Meredith Monk grew up in a musical family. Her mother, who was a professional singer, came from a long line of singers originating in Russia. Early on in her childhood, Monk was introduced to the Jaques-Dalcroze rhythmic method. From that point onward, she developed a relationship with music that is natural, instinctive, and organic, particularly with regards to rhythm. Her work is unique in the post-1945 artistic landscape and restores value to an often-overused label: singularity.
Indeed, the American experimental music scene could be described in terms of singularity. According to musicologist Michael Boyles, author of Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, mavericks such as Charles Ives, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Harry Partch, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Anderson have created an authentic American tradition.1 Monk, who was in close contact with Cage, belongs to this group of experimentalists and independent composers. Yet, unlike Ives, Monk did not shy away from the spotlight, and even if every new project put the economic sustainability of her enterprise under pressure, she was never forced to live a vagabond life like Partch. Following her education among the mavericks of the American West Coast, she joined New York’s burgeoning avant-garde music scene. Institutional recognition followed, first in Europe in the 1970s, and worldwide with regular releases of her music on the ECM label. In 1985, the New York cultural newspaper The Village Voice gave her three Obie Awards, including one for her remarkable career, even though she was then only forty-three years old. Two years earlier, she featured alongside Cage, Robert Ashley, and Philip Glass in filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s documentary Four American Composers.
Her career may seem similar to that of her colleagues Steve Reich and Glass, with whom she started out as a composer. Yet, unlike these two repetitive minimalists, Monk has remained the main performer of her work throughout her career. Alongside the members of her ensemble, she has dedicated her art, her life, her body, and her voice to the making of music that harks back to ancestral folkloric — and sometimes imaginary — traditions.2 Moreover, Monk’s use of repetition stems from traditional music, and the freedom as well as the sophistication of her music is more in line with the asceticism of La Monte Young’s minimalism.
Her orally transmitted music was first performed outside concert hall conventions — Monk had no interest in following the diktat of the then essentially male-dominated traditional art music scene. Throughout her career, she has broken boundaries in the art music scene, both in terms of her status as a woman composer, and in the aesthetic qualities and distinctiveness of her music.
Prior to any further commentary on the marginality of her career, it is essential to understand two aspects of her practice: her multidisciplinary approach, and the centrality of the voice.
The words “composite” and “mosaic” come up frequently in descriptions of Monk’s work, which combines music, singing, theater, performance, visual arts, movement, video, and cinema. In 1966, with her solo piece 16 Millimeter Earrings, joining cinema, texts, objects, and movement, Monk engaged simultaneously with traditional poetry and the non-verbal poetry of images, sounds, and textures. 16 Millimeter Earrings was her first large-scale music composition. The performance was accompanied by a thickening sound environment made of sound blocks and looped vocal textures and texts, as well as recorded fragments played live on four tape recorders. Two years after this decisive performance, Monk founded a production company, The House, to support her work, bringing together actors, musicians, and dancers.
The type of “musical theater” Monk developed over the following decades is multidisciplinary, balancing different media and weaving together multiple forms of expression — poetry and musicality — into an intricate whole, like cells of a single organism. Monk seeks to achieve the subtlety and unity of Asian performance art such as Indian Kathakali, Chinese opera, and Japanese kabuki, where the various components of the performance blend naturally. These elements of Monk’s performances can also stand alone, as video installations, films, or concert versions.
Monk often describes her work as visual poetry (visual rhyming). For want of a better word, she also accepts, with some reservations, the Wagnerian term Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) to describe her music. The word “opera” also appears in the subtitles of several of her emblematic pieces: Vessel (“An Opera Epic,” 1971), Education of the Girlchild (1973), Quarry (1975-1977), Recent Ruins (1979), Specimen Days (“A Civil War Opera,” 1981), and Magic Frequencies (“A Science-Fiction Chamber Opera,” 1998). Atlas (1991) is the only opera of her corpus that was premiered in an opera house (in Houston). These are, however, operas without words, where the voice achieves a glossolalia-like power.
