Meredith Monk
impermanence

Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble
Theo Bleckmann voice
Ellen Fisher voice
Katie Geissinger voice
Ching Gonzalez voice
Meredith Monk voice
Allison Sniffin voice
Sasha Bogdanowitsch voice
Silvie Jensen voice
Allison Sniffin piano, violin
John Hollenbeck percussion
Bohdan Hilash woodwinds
Recorded January 2007, Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“War belongs to our souls as an archetypal truth of the cosmos…. To this terrible truth we may awaken, and in awakening give all our passionate intensity to subverting war’s enactment, encouraged by the courage of culture, even in dark ages, to withstand war and yet sing.”
–James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War

I start with this provocative comment from author James Hillman for two reasons. First, for the way it fogs its breath over an unsettling facet of creative expression: namely, that the shape of our singing is often determined by violence. Second, because Meredith Monk’s impermanence opens with “last song,” a piece inspired by Chapter 2 of The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, also by Hillman, in which the author writes: “By putting closure to a series of events that otherwise could run on and on, the last time is outside serial time, transcendent.” Perhaps no other statement could describe Monk’s latest ECM project more astutely. To be impermanent is indeed to transcend time, shrugging off rules like so much weight from the proverbial shoulders. The core message of Character stresses the primacy of the body in the acquisition of wisdom. In saying as much, Hillman also recognizes the value of life in precisely the moment at which it fades. Hence his take on war, which dives into the rubble of our denial and emerges with a body that is nothing if not the human experience personified.

For those of us who place ourselves outside its shadow, war would seem an impossible ideal, a reality in which utter ruin can be the only outcome. What we are so often led to forget—and on that note, I can only speak for myself—is that war is a multivalent term. The crossing of arms over contested borders may be no more fraught with tragedy than, say, the equally unstable terrain of our emotional battlegrounds. That such language has crept into the vocabularies of our internal lives is proof positive of the power of language to mold human relationships. In light of this, the act of memorializing trauma may seem a primal and universal phenomenon to those who have no investment in its implications. And yet, the process of forging an immediate conveyance of meaningful representation in the wake of death is one filled with choices, and it is these choices that keep it from merely being filed in the annals of psychoanalysis as a narcissistic reflex against loss. For although this album grew out of perhaps the most profound of losses (that of Monk’s partner Mieke van Hoek), there is much to be cultivated from the wisdom of its traumatic seeds. The music throughout this emotional document, drawn from the voice of a life unhinged, marks an auroral trajectory with its own lungs. Although a six-year gap separates impermanence from Monk’s previous ECM effort, mercy, it is filmed with lifetimes’ worth of residue.

Condensed from the larger synesthetic composition of the same name, as we encounter it here impermanence is far from incidental to its source. Here, Monk branches out from her usual diatonic trunk into more chromatic foliage. The staples of her craft are dutifully maintained: cyclical patterns and semantic dissolutions, keyboard parts that lumber like human figures, and a suitable array of extended techniques. The ordering of pieces suggests a structure that may crumble at any time yet which is all the more resilient for its empty spaces. From the clattering metal of “disequilibrium” to the ethereal rounds of “passage,” there is a clear lingual flow to be distinguished. Some of the sounds, such as can be found in “sweep 1,” are organic and vulnerable, while others, such as the clattering of “particular dance,” are picked apart like ancient automatons. Ultimately, the reverberations of the digital recording process lend such music a parable quality. Rather than being didactic, the lessons to be learned have more to do with silence than with moral truths. Our habit of reading prescriptive meanings into the human archive is an endless circle, an offering of shadow in a realm without light. Here, at least, we can cast aside such shackles and take comfort in the liminal.

Monk humbles me with her consistency in engendering new experiences. This album is a fine example of her indomitable generative spirit. This may very well be her textually richest album thus far, though it has its fair share of gracious confusion and impossible-to-complete sentiments. Her aphasia is distinctly her own, and I believe its frequency serves to interpolate speech into the human body. As such, it is anything but narrative. As with so much of Monk’s (sub)textual work, every semantic concept is consistently wound and unwound, so that by the end the word’s immediate power is at once erased and underlined. Much like the disc upon which they have been digitally imprinted, these songs epitomize the album’s title. As concepts, they are dead the moment they are uttered. As utterances, they are reborn as concepts the moment they are silenced.

