Vanessa Wagner INLAND

 

INLAND

 

Jess Gillam TIME

 

TIME

WOMEN OF NOTE

Clara Schumann's recently recovered G-Minor Sonata['s]...bold gestures and the strong development of its ideas, especially in the substantial and stormy first movement, offer plenty of rewards, both emotional and intellectual... And while the excerpts from Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's The Year fit more comfortably into the orthodox parameters of music for (advanced) domestic use, they do so with exquisite polish... Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by the repertoire. (Peter J. Rabinowitz)

Lasting a shade under twenty minutes, Zwilich's Third Symphony is large in scale. Sinewy, assertive and confident, it is very much in the tradition of the Great American Third Symphonies of the 30s and 40s. As is the case with some of her music from the past decade or so, Shostakovich is the muse in some of the symphony's timbres, rhythms, power, and intensity... Marked Largo, the third movement cyclically revisits the first. Its midsection is strikingly dark and somber... This CD is a release of a major importance. Top recommendation. (Benjamin Pernick)

The great find of this release, however, and reason to rush out and buy it, is Galina Ustvolskaya. Born in 1919, one of the most important students of Shostakovich, and longtime resident of St. Petersburg, her music is fiercely original. I find myself almost at a loss for words to describe it. Simple motives are reiterated and developed with a sort of hypnotic force, but the os.tinati are never “cheap.“ Every gesture seems won through a titanic struggle. This is deeply spiritual music, but informed as much by anguish as transcendence... [B]y the 1988 sonata, Ustvolskaya is completely her own composer. It is only six and a half minutes long, but its thunderous, relentless low clusters (brutal sound-masses, yet still full of harmonic meaning) make it unique among piano music I have heard over the last decade, and its intensity suggests a piece far larger than its real-time duration. Though I have heard some of her music over the radio, and though I know a boomlet of her music is emerging on CD, this is my first encounter with Ustvolskaya on disc, and it has been shattering, the type of discovery that adventurous listeners dream of. (Robert Carl)

Jean-Luc Godard NOUVELLE VAGUE

This is the complete soundtrack - music, dialogue, sounds - of Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990.'In making this film,' Godard said at a press conference later that year, 'I heard a great deal of music; music produced by Manfred Eicher.I can well imagine how musicians are inspired and influenced by these sounds. And I too have immersed myself in this music, and I have felt,in my work, like a musician.' Interviewed at the Toronto Film Festival of 1996, Godard returned to this theme: 'Manfred began our relationship by sending me some music. It was new music of Arvo Pärt and, especially, David Darling, which I had never heard of before. And after listening, I wrote to him and asked him to send me more records of his company. And I had the feeling, the way he was producing sound that we were moreor less in the same country: he with sounds, me with images. And the music that he sends me is music that brings me to some ideas in moviemaking. In fact, some of the records brought me to a picture called Nouvelle Vague and later other ones... and I began to imagine things due to that kind of music.' Cahiers du Cinéma: 'The Nouvelle Vague soundtrack is magnificent. The intertwining of the various forms of music, voices and sounds is one of the most extraordinary ever heard, even including Godard's oeuvre.' Includes the voices of Alain Delon, Domiziana Giordano, Roland Amstutz, Laurence Cote, Jacques Dacqmine, Christophe Odent, Laurence Guerre, Joseph Lisbona, and others. (ECM Records)

MEREDITH MONK Do You Be

This release features song excerpts from various long-form theater pieces, the first four coming from Meredith Monk's theater piece Acts From Under and Above, and these are the most jarring on the record. "Scared Song" features English lyrics, minimal accompaniment, and Monk singing harsh, abrasive "scared" sounds. Very unsettling -- and perhaps that is the intention. "Do You Be," a selection from her opera Vessel, features Monk solo on piano and voice with a shrill, piercing wail. Very satisfying. Additional selections from Vessel appear on Monk's 1992 recording Facing North. With one exception, the remaining tracks come from a Monk/Ping Chong science fiction epic opera called The Games, and these more diverse, more exploratory pieces really make the collection work as a recording. A casual listener unfamiliar with the theater pieces may well be put off by the abrasiveness of the first four tracks, which may unfortunately be enough to deter them from the remainder of the recording. But beyond some questionable programming choices, fans of her work will be delighted to see her continuing development as a recording artist. (Mark Allender)