Monk’s musical theater blends narrative elements, such as characters and events, with her outlook on history and heroic narratives, in a flow of sequences arranged in a circular — rather than linear — conception of time. She views time as malleable, fluid, and unstable. Thus, through non-linear and sequence-based drama and music composition, she embraces the meanderings of thought and manages to reflect simultaneously different strata of reality.
In addition to a poet, one could also define Monk as an archeologist — one who finds meaning in all things through their resonance with historical events. Her work sheds light on the coexistence of various time strata, like in Quarry and American Archeology #1 (1994). Her manipulation of staging, sound, and visual elements recalls film techniques like editing and sequence shots. Her actual films Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1989) also play on the connection between past and present, between the contemporary world, medieval times, and the Second World War. Other times, Monk ventures into the future, as in Magic Frequencies and The Games (1983), her last collaboration with the theater director Ping Chong. The latter piece, premiered in the Schaubühne in Berlin, could be described as a sci-fi opera set in post-nuclear times.
Monk is a pioneer of in situ art, and her pieces blur the boundaries between art and life, between the stage and reality. In the first fifteen years of her career, she frequently broke down the fourth wall, venturing out into the audience. Such pieces redefine traditional ways of understanding a performance by challenging the stage/audience binary. For example, some performances are meant to unfold at various times during the day, some are ambulatory and require the audience to follow the performers, and others are presented in episodes and unfold over several weeks. Exemplar pieces of this period include Blueprints — a series of works created in collaboration with the performer Bob Wilson — as well as Tours, a large-scale piece in which local performers were involved.
In 1969, for Juice: A Theater Cantata in Three Installments, Monk and her eighty-five-member troupe took over the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The show wrapped up a month later in Monk’s loft on Great Jones Street. On 18 October 1971, this same loft was the starting point for the performance of the Vessel, an epic based on the life of Joan of Arc, where audience members later followed the production to a nearby theater and eventually to a parking lot. Almost forty years later, Monk returned to spiral structures with Songs of Ascension, a 2008 piece performed in the eight-story tower designed for the Oliver Ranch Foundation in California by the visual artist Ann Hamilton, with whom Monk had collaborated in 2002 for her show mercy.
A constitutive part of Monk’s work is humor. At the crossroads of the carnival-like farce of medieval entertainment, Buster Keaton-style burlesque, and Monty Pythonesque nonsense, Monk’s performances keep a salutary distance from anything too serious. Humorous scenes include the one in Ellis Island where Mieke van Hoek (Monk’s partner) plays a grumpy schoolteacher trying to teach English to first-generation immigrants. Another is the scene in Impermanence — cited multiple times by Fanny Chiarello in her book A Happy Woman — where the movement artist Ellen Fisher takes a plunge to hilarious comic effect.3 Monk embraces chance and surprise, which she sees as magic.
The years 1977 and 1978 brought a turning point in Monk’s career. She formed the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble for the piece Tablet, recorded on the Wergo label. The singers that joined the troupe learned Monk’s vocal technique and, from then on, Monk’s compositions stemmed from the unique personalities of her troupe members. While earlier pieces featured abstract archetypical characters, her work from the late 1970s onward stages actual people instead of characters. For example, the 1984 Turtle Dreams, as well as various pieces that Monk co-wrote with members of her ensemble (Acts from Under and Above, 1986; Evanescence, 1993, with the performance artist Lanny Harrison; Fayum Music, 1988, with the pianist Nurit Tilles, and Facing North, 1990, with the cellist Robert Een) are in line with this new collaboration-based creative practice. Instrumentalists and singers now participate in creating the dramatic and poetic identity of the ensemble.
It is also in this period of her career that Monk signed a contract with the label ECM with her Dolmen Music (1981), thus focusing her efforts on music. Yet, the performative and spectacular aspects of her art were still central to her creativity, as was, still and again, the foremost element of her artistic identity: the voice.