Meredith Monk
mercy

Meredith Monk voice
Theo Bleckmann voice
Allison Easter voice
Katie Geissinger voice
Ching Gonzalez voice
Allison Sniffin voice, piano, synthesizer, viola, violin
John Hollenbeck voice, percussion, melodica, piano
Bohdan Hilash clarinets
Recorded March 19/20, 2002

I regularly have dreams about flying. Said ability never comes, however, without focused and sustained effort on my part. In order to achieve flight, I must push against the air with my arms, gaining height ever so incrementally—sometimes losing altitude on the downswing—until I am in a position to navigate obstacles such as buildings, trees, and power lines. If these dreams had a soundtrack, it might sound something like Volcano Songs, for here is a space in which the human voice soars, to be sure, but not without the utmost discipline on the part of its performers. The “rudimentary” nature of this album serves to accommodate its broader wingspan, thereby widening our view to that much greater distance. As the booklet contains no liner notes, we become integral to the narrative evolution of what passes through our ears.

Created in collaboration with artist Ann Hamilton (whose work I’ve always felt begins and ends with the body, in both its implicit and fully realized forms), mercy is as much a visual composition as it is an aural one. Its scoring is modest: anywhere from one to six voices are accompanied throughout by varied clusters of percussion, piano, and clarinet. In spite of the somewhat scattered programming, most of the pieces have a partner or can be grouped with others. The two “braids” and “leaping song” that open the album, for instance, form a tight weave of likeminded vocal information. Monk runs down their helical spirals with such organic potency that when a piano suddenly makes its presence known, its jazzy syncopation in the left hand almost comes as a shock. Throaty squeals meanwhile ascend toward an aphasic finish, leaving instruments to dance around a private ceremonial fire.

From gong-like meditation to whispered desperation, the psychokinetic interludes that are the three “lines” use more diffuse gestures to express miniscule things. These are not the artist’s marks seeking to define space against non-space. They are the projections of thoughts into vibrational shapes. To “line 3” Monk adds a “prisoner,” whose voice is echoed from a variety of distances as the clink of knuckles on jail cell bars is heard, thus providing the album’s eeriest moments. “doctor-patient” is driven by piano and mallet percussion. Through a haze of illness and infirmity, the body’s internal condition resolves into focus. As the doctor-patient relationship stems from language, the former translates the latter’s internal melodies through external conjugations. In essence, the doctor mimics the ailment in question, hence his echoing of the patient’s literal cry for help. “woman at the door” transcends communicative barriers with the possibility of silence. Slight dissonances operate rather like a hearing test, eventually unwinding into an alluring cascade of voices, leaving us with a solitary invitation: “Come in, come in.”

As I listen to the final track, “core chant,” I am wont to ask myself: What chant? The core of what? Perhaps our first clue into either query is the seemingly abrupt ending, the incompleteness of which is rendered inconsequential, for without even the most basic morpheme at one’s disposal the pantheon of meaning begins to crumble in the face of more immediate auditory signatures. In the end, the performers’ humility is the most vital dynamic of the music in question, personal and steadfast in light of its possible resolution.

Monk’s is not a world in which the voice is primary but rather a voice in which the world is primary. Her centrality ensures that she is not alone, spared the burden of carrying the others, while also making her utterances the most visible. The variety of instrumental arrangements represented on mercy shows us some of the more tangible aspects of her compositional process, balancing beautifully with the voices’ less mechanical nature. “urban march (shadow),” for one, features an almost harp-like synthesizer, while its exuberant cousin, “urban march (light),” boasts enthralling percussion and ecstatic chanting. Just as the body remains unseen in the recorded voice, so too does the instrument betray its own biology through the unleashing of its sound. Of course, the voice is also an instrument, and nowhere more so than in the rhythmic mosaic of “masks,” where breath alone imparts the voice its defining physiognomy.