MEREDITH MONK Impermanence

In her album Impermanence, Meredith Monk succeeds in creating pieces that fit her theme well and much of this music does indeed seem ephemeral, fleeting. These works are not casually or routinely constructed, though; their apparent simplicity masks a psychological and musical sophistication that's evident in the way their carefully placed details contribute to their surprising impact. The prevailing mood of the album is melancholy, but not passive sadness; even the songs that deal most explicitly with loss, such as Last Song (which opens the album) and Liminal, are punctuated with astonishing, defiant gestural outbursts that make it clear that Monk has no intention of going gentle into that good night. One of the strengths of the album is the variety of its pieces; Monk is never repeating herself or just recycling ideas. Pieces such as Particular Dance, for voices and mixed ensemble, are lively and full of unpredictable humor, and Maybe 1, for eight pianos, is a quirky, minimalist-inspired bagatelle. The textural variety of the pieces is also appealing; almost all of them use voices in one way or another, but the voice is often used instrumentally or as accompaniment to the instruments. Monk and her ensemble perform with great delicacy and sensitivity to each other; this is clearly a group of singers and instrumentalists that knows how to listen, and each member is constantly calibrating his or her contribution with the sounds of the others, as in the best chamber music performances. ECM's sound is immaculate. The album is a significant addition to Monk's discography and should be of strong interest to fans of new vocal music that pushes the envelope but is still accessible and engaging.  (Stephen Eddins)

ATLAS an opera in three parts by MEREDITH MONK

With this, Meredith Monk's latest record and one of her most substantial pieces, a number of questions have to be raised and satisfactorily answered. Atlas is a self-declared opera, yet is an opera virtually without words. It has a narrative, yet the narrative would be imperceptible to the CD listener unless it was relayed in an accompanying note which, by definition, is separate to the musical entity called Atlas. Judging by the booklet-note by Max Loppert and the accompanying photographs of the 1991 Houston premiere, these problems would not attend an actual staging of this work where the music has a clear and narrative-based context throughout.
So, how are we to approach this work in its CD form? A parallel which comes to mind is listening to a conventional opera sung in a tongue which one doesn't understand, and for which one has neither libretto nor synopsis. Or, perhaps even more aptly, a ballet where one is similarly strapped for a story-line and unable to see the dancers. Several layers of meaning are left unilluminated but we are left with the music itself.
What is encouraging about Monk's work here is that, as opposed to some of her drier exercises from the past, it does have a feeling of continuity and of succession: each section grows from the previous one, and there is a sense of thematic and motivic growth (albeit not along formal lines) which marks it out from the more militant miniaturist compositions. Monk is also interested in creating music which is pleasant to listen to and which paints pictures, even to the listener with no idea of the story-line. There is a large cast of singers, but it is rare for more than four characters to be singing simultaneously, and more often Monk uses voices in quick succession, each working with different musical material, to build up her overall picture.
The accompaniment is supplied by just ten instruments, five of these being strings. It is very sensitively attuned to the vocalisation, and also contributes some purely musical interludes of great charm. The performance level is very high, the dedication is evident at every turn: as a substitute for being there, this set will do nicely. But I'd love to see a production mounted in this country; or perhaps ECM could release a video version?' (kshadwick / Gramophone)

MEREDITH MONK Dolmen Music

Meredith Monk has such a wonderful and unique vocal style that she is able to sing in complete abstraction (no known words or language for much of the album) yet maintain a very emotional and even sentimental quality in these abstractions, at times. Listeners who can get past just how unique and abstract her approach is will find immense joy and sadness deep within her pieces. On Dolmen Music, Monk wavers from being sad to the point of being quite morose (such as the tracks "Gotham Lullaby" and "The Tale") to being happy to the point of hysteria (as on "Traveling" and "Biography") without skipping a beat. Most of the musical accompaniment is minimalist (mainly piano with occasional, sparse percussion, guest vocalists also being prominent on the final six-part track "Dolmen Music"). This minimalist support only furthers Monk's vast vocal language as the prominent focus in the recordings. Listeners will also be very pleased to find that her wonderful voice is not crowded or overshadowed. A true original, Monk's work should be sought by anyone with an interest in vocal exploration. (Michael G. Breece)

