Meredith Monk - The Voice of the Dolmens

In search of the eternally human

There are emotions, states of mind, visions, for which linguistic expression seems inadequate, limiting, at times even nonexistent in the vocabulary of a language. Sensations and disturbances that perhaps we don't know, because they are foreign to our world, or that perhaps we have forgotten, too busy with the cycles and recurrences of our own history.

In the New York of the Sixties, a woman named Meredith Monk, fascinated by such questions, decided to devote her entire career to the search for an artistic expression capable of representing the anxieties of the "eternally human", digging ever deeper into the exhumation of the most primitive layers of our subconscious, while fixing them at the same time in a kind of timelessness and universality.

An extremely ambitious journey that has remained almost unprecedented in the history of music, both for the emotional, deeply human character of Monk's art (which differs from the exoticism of names such as Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil), and for the extraordinary communicative power of a body of work that, although born within the most erudite American avant-garde, still manages to reach everyone.

Born into a family of singers and dancers (her mother and grandfather were professional singers), Meredith Monk moved with ease from the very start through a New York teeming with artistic ferment. First came her degree from Sarah Lawrence College, then participation in numerous avant-garde performances, lending her voice to other people's compositions or, at other times, performing as a "solo dancer". The body and the voice, the material and the immaterial: the young Meredith expressed herself with astonishing naturalness in the fusion of disciplines, to the point that the concepts of "movement" and "dance" would remain pillars even of her purely musical works.

It could only be multidisciplinary art, then, that in 1968 lay at the heart of the realization of her first large-scale goal: the founding of the theatre company The House, whose purpose she described in these terms: "To create an art that breaks down the boundaries between disciplines, an art that in turn becomes a metaphor for opening up thought, perception, experience. An art that purifies the senses, that offers intuition, feeling, magic. That allows audiences, perhaps, to see things they already know in a new way."

A transversal and complex art, then, one that sinks its roots into Greek tragedy and the arts of the East.

Yet it's on the most natural and powerful of instruments that Meredith focuses her study during these years of intense activity: her own voice. It's a study she broadens to encompass the most disparate genres (from opera to the chants of Eurasian tribal traditions) and the boldest techniques, and which also includes a reassessment of the musical material written for her theatrical performances. In a short time, Meredith Monk wins the esteem of the most prominent figures in art music and minimalism, becoming the leading name of vocal avant-garde.

Between 1968 and 1970, Meredith Monk staged a show, presented as "invisible theatre," which would go on to form the material for her first record release: this is Key (1977), released on Lovely Music and for years her hardest-to-find album, until it was reissued in 1995.

The artist's voice occupies center stage, with little else around it: an organ, a piano, a jaw harp. These are ten minimalist sketches in which Monk immediately reveals, with great clarity and depth, everything she is capable of: venturing into neurotic, reckless a cappella passages ("Porch"), leading us on a grotesque descent through the circles of hell ("Understreet"), sketching a surreal, exorcism-like atmosphere ("What Does It Mean"), but also withdrawing into moments of mournful contemplation ("Fat Stream"), right up to the closing ritual march in a trance-like state ("Dungeon").

Meredith Monk has the ability to constantly wrong-foot the listener; her singing is free and capable of confronting the most demanding registers, and more than once it genuinely seems to come from another planet. And yet all of this would amount to mere intellectual posturing if it weren't grounded in that instinctive, visceral, primordial approach that reaches into the darkest layers of the mind.

Curiously, the years following the "invisible theatre" are the artist's most "visual": between 1974 and 1979 she stages a large number of short films, including "Quarry" (later released on record), "Humbolt's Current" and "Ellis Island" — the latter, centered on immigration to America in the early twentieth century, would win the Golden Eagle at the Atlanta Film & Video Festival. Meanwhile, she launches the "Travelogue" series of performances.

But Meredith Monk by no means neglects what has by now become her principal activity in every respect: music and the study of the voice. Signing to ECM marks the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration, one that will continue for over thirty years, as well as the start of a more consistent musical output.