My flying dreams typically end the same way. The fatigue becomes overpowering and I must seek solid ground. Yet I always seem to land in a high place. Rather than empowering me, this humbles me to the landscape I have just traversed, reminding me of its insurmountable vastness, which is always greater than the sum of my actions. So, too, do we end mercy on a higher place from where we began. And is that not one possible outcome of mercy? Does compassion always leave one elevated? Fortunately, we are given the freedom to answer such questions differently every time we listen.

Meredith Monk
Volcano Songs

Meredith Monk voice
Katie Geissinger voice
Allison Easter voice
Dina Emerson voice
Harry Huff piano
Nurit Tilles piano
Recorded July 1995, Clinton Studios, NYC
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Tina Pelikan

The Random House Dictionary defines volcano as “a vent in the earth’s crust through which lava, steam, ashes, etc., are expelled, either continuously or at irregular intervals.” In spite of human fears, the volcano is vital to the earth’s formation, sculpting the very landscapes we inhabit. For Meredith Monk, it would seem more importantly a source of fertility, and it is from this fertility that she opens herself to the generative spirit that infuses the world as a living organism. In this sense, she vocalizes a point of continuity between herself and listener, between the illusions of recorded sound and the illusions of physical bodies.

Like their referent, Monk’s Volcano Songs (1993-94) reveal the earth’s hidden forces, at once violent and graceful, as they are embodied in the human form. Fissures in the great cosmic wheel release their breath in chant, foregoing the detriment of words in search of untinctured expression. Therein lies the great irony of this music, and of the earthly condition that engenders its existence: namely, that in order to express detachment one must hold steadfastly to the ephemeral utterance as a point of departure. Hence the uncanny splitting of the self we find between Monk and Katie Geissinger in the duet portions of the Volcano cycle (for indeed, were I unaware of the album’s personnel, I might have thought that Monk was overdubbing herself). Undulating breaths open into distant cries, like shepherdesses reaching deep into their lungs to lure their spiritual flocks out into the open. For all their microtonal friction, grunting expulsions, and sustained laments, these songs cut through the darkness like lightning bolts in slow motion. Of note are the guttural “Boat Man” and the playful “Skip Song.” In these, Monk’s mimicry is at its most humble, fleshing out evocative characters and histories with the most minimal of palettes. And how can one resist the siren-like ascents and delicately applied throat singing techniques of “Old Lava,” with its appropriately languid crawl, dripping like molten rock?

Although New York Requiem (1993), for piano and voice, profoundly intersects with the AIDS epidemic and is, says Monk, “really about all kinds of loss,” for me it is also about gain: of awareness, of situatedness in one’s sociopolitical surroundings, and perhaps even of silence. By the latter, I mean to imply that, through the art of wordless singing (for what requiem is without a text?), Monk has caressed the contours of mourning with a uniquely feathery touch so as not to disturb the memories being circumscribed. It is a slogging, diaphragmed journey in which narration must be forged rather than found. A truly heartfelt composition matched by an equally committed performance.

St. Petersburg Waltz (1993) is a solo piano piece that peers back into Monk’s genealogical roots. Falling with the solemnity of snow on wide streets and narrow alleys, its columnar gestures and understated motives were “inspired by the idea of a place rather than the place itself.” Thus is the complex web of genetics and circumstance delineated only vaguely, a ragged film reel on its last revolution, its swan song fading like a credit roll in the throes of this digital age. We find in its preservation an archival quality that speaks of a history beyond the confines of personal reflection.

