MEREDITH MONK
December 7, 1999
ALVIN LUCIER
I first heard Meredith Monk in 1975 in the Merce Cunningham dance studio in New York. In those days, Merce used to program Events, mixes of various dances he had made. He would invite musicians to come in and do anything they wanted.
Meredith was sitting at an electric piano (organ, I guess) and began to sing. It sounded like every woman in the world singing at the same time. That’s the way I think of it now, maybe that’s a little embarrassing. Then she’d sing another song in another voice, and it still sounded like every woman singing. It was fractal. One voice didn’t mean only one thing, they all were exemplifying women’s singing. This was before we got interested in world singing styles. It was amazing. I thought to myself, “What is this?” I’d never heard anything like this before in my life. It was one of those amazing shocks you get when you experience something new and wonderful for the first time. You are very lucky if you have that experience once in your lifetime.
Over the years, as I have attended many of Meredith’s events and watched her films, I have tried to get a handle on what she was doing with the various arts. Could her work be categorized as multimedia or mixed media? It was very different from anyone else. Merce Cunningham and John Cage would keep dance, music, and decor completely separate. Martha Graham would choreograph to the music of Aaron Copland, for example. With Meredith’s work, it seemed that parts of the work that belonged to one art were being composed with the rules and principles of another. In the theater work, Education of the Girlchild, an actor would pick up a cup of tea, then put it down, and then do it again several times. It looked like a visual representation of a Mozart symphony, the way the event repeated. I could talk all night, which, of course, I know you would be delighted to hear, but I’ll stop now. Here is Meredith Monk.
MEREDITH MONK
First, I’d like so much to thank Alvin Lucier, who is not only my old friend but one of the most inspiring composers in the world and of all time. I’m very touched. Thank you for saying those things, Alvin. And I’m very happy to be here, back at Wesleyan again. I was here about ten years ago.
I thought that what I would do is give you a little bit of background, talk a little bit, and then spend some time singing. After that, I’d be very happy to answer any questions.
So, I’m going to go back to my mom. Thank you, Mom, for having me. I came from a very musical family. My great-grandfather was a cantor in Russia. His son, Joseph Zellman, first came to the New York area but ended up founding and directing a music conservatory in Meriden, Connecticut. He was a Russian bass baritone, came to America on a music scholarship, ended up staying here, concertizing in New York with a contralto in places like the Brooklyn Academy and Carnegie Hall. He founded a music conservatory up in Washington Heights. He married an American pianist, Rose Kornicker. They performed on some of the early Thomas Edison cylinder recordings for voice and piano. I remember his voice very well—a deep, beautiful Russian bass baritone. My mother sang popular music on the radio and also sang jingles. She was the original Muriel Cigar and sang for Blue Bonnet Margarine, Schaefer Beer, Chiquita Banana, Royal Pudding, Robert Hall Clothes, and others.
Basically, my childhood was very much like Woody Allen’s Radio Days. I would often come with her for jobs. At that time, we were living in Queens. In those days, everything was performed live; there wasn’t any tape. Her main job was the DUZ Does Everything commercial every day at one o’clock. It was a commercial for a soap opera called The Road of Life. Sometimes I would sit on the organist’s lap and watch the actors with their scripts, playing their characters; sometimes I would be in the control room drawing on the back of scripts.
So music was definitely a part of my childhood. It was taken for granted. I’ve been told that I sang before I talked and read music before I read words. Our house had a very aural kind of atmosphere. We sang while washing the dishes and as part of daily life. My mother, my sister, and I sang songs in three-part harmony in the car.
I started piano at a young age and played pretty much through childhood. Although I was never a great pianist, I could sight-read quickly. Because I have a visual challenge called strabismus, where I cannot fuse two images out of my two eyes, I had a kind of left-right lack of coordination. When I was three, my mother heard about classes at Steinway Hall taught by two Polish sisters, the Rohms, in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Eurhythmic is a technique invented by Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss composer and teacher in the late nineteenth century, to teach music and rhythm through body movement. His method was comprised of three components: rhythmic movement exercises in space, solfège, and improvisation. Many conductors have studied it so that they can learn to conduct one rhythm with one hand and another one with the other. He once said that all musical truth can be found in the body.