MEREDITH MONK Turtle Dreams

A daring display of vocal gymnastics and a journey back to childhood when all sounds were wondrous, Turtle Dreams includes the title track composition for four voices (two men, two women) and four organs as well as shorter pieces featuring various combinations of voice, Casio, piano, miniMoog, and didgeridoo. Monk's work raises smiles as well as the hair on the back of the neck. Here she seems tapped into some primordial force -- humming, babbling, chattering, all set to looping, funereal organ works of chromatic simplicity. Mesmerizing yet never mechanical, the side-long "Turtle Dreams" and "View 1" derive their pleasures from the infinite sounds of the human voice. The entire album accompanied a multimedia work where Monk and three other singer/dancers were intercut with shots of a turtle walking over various terrains (including miniature cities, looking like a monster movie). Comforting thoughts during any listen. (Ted Mills)

MEREDITH MONK Mercy

Ostensibly a response to watching a Palestinian father and son fall prey to crossfire on the Gaza Strip, mercy journeys beyond grieving or anger to a meditative state that hints at both but submits to neither. The style is coolly contrapuntal: the opening “braid” unfolds like a slow vocal fugue then grows more agitated around the twominute mark as the piano enters and a woman protests across the musical line. Or ist it protest? More voices join in and the mellifluous accompaniment helps turn the tables for what sounds more like celebration. This energetic ambiguity is typical of Monk. … mercy appears to reflect elements of Reich-style minimalism, Satie-style economy, early vocal music and rustic harmonic twists typical of Bartók, Janáĉek, Enescu and the like. The modest resources used – a handful of voices, clarinets, tuned percussion, synthesiser, melodica, violin, viola – meld or converse unpremeditated, much as they would in a folk group. mercy is an outgrowth both of Monk’s maturity and the maturing musical trends that surround her. Like its subject, it is very much of our time. I was very taken with it. (Rob Cowan / Gramophone)

MEREDITH MONK Volcano Songs

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). 

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. (ECM Reviews)

MEREDITH MONK Book of Days

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. (ECM Reviews)

MEREDITH MONK On Behalf Of Nature

“I work in between the cracks,” says vocalist/composer/performance artist Meredith Monk, “where the voice starts dancing, the body starts singing, the theatre becomes cinema.” In a way, everything she does is about ecology – that interconnectedness; those wild vocal noises – and On Behalf of Nature is a treatise without text, an outcry without words. She wants the work: “to expand our awareness of what we are in danger of losing”, and she does that by making music that sounds as if it comes from the earth, feet planted in the mud, voices erupting and gusting and keening. As a live show its physical gestures were a bit stilted and obscure; for me it’s more articulate as music alone. And though Monk’s incredible technical range is going, the softer stuff is still enthrallingly playful and ritualistic. Sometimes it feels weird being a bystander to her music: this kind of elemental rite should involve us all. (Kate Molleson / The Guardian)

With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Meredith aimed to address ecology and climate change, she says: "Believing that music speaks more directly than words, I worked to make a piece with a fluid, perceptual field that could expand awareness of what we are in danger of losing. On Behalf of Nature is a meditation on our intimate connection to nature, its inner structures, the fragility of its ecology and our interdependence." Voices and instruments have equal weight: sometimes each is heard alone; sometimes they are blended to form a new, mysterious sound; sometimes they are combined to create intricate, layered, yet transparent sonic landscapes. 