Three Heavens and Hells (1992) sets a poem of the same name by an 11-year-old Tennessee Reed. In a humble quartet of voices, Monk and her sistren unravel a rather brief splash of words into a vaster ocean of implications. They open with an invocation:

There are three heavens and hells

Every breath seems to revel in the words, underscoring the unity of the flesh that binds them in worldly care. Over a precise macramé of chants and variations, the voices continue:

People, heaven, and hell
Animal, heaven, and hell
Things, heaven, and hell

Reed tellingly uses the word “animal” in the singular, thereby planting the text into a more unified field of impression and evocation. A deeper exploration of each word ensues, where “People” are mournful, pitying; “Animal” abounds with calls of the wild; and “Things” become externally convoluted yet internally ordered. Latched as we are onto the lure of meaning, a single question hangs over us:

What do the three heavens and hells look like?

This unreachable dilemma constricts our understanding of the piece’s thematic core, and renders any possible answer a barrier to enlightened solutions. In the end, we are left with:

Heaven, heaven, heaven
Hell, hell, hell

And as we flounder in the wake of our own attentions throughout this 21-minute piece, we come to realize that the act of listening doesn’t always mean being a receiver, that it can just as easily suspend the mask of the questioner from our attentive ears. On a side note, the strong rhythmic breathing throughout this piece plays a role not unlike beatboxing in modern hip-hop, and puts me in mind of Björk’s Medulla-era vocal menageries—which makes me curious as to the contemporary shadows that might be hovering at the edges of either artist’s ever-evolving craft.

The album ends intimately with two of Monk’s Click Songs (1988). These self-styled “duets for solo voice” further expand upon the refracted aesthetics through which the album’s opening seeps, thereby calling our attention to the finality of subjecthood and the selfish desires that are its attendants.

Compared to Monk’s six previous ECM New Series efforts, Volcano Songs is perhaps the most intimately recorded. Microphones seem fully embedded in these voices, subtly processed for reverberant effect. Ultimately, I feel that one gets out of this music only what one is willing to lay at its feet. It is both the beauty and the tragedy of the human voice: in pulling at the threads of our emotions, we must undo one thing to communicate another, so that by the end we have forgotten where we started, inhaling an idea that may very well outlive us. And just as a volcano spews forth its scalding breath into the atmosphere, so too must we eventually exhale, licking the fragile layer that separates our survival ever so delicately from the blank space beyond. The magic of Monk’s music is that it offers a glimpse of that other side, in terms that we can relate to.

Meredith Monk
Book of Days

Robert Een voice, cello
Ching Gonzalez voice
Andrea Goodman voice
Wayne Hankin voice, großer Bock, hurdy-gurdy, bass recorder
Naaz Hosseini voice, violin
Meredith Monk voice, keyboard
Nicky Paraiso voice
Nurit Tilles piano, keyboard, hammered dulcimer
Johanna Arnold voice
Joan Barber voice
John Eppler voice
Toby Newman voice
Timothy Sawyer voice
Recorded June 1989 at Clinton Studios, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.”
–Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk is generally described as an avant-garde artist of many talents. Of her many talents there is no question, but what exactly makes her “avant-garde”? The Random House Dictionary defines the term as meaning “of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.” This raises another question: What does it mean to be experimental? The same dictionary gives us: “founded on…an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle.” At the risk of reading too much into semantics, I would venture to say that Monk is anything but avant-garde, for she is interested neither in discovering the unknown nor in proving suppositions. Rather, she reveals that which has been obscured by, as well as changed by, history. She interrogates the subjective over the empirical and its effect on the flow of intercontinental relations. Thus do we get Book of Days (1988), a marriage of music and moving images that covers such broad yet related topics as nuclear holocaust, AIDS, eschatological wonder and trepidation, and the cyclical nature of time. The idea for Book of Days came to Monk one afternoon in the summer of 1984, when she was overcome by a black-and-white vision of a young Jewish girl in a medieval street. This same figure would become the locus for much of the film’s traumatic crossfire, amid which the girl has visions of her own, only for her they are of a grave and violent future. She soon encounters a madwoman (played by Monk herself) and discovers in her that one kindred spirit in a world headed for annihilation.