While her work on her favourite instrument grows ever more meticulous, pushing its range to the extreme limits and embracing Japanese and Siberian singing techniques, in 1976 she decides to retreat to the top of a deserted hill in New Mexico. In these arid, uninhabited places, Meredith senses a disquieting presence, however: that of vanished civilizations, lost cultures, exterminated Native peoples. It is out of this state of suggestion that one of her most moving works is born: Songs From The Hill (1979).

The "songs of the hill" are ten brief visions (to which the long "suite" Tablet is added on the record) in which the artist embodies ten different characters, using a different vocal technique for each. A sense of death and desolation dominates, amplified by the harshness of the performances, in which the voice is the sole instrument. Monk's throat is the vehicle through which the vocalisations, the age-old chants, the propitiatory rites of an extinct civilization (identified with Native American culture, though Monk's message is universal) are reviewed one last time before final oblivion. Thus we hear the spectral lullaby of "Lullaby," which constitutes the only structured melody of the set, or the tribal chief's call in "Mesa," or the intoxicating nursery rhyme of "Wa-lie-oh." The warbling becomes extremely high-pitched in "Bird Code," while "Jew's Harp" and "Insect" rank among her wildest experiments ever: the first is an alienating experiment on the jaw harp, while the second is reduced to a buzzing murmur, just like the drone of an insect. The atmosphere grows ever darker, the foreboding of an imminent end spilling into an unbearable tension that culminates in utter despair in "Prairie Ghost": in the silence of the night, and perhaps all the heavier for it, we hear a voice panting in fear, trying to hold itself back when at several points it seems to give in to the temptation to scream, continuing to whisper uncertainly but ultimately surrendering to despair at the end and breaking into a wild howl.

It's almost liberating, then, when the piano appears in that final tour de force that goes by the name of "Tablet." It's a long stream of consciousness in which Monk perfects a new vocal architecture, based on progression and layering. The piano obsessively repeats a short phrase, which will undergo only two variations across the whole piece, the voice begins intoning a tormented dirge, but suddenly two, three, five voices enter, first from the right, then from the left, each carrying its own baleful rhyme, slowly at first, then ever faster. Just when the piece seems about to close at a certain point, it instead fades into a new variation, onto which the voices once again layer one after another. A flute phrase is also added, leading the listener into total disorientation. Before we realize it, twenty minutes have passed, and then this delirious process of accumulation suddenly halts, leaving only an agonized lament that fades into a lifeless rattle. A memorable piece, the fitting conceptual endpoint of the "songs," as well as a crucial bridge toward minimalism: Meredith Monk draws ever closer to becoming a "vocal" alter ego of Steve Reich.

With Songs From The Hill / Tablet, Monk's genius has reached dizzying heights, from which the view seems obscured only by the peaks of dolmens...

Vocal minimalism: a round trip from the dolmens

It's a Meredith Monk in a state of grace who, having just put out the songs of the hill, releases one of the towering works of American avant-garde music. Dolmen Music (1980) is the fruit of a composer now fully mature and self-aware, able to express, calibrate and channel her boundless abilities with mastery, and who, far from basking in sterile self-satisfaction, manages to constantly look beyond, as if the true destination were always the next one, still to come. And yet, it's genuinely hard to imagine a work more complete and definitive than Dolmen Music, a convergence of the many signals sent out in different directions and a fundamental point of reference for the artist's own future evolution.

And once again it's a lullaby that introduces us to the album: "Gotham Lullaby." The technique of an endlessly repeated piano phrase with few variations had already appeared in "Tablet," but the context is completely different: no chasing voices, no restless chant, just a few spare notes over which Monk's voice intones an extremely sad melody, yet airy and solemn, like a requiem for the end of mankind. One of the important achievements of Dolmen Music is already evident here: the perfect fusion of voice and instrument. The music is no longer a comment, a backdrop, but actively contributes to the success of the piece, working in symbiosis with the vocal element. The piano-and-vocal-melody solution also sets the template on which many later compositions will be based.