Most of the children in the class learned the music through the rhythmic movement, but for me, it was more of a way of learning physical coordination and body movement through music, something that I felt [was] very comfortable and familiar. I loved it. In a way it was really the beginning of something that I always take for granted, which is that sound is in space and that the voice and the body are one thing. You might learn a scale, but you would do it with your arms as well as hearing it. You might see what it looked like as notes, then you might sing it and clap or dance to it—all the senses working together. That principle has been something that has been at the heart of what I do. I always think that my voice dances and my body sings and that there’s really no separation between the two.
That was the beginning of my movement background. I took ballet when I was ten. I was never really a great technical dancer, but I loved to move. At Sarah Lawrence I created what came to be called a combined performing arts program. In the voice department, I studied classical technique, lieder, vocal chamber music, and opera workshop. At the same time, I was composing short pieces for piano. In the dance department, I was studying dance composition and technique. I started working on pieces while I was still at school, where I began to have glimpses of how to put some of these elements together, how to weave voice and movement together and include visual images, objects, and light. For me it was [a] kind of emotional integration. How do you put all these aspects or layers into one form?
Early on I also realized that—because the world that we live in is so complex—that to separate art forms seems to not be really reflective of that world. Western European traditions are the only art that separates these elements. Music is over here, movement is over here, whereas there are so many other forms (as a lot of you students know), Asian theater and African forms, where these elements of music, movement, and theater are combined. No one in those societies really thinks that’s such an unusual thing. I find, as time goes by, that actually now it seems to be even more difficult to get past this category thing. It’s as if the walls have gotten higher, but I think my big struggle over the years has been to explain that these elements are all part of perception, that, as human beings, we have an incredible, rich perceptual palette that includes all the senses, thought, feeling—everything and anything. And so, to be able to attest to the richness of human beings as performers and also as audience members is something, to me, very affirmative and reflective of the complexity of life. Early on, I realized that this inclusiveness as a philosophical basis for making work was something that was very essential.
I came to New York in the fall of 1964 and first made solo pieces in galleries, churches, alternative spaces. There were a lot of wonderful performance spaces opening up at that time. I would say that my early works were gestural pieces, with cinematic structures—as in what Alvin said, taking principles that might be in another art form and transforming them. How would you make a piece of movement or gesture with the kind of cuts or washes or dissolves that you can work with in film, taking that syntax and seeing what that would be in another form? My soundtracks were on tape that I played live. At that time, we didn’t have multitrack tape recorders, but I had a two-track machine and with that I could add different generations of sound by recording on that machine, overlaying more tracks or another one, and even more back on my original one.
At a certain point, after having been in New York for about a year, I started missing singing. I somehow always knew that I wasn’t going to be a classical singer because something about it made me feel limited; it just didn’t feel right. I had been a folk singer in junior high and high school in Stamford, Connecticut. (One of my friends from second grade in Stamford is in the audience tonight. We sang “Bye Bye Love” together in junior high school.) I partially earned my way through Sarah Lawrence by singing and playing guitar at children’s birthday parties.
Because I missed singing so much, I began sitting at a piano and working on regular classical vocal exercises. This was around the mid-1960s, long before most of you were born. One day I started vocalizing, and suddenly I had a revelation that the voice could have the flexibility of the spine, it could have the articulation of a hand. It could have within it male and female, all ages. It could delineate landscapes and characters and have within it limitless colors and timbres, ways of producing sound, range, kinetic impulses. It didn’t need words. It was an eloquent language in itself. So basically I started working with myself as a guinea pig and, in some ways—because I had done choreography where I was using my own body—making my material on my own body. I knew how to explore and work with my voice. In some ways, I was lucky that I didn’t have physical facility because I had to invent my own style of movement. I could easily transfer that method to working with my voice. And because of my family background, I had a wide range and a strong flexible instrument to start out with. So basically I worked with my own voice and kept on exploring it deeply from that point on.
And that has been very much the center and the heart of what I do. I always say that my work is like a tree with two main branches. One is working and writing music for the voice, for myself and for my ensemble, doing concerts and making CDs. The other branch consists of multidisciplined composite forms, including musical theater pieces and films. Now I’ve also become interested in making installations that include music and video.