The film’s soundtrack was later reworked into the studio version recorded here and scored for 12 voices, synthesizer, cello, bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy, piano, and hammered dulcimer. The music of Book of Days also wavers between past and future, rendering the present all but graspable. These temporal concepts are accordingly reflected in the arrangements of each itinerant section. A triptych of monodies (“Early Morning Melody,” “Afternoon Melodies,” and “Eva’s Song”) mark the passage of the sun in the sky, the contrast of dark and light. This diurnal atmosphere is further underscored with the hurdy-gurdy-infused “Dusk” and the smooth braid of vocal beauty that is “Evening.” This chronology culminates with the delicate “Dream,” an all-too-brief reprieve from the threat of Armageddon, before opening into “Dawn.” The five scattered pieces that make up “Travellers” constitute time as diaspora, each its own lilting pseudo-canon of both hummed and open-mouthed syllables. The fourth section, subtitled “Churchyard Entertainment,” fleshes out the thematic core of the entire work in its most fully realized form. In a similar vein, “Fields/Clouds” unfurls an ethereal carpet of synthesized organ for a procession of contrapuntal voices, with Monk soaring above all like a predatory bird riding a thermal. Time’s fragility is expressed in “Plague,” a rhythmic chant of whispers, hisses, tisks, and heavy breathing: the universe in a pair of lungs. Encompassing all of this is “Madwoman’s Vision,” a masterpiece of composition and performance that flits nimbly from creaking aphasia to elegiac commentary. The album fades to black with “Cave Song,” alluding perhaps to Plato’s shadows and the illusory nature of our attachments.

The markedly instrumental approach to the human voice embodied by this ensemble lends itself beautifully to the subject matter at hand. In choosing to eschew words entirely, Monk peers more deeply into the oracular interior of her music. Relying on nascent phonemes such as “na” and “la” in lieu of recognizable vocabularies, she complicates the linearity of her effected nostalgia. Book of Days is all the more haunting for reducing that nostalgia to a liquid state and scooping up as much of it as possible before it seeps out of sight through those very cracks where her music is born.

Meredith Monk
Do You Be

Meredith Monk voice, piano, synthesizer
Robert Een voice
Ching Gonzalez voice
Andrea Goodman voice
Wayne Hankin voice, keyboards, bagpipes
Naaz Hosseini voice, violin
Nicky Paraiso voice
Nurit Tilles piano, voice, keyboards
Johanna Arnold voice
John Eppler voice
Edmund Niemann piano
Recorded June 1986 and January 1987, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg and Clinton Sounds, New York
Engineers: Martin Wieland and James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The appearance of words in Meredith Monk’s work can be rather jolting, as it is so easy for one to get used to the lack of semantic footholds. Like few other vocalists (Elizabeth Fraser comes to mind), Monk grinds the surface of what is being conveyed to such a fine patina that quantifiable meaning is often no longer necessary. Her vocal ramblings are mimetic, purposeful. Monk ably switches between registers and modes with lightning precision, creating a veritable conversation in and through a single body, gazing in multiple directions in the same breath.

Do You Be is a Meredith Monk hodgepodge culled from an assortment of operas and theater pieces. As such, it contains more in the way of quantifiable semantics.

We open with four selections from Acts From Under And Above. A synth ruptures the silence that precedes “Scared Song,” in which Monk’s immediately recognizable voice furls and unfurls itself across a text that blurs the line between confession and innocent recollection. And just when we have been primed to embark on yet another wordless journey, we recognize the emergence of narrative from its constituent parts as she sings:

And a runnin’ and a skatin’
and a runnin’ and a skatin’
and a runnin’ and a skatin’
A runnin’ and a skatin’    A runnin’ and a skatin’
A runnin’ and a skatin’    A runnin’ and a skatin’    A run, oh I’m scared
Oh I’m scared, oh she’s scared, oh she’s scared
Scared, oh he’s scared, scared    Oh, oh, oh, oh

This rondele of sorts is self-contained, and as such bars its own interpretive cycle from completion. Enter piano, coloring the sound with a somewhat harsh and underlying urgency, and a series of fragmentary commentaries. “I Don’t Know” continues pianistically, now in quieter accompaniment. Against this faded backdrop, Monk squeals and dips, sounding veritably bird-like as she hops among the branches of her scant libretto:

So what, what do you know?
What, what do you know?
I don’t know, I don’t know

and variations thereof. She seems to inhabit the edges of these words, picking at their scabbed edges until those membranes join the dust of countless expelled breaths. “Window In 7’s” comprises a brief interlude, a linear narrative upon a road that is freshly paved, yet which also retains all the old potholes and cracks that its travelers remember so well, and along which we proceed with the regularity of a printing press. “Double Fiesta” abounds with sublime vocal reflections. A second piano joins the first, playing a staccato note that becomes almost indistinguishable from Monk’s voice as it punctuates the audio landscape like a Morse code signal. Monk laughs, but musically—that is, in accordance with a predetermined time signature. She lowers herself, only to rise higher with each recapitulation. Amid a series of motives, she leans back and laughs. And with this the pianos build to a crescendo and release.

The next piece is our title track and is excerpted from Vessel: An Opera Epic. “Do You Be” ululates and runs around in frantic circles. As with much of her earlier work, Monk plumbs the depths of communication.

This is followed by a representative selection from The Games. “Panda Chant I” works in a round, tracing its center with the throat and coloring it in with air. Unpretentiously built around the syllables “PAN-DA,” an a capella ensemble provides its own rhythm and direction. “Memory Song” lays down a delicate Casio ostinato, over which women’s voices skip like stones across water, jumping octaves with beautiful ease. They narrate from a space in between German and English:

Ich vergessen, Ich vergessen, vergessen, vergessen
Ich vergessen, vergessen, vergessen
(I forget)
Ich vergessen, vergessen, vergessen
Ich vergessen

Trees, trees
Oh trees, birds
Oh trees, birds, coffee, coffee, coffee
Do you remember, do you remember, do you remember…

as a violin comes and goes, arising in solo at last as if to mourn while also paving the way to resurrection. The voices speak through their song:

Trees, birds
Champagne, champagne, champagne
Football, football, football
Chairs, chairs, chairs, chairs

After a sylvan cacophony, there is a litany of memories:

I remember mushrooms
I remember candlelight
I remember early morning coffee
I remember fish
I remember newspapers
(Ich erinnere mich an altes Großsteinpflaster)
I remember a black Suzuki
(Ich erinnere das Tischgebet)
I remember aspirin
I’m thinking about Shakespeare’s garden

As Monk so brilliantly demonstrates time and time again, after the rather startling aphasia that lulls us into this unusual sense of communion, when hearing language in its more standard form, even the most innocuous asides take on fresh meaning. “Panda Chant II” is another a capella round. Perhaps a distant cousin of the Ramayana Monkey Chant, it similarly recreates the chattering of lush forestland.

“Quarry Lullaby” is our only selection from Quarry, and opens with a plaintive male voice, joined in unison by a female one, and still by others in counterpoint. The piece builds to a fine display of extended vocal techniques. As the dirge ends, it lays itself bare to a strange animal rhythm, the complexity of which lies in the open spaces that it leaves unbreathed upon.

We close with two more selections from The Games. “Astronaut Anthem” inhabits, as its title would imply, the depths of outer space, reaching us only through a sort of dynamic motionlessness, like that of a comet in the sky. It unfolds with the resonance of medieval polyphony and is certainly the most “atmospheric” piece on the album. Its resplendent harmonic twists and soaring sensibility; its confluence of title and musical expression; its closing sirens that hurtle themselves into the ether with the force of rocket propulsion—all of these elements make for a mystical experience. For the final “Wheel,” the listener is fed on bagpipes and a linear vocal line. It is a fitting closing that proceeds like end credits rolling over characters’ faces in freeze-frame. Memories still move among us, but we know the story must end. Accepting this end, we find great beauty in the solace it promises. The bagpipes summon shrill breath, even as the vocal after-effects linger with the assurance of something that will outlive us all.

Listening to this music we might swear we’ve heard it before, for it may very well tap into something familiar but hidden, something intimately touched by the promise of singing and sealed by the taste of mortality.