There was no other way that journey under full sail titled "Travelling" could be named. The piece, which along with "Biography" had already appeared in the theatrical work "Education Of The Girlchild," sees Monk's voice fleeing — now epic, now possessed — toward very distant shores, sustained by percussion and a piano that seems to imitate the steady, ceaseless movement of waves. The register shifts again with the surreal, schizophrenic little vignette of "The Tale," a piece for which a certain John Cage would never stop singing Monk's praises. The light of reason is utterly lost by the time we reach "Biography," more an open-heart operation than a musical piece. It's useless to resist: the voice of the witch Meredith seeps sternly into some defenseless crevice of our mind, penetrates the psyche relentlessly, touches the exposed nerves, the most painful and hidden ones. It then coils around itself, turning into a heart-rending cry as it descends toward the heart, grips it and crushes it, corroding away until nothing remains but an unbearable, compassionate "na-na-na."

Having survived this painful psychiatric session, all that's left is to approach, in silence, purified, the presence of the dolmens. In the twenty-three minutes of the majestic title track, we board an imaginary time machine and bid farewell for good to the categories of space and time. "Dolmen Music" is a choral work for six voices, three female and three male, all operating at extraordinary levels, joined by the fleeting interjections of an unrecognizable cello, the whole thing architected according to a progressive logic of crescendo and continuous transformation. The introduction is entrusted to a cello that recalls the sound of some archaic instrument; Meredith Monk begins the undertaking with a solitary "ah-u", soon joined by the other two female voices to form a religious, mysterious choir. The male voices then enter, intoning a menacing theme that starts out like Gregorian chant and spills into a dialogue in a kind of pre-Babel language. As the minutes pass, the choirs begin to fray, the themes die out, each voice goes its own way and starts to reveal its primitive, uncontrolled impulses. The passage into a prehistoric era is complete. Our male ancestors communicate in a magical tongue, our female ancestors improvise a siren song over the cello's low drone. At a certain point this strange idyll breaks apart. We travel back to an even earlier age. Now come screams, shouting, cries, laments, the cello mistreated into an inextricable tangle of calls: the rediscovery of sound's primordial nature and of the voice as the archaic instrument par excellence. Some might be reminded of the opening of "2001: A Space Odyssey". "Dolmen Music" is a journey, a mental and cerebral experience that is at the same time so physical and instinctive, a tightrope construction balanced between dream and reality, between this world and others. In a word: art.

Meanwhile, critics across much of the world bow to Monk's genius, and many music magazines will name Dolmen Music "album of the year".

Yet the New Yorker's inventiveness is never content to rest. If anything, the years following Dolmen Music will be her most prolific for composition. While working on her first installation ("Silver Lake With Dolmen Music"), she puts together a new theatrical performance, "Spacimen Days", and the short film "Paris".

In 1983 her oblique talent lands another blazing masterpiece: Turtle Dreams (1983). While the vocal structure confirms the choral form of Dolmen Music, the semiotic register is quite different. Having left behind the bucolic visions of the dolmens and New Mexico, Meredith Monk decides to lay bare the world around her, that frenetic, insatiable New York which in those years was stamped on the global collective imagination as a synonym for development and prosperity. Yet what emerges from "Turtle Dreams", another long flow of over seventeen minutes, is an anguished, delirious humanity, filing apathetically past the gleaming shop windows of the superstores, while something deep inside protests, longing for a return to an authentic civilization in communion with nature. Musically, this desolate picture is rendered through a restless alternation of choirs, laments and solitary high notes, while in the distance an organ drones on, mocking, tragic and impassive. True to her idea of multidisciplinarity, in the theatrical staging Monk accompanies the performance with a choreography in which the four singers move in regimented fashion from side to side, before giving way to convulsive movements.

The other four tracks that round out the album are no less remarkable: "View #1" is another stroke of genius, a clash between pre-recorded piano phrasings, a series of deranged overlapping nursery rhymes, and an alienating synth that bursts in at the close; "Engine Steps" is a brief tape collage in the footsteps of her "spiritual" father John Cage (with whom, incidentally, she forges a genuine friendship around this time); and finally "View #2", a sonata for voice and synthesizer, subdued and melancholic. For these reasons too, Turtle Dreams may well be the artist's most dramatic and contemporary record.

