving more than 100 artists.



On February 1st, Monk’s voice, and many others, will resonate through the Whitney Museum of American Art in a celebration of Monk’s artistic work past, present and future. Probable participants include Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, which brings together artists whose backgrounds range from Chinese to Western opera, from Broadway to musical theater. Slated to join the Ensemble are The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation, a newly formed ensemble dedicated to continuing Monk’s legacy with younger vocalists, Todd Reynolds’s String Quartet and the Claudia Quintet.