Those are forms that combine sight and sound, that either weave together these elements or maybe put them in counterpoint with each other. I work very much like a mosaicist. I work on one aspect, say the “red” tiles first; then I might discover the “blue” tiles, then “yellow.” How does this balance out? How does this make a form or a whole? How does the eye balance out the ear? How do these things work together? Sometimes I’ll have an idea for something then wait a long time to figure out what would be the most eloquent form. I like to work in film from time to time because of the flexibility of time and space that you cannot achieve in a live performance. You can really fly from one place to another, or you imply simultaneous time by intercutting. Actually, in live performance you can literally have simultaneous events, and that is something you can’t do in film unless you divide the screen into parts.
I believe very deeply in live performance. It’s something that I’ve been fighting for in the world of computers. There’s something about a live performance that you just can’t get anywhere else. It’s the vulnerability of the person. The performer’s on a tightrope and could fall off at any time. He or she can make a mistake. It’s that figure eight of energy that goes between the performer and the audience that’s so special and the communal aspect of a large group of people together and a time and place to be able to let go of that “yack yack” constant narration of experience that we have in our minds. Live performance offers the possibility of having a little silence and space to experience something directly and deeply. That’s very healing to people and the world that we’re living in. And in that way, I feel that art is very healing.
Let me tell you a little bit about one or two other ideas before I talk about some other things that I have been working on. After a few years of being in New York, I started getting tired of the basic proscenium stage situation. I started making pieces outdoors or using large groups of people in architectural spaces. I made a piece called Juice. The first part of it was in the Guggenheim Museum. I had a choir of about eighty singers—singer-movers—that were performing on the ramps in the building, with the audience looking up. It had a cathedral-like quality and used the resonance of that room, which has a very long decay.
I was very interested in cutting through the habitual pattern of going to see something, having a cup of coffee and talking about it, then forgetting about it. That’s the usual ritual of going to a performance. I was trying to make something, for example, that would start on one day, continue a month after that, then a month after that, so that memory became a part of it. Part One of Juice started at the Guggenheim Museum, but you bought one ticket for the three different parts. In the Guggenheim there were about nine main cast people along with the chorus. Four of them were painted red from head to toe and were stomping around in big red combat boots. They were only one part of the huge tapestry in the Guggenheim. A month later, you focused more on those four people. A month after that, you went to a gallery and you saw the eighty-five red combat boots that were from the Guggenheim part. You saw the costumes and all the elements that had been in those other two parts, but you could go very close to them. Yet at the same time, the four main characters were on video, so you saw their faces very close, but there were actually no people there. The whole three-part piece was like a giant zoom lens of attention and perception, but, ironically, in the third installation part you got farther and farther away from the people.
I was working very much with these different notions of distance, time, scale, and the relationship of audience to performer. Sometimes I would present performances in the morning or outside in parking lots in New York. I still try to do those site-specific works as much as possible. I did a piece a few years ago on Roosevelt Island where we bussed the audience from one part of the island to the other and worked with a fairly large group of people, including some of the people from the hospitals there.
That’s been one strand of my work. The other has been musical theater pieces and opera. I’ve always called my big pieces operas because they include all these different forms. I did compose an opera called ATLAS at a real opera house for the Houston Grand Opera, which was a very interesting experience for me. I worked on it for five years. Part of the process was the rehearsal period, when I taught my way of working to singers who came from a classical background, and I soon realized that rhythmic articulation and complexity as well as working with the voice in different ways was not part of their experience. I had to figure out what I could do for them. I chose people who were open minded and willing to play and were not too rigid in their ideas of what singing was about.
So basically, this is what I’ve done all these years. I keep on moving along from one step to the next. For about the last fifteen years I’ve done a Buddhist meditation practice that has been very helpful for me in many ways. The first thing is how I work with other people and learning about their vulnerabilities. Over the years, I’ve had a wonderful group of singer-performers. In the early group, most of them came from acting and dancing backgrounds. I composed very simple music for them and sang the more complex material with the organ or piano myself. Then, at a certain point in the mid-1970s, I wanted to work with more complex musical textures, so I started working with people who came more from a singing background. I had a wonderful ensemble throughout the ’80s. We played all over the place—in clubs, in churches and concerts halls. Then, with the opera ATLAS, a new group came in. I’m still working with them to this day. I’ve always had such wonderful luck. I have tried very hard to choose people not only for their artistry and musicianship but also for their generosity and spirit and the kind of radiance that they have as people. We’ve always had a wonderful playful spirit of working on this music.