The Journey and the Search

In 1986 Meredith Monk stages the musical work "Acts From Under And Above" with Larry Harrison, while ECM releases two more important records. The first is called Our Lady Of Late, an unusual experiment first brought to the stage some years earlier, in which the artist performs with the aid of a number of wine glasses. While Monk presents some fifteen vocal fragments, each different from the next, the sound of the glasses in the background is monotonous, delicate, hypnotic, obsessive. It even turns into an instrument of torture in the chilling dialogue between a tormented soul and the devil, titled "Conversation". "Unison", on the other hand, is the most curious episode, in which the voice imitates the sound of the glass, in a bewildering man-and-glass duet.

However bold, the record once again wins over the critics, and in 1989 Wergo will include it, alongside Songs From The Hill, in a series collecting the most significant works of contemporary music, among names like Cage and Stockhausen.

Do You Be (1986) is instead a collection of pieces scattered across the previous nine years, composed largely with synthesizer and piano, and containing a few essential gems. Starting with "Scared Song", which bursts in solemnly to comfort the soul's restlessness, as she stated in an interview, "...An exorcism of that fear from which many of our actions unconsciously originate and which we are constantly terrified to face". Among the eleven tracks that follow, two other moving piano interpretations stand out, "I Don't Know" and "Do You Be", the latter one of Monk's most representative pieces, already featured in another version on Key.

Book Of Days (1990) is another cornerstone achievement. The album is nothing less than the soundtrack to her first feature film, released the year before and recently issued on DVD, and it highlights Monk's changed approach to performance: no longer psychological dramas (though traces of them can still be sensed, as in "Madwoman's Visions") but melancholic, essential cantatas, closer to church singing, in dialogue with silence. The project stems from a vision the artist had (apparently while doing housework at her country home...), a journey into the Middle Ages, the story of a Jewish girl who is the protagonist of a series of magical encounters and age-old rituals.

Book Of Days is perhaps her most evocative and fascinating record, in a new, nocturnal, romantic sense.

Riding this renewed taste for the ancient, Monk releases Facing North (1992), based on the story of Joan of Arc. Despite a few interesting fragments, such as the irrepressible tongue-twister of "Arctic Bar", the album remains the least engaging in her catalogue.

That same year, however, also sees the release of what can be considered the true culmination of an extraordinary and daring artistic quest spanning more than a quarter of a century: Atlas (1992). It is in this monumental three-act work that the fusion of voice and music, as well as her idea of a "marriage" between the arts, reaches its definitive fulfillment. Atlas is a journey, or rather the journey: the pilgrimage, physical or spiritual, in search of answers to those questions about the true meaning of life, and thus of making our existence fuller and more authentic. Although the CD makes for easier listening by including the booklet for the stage work, the best way to approach it is to let go with an open mind, letting the imagination wander across mountains, plains and oceans. It is a journey that naturally begins with the dream, the thrilling speculations of the eve (roughly the whole of the first part, "Personal Climate"), and which then becomes real, with the careful choice of travel companions, bizarre encounters, epic crossings, curious discoveries and intense reflections ("Night Travel").

The work closes with the brief, rarefied passages of "Invisible Light", sealing with a touch of melancholy the end of this journey, in which what matters is not so much "where" it has led us (there is probably no answer to our quest), but the store of knowledge gathered along the way, capable of lending an entirely different color and intensity to our experience.

Atlas, in short, is Monk the vocalist and arranger's supreme work and, for us, one of the most moving listens there is.

Meanwhile, Meredith Monk's name is no longer confined to genre devotees: her talent is now recognized and revered across the most diverse artistic circles, pop included, her pieces are being used in film soundtracks and "classical" vocal ensembles are reinterpreting some of her work. In 1995, moreover, she received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the award given to the "genius" figures of the art world.