The Voice, Center of a World beyond Words
Monk has often recalled that day in 1965 when, sitting at the piano vocalizing, she realized that the voice could be “the soul’s messenger,” to cite the title of a text written by John Zorn for the Arcana music journal:
I suddenly had a revelation that the voice could have the same flexibility and range as a spine or a foot, and that I could build and find a personal vocabulary for my voice just as one makes movement based on a particular body.4
Since then, she has been dedicated exploring the voice, an organ which contains “male and female, all ages, shades of feeling that we don’t have words for.”5 Her first attempts, as recorded on the albums Key and Our Lady of Late, are moving. To reach the limits of her physical capacities, Monk experimented with a whole range of techniques, often accompanied by a simple organ or even a wine glass ostinato with which the voice becomes one. Monk has described these early pieces as “folk music from another planet.”6 In the 1970s, she started giving voice and organ, and voice and piano solo recitals. She also performed as a musician for choreographers William Dunas (Our Lady of Late, 1972) and Merce Cunningham (Events #118 and #189, 1975-77).
The American music critic and composer Greg Sandow had written that Monk’s music sounds like “folk tunes of a culture she invented herself.”7 In Monk’s work, language has no purpose. For her, the voice is a language in and of itself:
The voice itself can convey experiences that lie beyond words, beyond language, and even beyond thought. I want to share them with the public, so that everyone can experience them literally in the depths of their being.8
Without words, Monk’s “prehistoric” voice — to use the word of Chiarello — traces the contours of a timeless and spaceless world, summoning in its wake universal and timeless forms such as the song, the hymn, and the lullaby.
Through hisses and screeches, hoots and roars, cries or calls, Monk’s voice evokes in turn animals and elements, the seagull and the storm, the sister and the witch, the musical instrument and the living being. The uncommon range and flexibility of her voice abolish age and gender differences, and evoke landscapes and scenes, playing with geographical and cultural boundaries. In Light Song (1988), she even manages to combine two voices within one. When her music alludes to words, like in Scared Song (Acts from Under and Above, 1986), Three Heavens and Hells (1992), and Last Song and Between Song (from the album impermanence, 2004), these words come up in an abstract fashion, which only increases their impact.
Monk’s music recalls the textures and structure of medieval music, an era that fascinates her. Richard Taruskin has written about the “organum, hocket, rondellus” of Monk’s ensemble music, and how such musical idioms “found their way into written sources only after considerable development as oral practices.”9
It also recalls African and Asian traditional music, Jewish and bird songs, sometimes within the same piece. The musical accompaniment to the vocal parts is led by a small band of musicians, playing minimal and repetitive ostinato on the organ, the synthesizer, the piano, or on a percussive instrument. One hears in this type of accompaniment both the echoes of an ancient instrumentarium complete with a shawm, a psaltery, a dulcimer, and a medieval drum, as well as the timbre of the bagpipe, of the Indonesian angklung, and of the Indian shruti box.
The Meredith Monk Ensemble can be understood as the logical outcome of The House, founded a decade earlier. To bring her musical ideas to life, Monk needed to share them with other musicians. Many members of her ensemble have additional creative projects of their own: the founding members Julius Eastman, Lanny Harrison, Ellen Fisher, and Andrea Goodman, as well as other members that joined the troupe along the way like Ching Gonzalez, Bohdan Hilash, John Hollenbeck, Katie Geissinger, Theo Bleckmann, and Allison Sniffin. With her ensemble, Monk creates what could be called stage music, in the sense that the pieces take their definite form during the rehearsal, through collective experimentation, like in a jazz or a rock band. The score — if there is any — only comes after the collaborative process.