I feel that my work is only a pretext to offering experience of the radiance of these people. I have an idea of a particular piece, and I work very hard to perfect that form but, in fact, that is only an armature; it’s really more about these people’s energy. I’ve been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world of different ages and backgrounds. That’s been a strong part of my work.
That’s probably as much as I want to talk about right now. I’d like to sing a little; then you can ask me questions and I will answer them. The first thing I’d like to sing for you is a piece called Porch, which I wrote very early on—I think it was around 1967. It’s basically a piece that has a repeated melodic pattern, but is very much about working with different colors and textures in the voice within a simple melodic structure. [Sings].
Now I’d like to do a song from a series called Light Songs, which I wrote in the late 1980s. I think of these as duets for solo voice. More than one thing is going on at the same time within one voice. Some of them are like dialogues. In others, more than one layer is going on at the same time. This one is called “Click Song #1.” [Sings].
Next I’d like to sing a few songs from the Songs from the Hill series. They were all pieces that I wrote sitting up on a hill in New Mexico in the mid-1970s. My sister was living in Placitas, and I would go out to visit her in the summertime. I had been working with keyboard and voice for a few years and hadn’t done much a cappella work for a while. My goal was to sit in a particular spot on a hill that I had chosen and compose one song a day. I wrote sixteen of them, or at least started most of them, and then came back to the East Coast and put the ideas into musical forms. I was influenced by the landscape, the magic of New Mexico. I don’t feel as if I was imitating what I was hearing, but sitting there, I’m sure that that incredible atmosphere of that place and the desert influenced this music. [Sings].
Now I’d like to sing a few different ones. These are all songs that are inspired by nature and space, but each one also plays with a particular aspect of the voice. This one is called “Wa-lie-oh,” consisting of just the syllables that I’m singing. [Sings].
Now I’d like to do three kinds of animal songs from Songs from the Hill. The first one is called “Insect,” the second one is called “Descending” (it really is another insect piece), and the third is called “Bird Code.” I’ll sing one more a cappella song, from Light Songs. It’s called “Click Song #2.” [Sings].
I’d like to end this set with a little instrument called a jaw harp, or Jew’s harp. I’ve been playing this pretty much from the late ’60s and find it a wonderful instrument for singers. There’s a wide range of sound that can be found within it, and so I’d like to share this with you. [Plays and sings].
Thank you very much. Now I would like to continue with some of the pieces that I have written for voice and piano over the years. I’d like to start with one of our earliest song forms and an early piece of mine—a lullaby. Probably this was the first song form because a mother had to find ways to calm her child. Over the years I have worked a lot with the idea that there are archetypal song forms. Within every culture there are lullabies, love songs, marches, laments, and work songs. I like to compose my own manifestations of these song forms that transcend culture. This one is called “Gotham Lullaby.” [Sings].
This is also another of my early pieces. It’s called “Traveling,” and it comes from Education of the Girlchild. It’s a dance and a journey in 5/4. [Sings].
This next one is actually part of the track of a feature-length film that I made in 1988 called Book of Days. I’ve always been interested in layers of time. Many of my pieces are about time travel. Book of Days dealt with the Middle Ages and our time now. It examined the Middle Ages through our eyes, through the filter of the twentieth century. But at the same time, it was looking at our time through the eyes of a young girl from the Middle Ages. She has visions of our time, but she doesn’t really know how to explain them to her family and the people who live in her little village. So she’s very lonely. It’s really a film about a visionary. The one person she can talk to about it is an old madwoman who is actually a seer herself and lives outside the village. The girl tells the madwoman about her apocalyptic visions, like a city that might be burning up and consumed by a plague. There are a lot of parallels between, for example, AIDS and the plague and how certain people were and are blamed for it. Many aspects of human nature seem to stay the same throughout time, and yet each period that we live in is different. The madwoman, after she hears the little girl’s vision, answers her with a song about looking at all of time, nature and human nature from an aerial point of view. It sees the folly and beauty of human beings—love, passion, war, violence—from the perspective of nature, the way that nature always renews itself and continues. It’s looking at things with a kind of sadness for the world and, at the same time, a kind of compassion and equanimity. This is “Madwoman’s Vision.” [Sings]. Thank you very much.
Does improvisation play a part in your compositional technique, or even in your performance itself?