In 1997 Volcano Songs was released, an album that distances itself from the neoclassical adventures of Atlas in favor of a more stripped-down sound, as in the a-cappella opening of "Walking Song", a track that would also end up on the soundtrack of "The Big Lebowski". The album, excellent as it is, doesn't add much to what the artist had already said and restated.

Pity and impermanence: a philosophical landing point

More interesting are the projects that arrive with the new millennium. Mercy (2002) takes on a very particular weight: the album comes out just a few months after the fateful September 11th that shook the whole of the West and left two thousand dead beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center in her own New York. The questions and reflections on the meanings of mercy, on its various levels (pity, compassion, God's mercy toward man, man's mercy toward his fellow man), unintentionally take on a much broader significance, the resolution of which, if there is one, is left to the listener.

Much of the album's material originates from the installation of the same name, created with multimedia artist Ann Hamilton, and musically it picks up the orchestral scores of Atlas, though set within a completely different context. In place of the dreamy, wandering arias, here we find a more intimate, essential atmosphere, harking back to the minimalism of her earliest work, though on more than one occasion it also edges toward a kind of chamber jazz.

The record goes straight for the heart, with little preamble, opening with the invaluable "Braid 1 And Leaping Song": a dark, crepuscular melody in the style of a Lenten chant that halfway through opens up into a sublime aria, joined by voices and calls in invented languages, before closing back down into the a-cappella of "Braid 2". Even as Monk's music increasingly takes on the traits of neoclassical opera, the vocal element never becomes a secondary concern: in the album's other two masterpieces, "Patient Doctor" and "Prisoner", it is precisely the voice that determines the intensity of the pieces — in the first especially, where the male voice (the two vocalists, Theo Bleckmann and Ching Gonzales, are truly remarkable), in the role of the doctor, and Monk's own voice cross paths in a mutual plea for help ("help"), unsettling the conventional hierarchy of roles.

With Mercy, as is typical of her, the artist makes no claim to offer definitive answers, but rather raises questions and reflections from which the listener draws their own conclusions. And in this, Mercy is yet another triumph for Ms. Monk.

Impermanence (2008), on the other hand, is an album built from meditations on the concept of impermanence, one of the cornerstones of Buddhism (Anitya), a philosophy Monk is now closer to than ever, driven by some intense reading (including James Hillman's "The Force Of Character", and various Taoist texts) but also by the experience of recent losses that marked her deeply, such as the death of her lifelong partner Mieke van Hoek.

Far from showing any signs of decline with age, Meredith Monk still delivers an album of great class, one that on the one hand revisits familiar but still moving solutions, as in the opening of "Last Song", which introduces the theme of the "end", and on the other ventures into unusual, Eastern-tinged experiments ("Skeleton Lines", "Particular Dance"). The heart of the record is probably "Liminal", a suite for piano and marimba overlaid with vocal commentary, nearly perfect in recreating a state of liminal, threshold-like tension. The closing track, meanwhile, could only bear the name of Van Hoek, a constant yet discreet presence throughout the whole album.

Like its predecessor, Impermanence is not an easy or immediate listen — something Monk's music has, after all, never been — but rather the complex creation of a sincere and uncorrupted artist, for whom advancing age has only changed the way she expresses herself.

In 2009, the official compilation Beginnings arrived as a surprise, the first release on John Zorn's Tzadik label. The album, far from being a mere self-celebratory best of, presents some unreleased gems from her very earliest works, of absolute significance. A rarity among rarities, for instance, is "Greensleeves", Monk's first-ever recording and the only occasion to hear her voice on a text with conventional meaning, and on guitar no less — like hearing Nico sing Joni Mitchell. The album also brings to light two excerpts from the short film "Quarry", among which "Procession" stands out, another mournful, liturgical lament of the kind only Monk can produce, along with "Duet For Voice And Echoplex", aided by the electronic device of the same name capable of simulating the echo of every single sound.

Beginnings is, in short, a delight for diehard fans in search of further treats, but it's also an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to approach Monk's art for the first time.