With the foundation of the Vocal Ensemble, Monk underscored the polyphonic nature of her music, and reaffirmed her belief that art is a deeply human experience that is only worthwhile when shared with others. As she wrote in the liner notes of the CD Volcano Songs [retranslated into English from the French], “People making music together: for me, nothing can replace that.” Indeed, her approach to music composition is intrinsically linked to the long and patient process she undergoes with performers. This is the reason she wrote so few scores for other ensembles. In her music, the mental and spiritual availability of the performer is just as important as the technical requirements. She explains: “It takes years and years to understand my music, its spirit, its philosophy. To get my music really under your skin, to become totally impregnated with it, deep down, you can’t have your nose in the score all the time.”10
Monk’s work in collective vocal music making is reflected in the recordings released from the early 1980s through On Behalf of Nature in 2016. Some are revised versions of the performances they are named after, while others , including Vessel, Education of the Girlchild, and Quarry, are carefully composed programs that revisit excerpts from earlier major works. Her major solo cycles, such like Songs from the Hill (1976) and Volcano Songs (1994), as well as her duets with Katie Geissinger from the Volcano Songs (1993), form astonishing galleries of characters and landscapes where the voice transforms into a ghost or a sailor, an insect or a jaw harp, a “lost wind” or “old lava.”
These recordings also enabled Monk to release her instrumental compositions. Most of them are for the piano, some of which were included on the album Piano Songs, released in 2014 by Bruce Brubaker and Ursula Oppens.
Recordings — whether audio or video — long remained the only trace of most of Monk’s works (an example is the 2019 revised and restored version of the 1978 documentary Quarry). This changed in the early 2000s, when Monk signed a contract with Boosey & Hawkes. Since then, she, along with Sniffin and Geissinger, has been transcribing some of these pieces into scores — works that until then had only existed on recording and in the bodies and memories of their performers.
Monk, a Composer without a Score and a Universal Artist
Monk is undoubtedly a proud maverick. Reflecting on her journey goes well beyond the realm of music alone. Analyzing her work — which is inseparable from her life and her deeply humanist approach, influenced by Zen Buddhism — brings us to consider notions that might seem outdated, if not outright suspect, in France: concepts like “spirituality” and “community.”
In 1996, the New York choir Musica Sacra recorded several of Monk’s pieces, interleaving them with music by Hildegarde von Bingen. A decade later, Monk for the first time took on a few commissions as a “composer,” notably from the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. For him and the New World Symphony, she composed Possible Sky for choir and orchestra in 2003. In 2005, the Kronos Quartet premiered her string quartet Stringsongs. In 2010, she wrote WEAVE for the St. Louis Symphony Chorus. In 2019, the director Yuval Sharon staged a new production of her opera Atlas at the Los Angeles Opera. The following year, Monk and her ensemble collaborated with the American ensemble Bang on a Can for the album Memory Games.
Both in the United States and in Europe, new ensembles and performers are gradually playing her music. One thinks of M6 in the United States — an ensemble completely dedicated to Monk’s work — of the Quatuor Béla, the Microcosmos chamber choir, and the pianist Vanessa Wagner in France, and the violinist Andrea Ritter and the RIAS-Kammerchor in Germany.
“C’est vraiment un milieu de mecs, qui peut être blessant pour les femmes ; et les femmes qui sont entrées dans l’histoire, dans la tradition européenne, occidentale, sont des femmes qui font de la musique à la manière des hommes. Je reste donc à l’extérieur…” 12
In a 1995 interview, Monk emphasized that her music draws from a primal, oral tradition that has much to do with the auditory experience, adding that working with the “muscle memory” inherent to the performance of her work enables her to lighten the memorization process, giving her music a quality that brings it closer to dance.11 Thus, despite the acknowledgment of her music by record labels and music institutions, her approach to music remains highly unorthodox compared to the conventions of Western written music traditions. Her music resists standard notation as much as it eschews the prevailing working practices of institutionalized music circles — a world she has often criticized as a competitive and predominantly male scene: “It’s really a guy’s world, and it can be hurtful for women. Women who have succeeded in this world, in the Western art music tradition, they compose like men. I rather stay in the margins…”12
Monk’s strength as a composer and her importance as a symbol in the field lie in how she has established herself from the very beginning — despite ridicule and misunderstanding — as a woman artist. In a 1977 interview with Jacqueline Caux, she shared how women were
looking for self-expression that, all the while relying on discipline, conceptual parameters, and on the intellect, also resorts to their own specificity. Women no longer want to imitate masculine forms of expression, as they too often did before the feminist revolution.13
Monk’s work has consistently featured strong female figures, like Joan of Arc in Vessel and Alexandra David-Néel in Atlas. Her iconic performance Education of the Girlchild, a retrospective journey through a woman’s life (moving backward from old age to birth), which she has come back to multiple times since 1872, stands as a manifesto and a universal statement on the female condition.