MEREDITH MONK
Well, it certainly plays a part in the beginnings of many pieces. My discipline every day is to work vocally or at the piano generating small pieces of material. I find different ways of working with that. It’s almost like intuitively coming up with little nodes of music, and then I start seeing how some of these ideas or phrases go together. So, right from the beginning, yes, of course I am working, playing with my voice, working improvisationally to start. Then, little by little, as I start seeing the world of each piece—I think that each piece is a world—I like to dig deeper and deeper into it. Another analogy to some of these forms is a tree with branches, in that the forms—if you listen to some of the Songs of the Hill, for example, over the years, you would know that they are the same pieces, but within those forms I have little places where I could branch off if I’m inspired. There are these certain parts of the form where the form branches off. I can play with that material because I always come back to the trunk again.
So, the forms—the beginning, middle, and end—are quite precise. They’re very rigorous, yet at the same time there’s always room to play. It’s the same with the ensemble too; the forms are set, but within them there are some places where we can really play and work with the moment.
QUESTION
I’ve noticed in your vocal technique there are sounds from all cultures, from all over the world. Did you develop them yourself, just through trying things out, or, in your musical travels, find them and then incorporate them?
I have always worked with exploring my own voice in my body; that has been my method over the years. I think of the process as developing a vocabulary, built on my own instrument. A lot of people, right from the beginning, started to associate some of what I found with sound that came from other cultures. The way that I try to explain it is that I think that when you work very deeply with your own instrument, there are sounds that transcend culture. If you work with a glottal break, for example, one that has the sound of a yodel (I came upon that as I was playing with my low and upper registers and what it could do, how it could go back and forth), that sound exists in cowboy music, in Swiss yodeling, in some African music, North Carolina hollerin’, and many other cultures. So it’s really more phylogeny and ontogeny, that just by working with my own instrument with as much honesty as I can, of course within my vocal instrument, I’m going to find different sounds that might make you have associations with other cultures, but the beauty of the human voice is that each of our voices is unique, and at the same time we are part of the world vocal family. I’ve never been interested in going to a culture, taking something, and using it.
Alvin and I were just talking about that. I was lucky enough to have received a MacArthur grant. They have wonderful meetings and conferences during which you exchange information with other MacArthur fellows. Last week, they had one on animal sounds. They knew I’d be interested in that. There were scientists present (a lot of these MacArthur people are scientists), as well as composer-anthropologist Steven Feld, who has recorded a number of beautiful songs and sounds from Papua New Guinea. Alvin and I were talking about how disgusting it is that sometimes those recordings get into the wrong hands, and then they’re totally exploited for commercial gain. That is a cultural imperialist point of view that’s not been at all interesting to me over the years.
QUESTION
Do you actually notate your pieces?
MEREDITH MONK
Keyboard works can be notated pretty accurately and some of the things for large choruses are pretty cut-and-dried … well, nothing of mine is really cut-and-dried. Actually, it doesn’t look very good on the page, the page doesn’t really show the principles behind the notes—it’s hard to convey that. I believe more in the oral tradition, in a certain way. Like passing it on directly while I’m still alive. But, at the same time, I’m trying to stay very open-hearted to people who want to perform my music. Some of the singers in my ensemble want to perform it, and from time to time there have been other choruses that want to do some of my choral works. So I’ve been struggling with notating so that other people could be able to sing the music. And I’m still in the midst of this struggle, of how I really feel about this, whether that would be a really good way or not. So, the compromised position is some of the stuff is on paper, but I say that while I’m still alive, I or somebody from my group comes and teaches it to the performers. There have been choruses that don’t want anything to do with that; they don’t want to bring in a person from outside. In that case I just say no, I’m not interested.
QUESTION
Do you rigorously practice every day?
MEREDITH MONK
Yes, I vocalize every day about forty-five minutes to an hour. When I did the music for Merce Cunningham, I noticed how dancers could go all day long. They take class, and then they do their performance. They’re raring to go, whereas most singers that I know, after a certain point, have to rest. You can’t sing hour after hour.
My perfect day—if I have a perfect day—is first to do a physical warm up on the floor. Then I vocalize. I take a little break, then compose and work on something. When I go to artists’ colonies, I have perfect days. I try to keep my voice exercised every day unless I feel like I need to rest my voice. Then I do.