The circle is the shape Meredith Monk chose as the central image of Songs Of Ascension, a multimedia work in which Meredith Monk seeks to connect the artwork to more transcendental meanings: the circle, then, as a symbol of perfection, of union with the divine. Of spiritual ascension, precisely.

But on closer inspection, the circle is also the image that best represents the strictly sonic substance of the work: the twenty-one tracks that make it up are not, in fact, songs in any conventional sense: there is no real internal development, everything instead seems to flow as a single stream, rich with recurring references and themes. Even when the musical textures swell, they never reach a definitive peak, but circle back to their starting point.

Musically, the album is richer in instrumentation than Impermanence, yet sparser in its final result. It's as if we're witnessing a kind of opposition between the vocal and instrumental parts: while the former intones religious chants ("Strand"), anguished nocturnal calls ("Mapping", "Cloud Code") or operatic passages ("Vow"), the performances of the Reynolds String Quartet remain consistently steady and austere, both in the four seasonal portraits ("Autumn" and "Spring Variation" are especially evocative) and in the taut, tense "Shift" and "Burn". On stage, the confrontation becomes almost physical, with the choir and musicians on several occasions standing face to face in two semicircles.

Only at the close do the two parts finally seem to come together harmoniously: this is “Ascent”, yet another masterstroke pulled off by Monk. The strings flow softly, only seemingly static, the choir fragments and each voice appears to intone its own theme (while on stage another group of singers appears, symbolically positioned up on a balcony).

Although its main shortcoming is that it can't sustain itself on the music alone for its entire length, Songs Of Ascension remains another significant step in Meredith Monk's long artistic journey — the one contemporary performer who, with undisputed mastery and elegance, is able to translate the soul's most crucial and intimate questions into music.

In 2016, then, Meredith Monk returns to the scene — from which, in truth, she never really strays for more than brief spells — to tour the project and album On Behalf Of Nature. It's an important album on many levels: for its political implications (rarely so explicit in Monk's work), for the global juncture in which it appears (climate change, terrorism, the election of Donald Trump and the crisis of the American left), but also for its ambitious intent to merge her traditional role as a medium — here inseparable from an awareness of her own artistic responsibility — with Buddhist concepts of impermanence, cause and effect, and interdependence.

The result is a dense album, rich in allusions and images, that positions itself as a mediator between the realm of man and that of nature, understood in its totality — encompassing forces, cosmology and plays of light — in a continuous movement of widening and narrowing perspective across the various planes of existence.

An ear and a visionary sensibility that have never lent themselves so naturally to acting as a mouthpiece for the inhuman, in some way answering the call of her friend Gary Snyder and the artist's responsibility as mediator between the world of (super)natural entities and the world of humans. An alliance, a complicity never as necessary as today, in the face of the warnings and prophecies of an ecosystem in transition, in which, nevertheless, creation and destruction are each contained within the other.

Meanwhile, Ms. Monk continues to collect (well-deserved) accolades and receive awards from every corner of the world; tribute concerts are held in her honor and a biography is also published. In 2007 Italy too decided to honor her, with the Demetrio Stratos award.

It's impossible to keep count of the contemporary performers who have drawn on the master's insights. Björk has repeatedly confessed her love for the artist and on the tour for “Vespertine” reinterpreted her “Gotham Lullaby”, while Dj Shadow and Dj Spooky have sampled fragments of her work for their electronic collages. But Meredith Monk's legacy has also been picked up by other musical experiences: from the dark/dreamy muses Lisa Gerrard and Liz Fraser, to the chameleonic Mike Patton, to the “multidisciplinary” pop heroine Laurie Anderson.

Meredith Monk, whose voice one critic once described as “the sound of death,” has earned a special and fundamentally important place in the music of the latter half of the 20th century, in the use of the voice in music — both popular and classical — all without ever compromising and without ever lapsing into self-indulgence.

But her greatest achievement is having bequeathed to history compositions such as “Dolmen Music”, “Biography”, “Tablet” and “Turtle Dreams” — abstract, yes, but charged with irreducible humanity, and above all capable of flinging open the listener's famous doors of perception.

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