Caux wrote that “although Monk is deeply anti-conformist and has no obvious link to a particular artistic or musical trend, she has always been acutely in tune with society.” Monk’s work bears witness to the Cold War, to the AIDS epidemic (Book of Days, New York Requiem in1993), and to other wars and tragedies of our time, even if only in passing. Her latest piece, Indra’s Net, premiered in November 2021 at Mills College, completes a trilogy on the relationship between humans and nature begun with On Behalf of Nature (1993) and Cellular Songs (1998). In the Buddhist tradition, Indra’s net serves as a metaphor for the universe, describing the interconnection between all living beings.
Monk consistently transforms tragedies into works with universal resonance, be it the televised murder of a Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip that inspired Mercy, or the painful loss of her partner Mieke van Hoek, which gave rise to impermanence. It is this duality between the universal and the particular that gives Monk’s work its strength, its humanity, its sincerity, and its humility. She is both an authentic avant-gardist and a timeless figure.
In a 1983 text entitled Mission Statement, she expressed her wish to “create an art […] that reaches toward emotion 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 in danger of being eliminated” and to “reestablish […] the wholeness that is found in cultures where performing arts practice is considered a spiritual discipline with healing and transformative power.”14
On stage, Monk and her ensemble exude and transmit a soothing, regenerative, metaphysical, and euphoric energy. As the music critic Alex Ross has written: “If Monk is seeking a place in the classical firmament, classical music has much to learn from her.”15
1. Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, Yale University Press, 2008. ↩
2. “Imaginary Folklore” is the title of Richard Taruskin’s article on Meredith Monk in the last volume of his Oxford History of Western Music (Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2006). Taruskin presents Monk as Harry Partch’s “most direct conceptual descendant.” ↩
3. The video of the performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2002 is available on YouTube. ↩
4. Meredith Monk, “Voice: The Soul’s Messenger,” in Arcana V: Musicians on Music, Magic and Mysticism, New York, Tzadik/Hips Road, 2010, p. 265. ↩
5. “Getting Down to the Bones: Meredith Monk and Deborah Jowitt in Conversation,” interview published on 18 May 2016 on the Minneapolis Walker Art Center website. ↩
6. “Folk music from another planet.” See William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers, New York, Da Capo, 1999, pp. 352–353. ↩
7. See Deborah Jowitt, Meredith Monk, Baltimore, London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1997. ↩
8. See Meredith Monk, une voix mystique – Entretiens avec Jean-Louis Tallon, Marseille, Le mot et le reste, 2022. ↩
9. See Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2006. ↩
10. See_Meredith Monk, une voix mystique – Entretiens avec Jean-Louis Tallon_, op. cit. ↩
11. See Geoff Smith and Nicola Walker Smith, New Voices: American Composers Talk about Their Music, Portland, Amadeus Press, 1995, p. 189. ↩
12. See my interview with Monk conducted in 2011, “Une rencontre avec Meredith Monk,” available online at https://sansondavid.wordpress.com. ↩
13. See Jacqueline Caux, “J’ai lu la musique avant de lire les mots: Entretien avec Meredith Monk,” in Meredith Monk, Paris, Artpress, coll. “Les grands entretiens d’Artpress,” 2018. ↩
14. Meredith Monk, “Mission Statement,” in Deborah Jowitt (ed.), Meredith Monk, “op. cit.”, p. 17. ↩
15. See Alex Ross, “Primal Song,” The New Yorker, 9 November 2009, available online at www.therestisnoise.com. ↩