Ursula Oppens / Bruce Brubaker MEREDITH MONK Piano Songs

Celebrating Meredith Monk as composer, this album of Piano Songs presents a sonic world at once playful and earnest, familiar to those who know the one-of-a-kind universe created in her groundbreaking works for voice. Drawn from music composed between 1971 and 2006, these pieces for piano duet and piano solo are performed by two of today’s most distinguished interpreters of new music: Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. These works are “songs” because they have roots in Monk’s pieces for voice and because they are direct, specific and imagistic. The composer on writing for two pianos: “I delved into different relationships and the possibilities between them; material passed back and forth, dialogues, interlocking phrases, shifts of figure and ground. In some pieces, I emphasized the individuality of each piano, writing for one player as the ‘singer,’ the other as the ‘accompaniment’; in other pieces, I wanted the two pianos to make one large sound.”

As a creator of new opera and music theater pieces, Monk has been hailed for her pioneering work with extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance; over a career of nearly 50 years, she has explored the voice as an instrument unto itself. Yet long before she began composing music for the voice, Monk wrote short piano studies as a music student inspired by the examples of Mompou, Satie and Bartók. She returned to composing for piano in the early ’70s, producing pieces that had their “own topography, texture and mood,” as she writes in the liner notes to Piano Songs. In her piano music, “directness, purity, asymmetry and, above all, transparency have always been important to me. The surface of the music is seemingly simple but the intricacy of detail and the combination of restraint and expressivity challenge the performer. Every gesture is exposed and clear.” 

Reflecting Piano Songs, Brubaker says: “There’s an intriguing balance in Meredith’s piano music between simplicity and a kind of music you’ve never really heard before. It feels familiar and strange at the same time. Some elements can sound almost like folk music, but they can be challenging in the way they fit together. Meredith’s music has a wonderful inevitability to it, as if she discovered it as much as composed it.”

MEREDITH MONK Facing North

Composed while working on the Atlas opera, "Facing North" was composed at the Leighton Artist's Colony in Banff, Alberta, and inspired by the sights and sounds of rural Canada in the winter months. The "Northern Lights" movements are atmospheric and gentle, while "Arctic Bar" represents the sounds of humanity congregating in a warm tavern -- dissonant, happy, and uncomfortable. "Keeping Warm" is an agitated staccato-punctuated vocal pattern that instills the mind with the notion of resorting to movement to keep one's self warm. This is a multi-faceted view of "north" as a state of mind -- what Monk calls "the awareness of the fragility of human life in relation to the forces of nature and in turn the vulnerability of nature itself to the indifference of human beings." Two other pieces are included on this release: the dramatic "Vessel: An Opera Epic" (a composition from 1971 based loosely on the life of Joan of Arc) and "Boat Song" (a movement from Monk's 1979 "Recent Ruins" composition). "Vessel" is an emotional piece; the "Fire Dance" movement is very slow and passionate with drones and throat singing, and the "Epic" portion is very shrill and agitated. "Boat Song" is short and esoteric; it leaves the listener wishing there were more of the whole piece included on this recording. (Mark W.B. Allender)

Meredith Monk SONGS OF ASCENSION

“Songs of Ascension” is a major new work from Meredith Monk. Written in 2008, and recorded in 2009 at New York’s Academy of Art and Letters, it is conceived as a continuous composition, a departure from Monk’s recent collaged or episodic works.

As Kyle Gann writes in the liner notes: “Meredith Monk’s been expanding into the worlds of orchestra and string quartet, which she likes to write for as though the instruments were, themselves, voices. ‘Songs of Ascension’ developed partly from her work with strings, and she teams up here with a string quartet of New York players who are well versed in new music. Add in winds, percussion and two vocal groups to her already extraordinary singers, and this becomes one of Monk’s most musically ambitious ventures. It is also one in which voices and instruments are paired and balanced against each other to an extent rare in her music.” Western and eastern instruments have a role to play, with Asian drone instrument the shruti box appearing in juxtaposition with string quartet at key points in the work’s development.

Inspiration for the piece included an encounter with poet and Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer, who mentioned to Monk that Paul Celan had written about the “Song of Ascents”, a title given to fifteen of the Psalms sung on pilgrimages going up to Jerusalem. "This idea of worship, walking up something and singing, even using instruments fascinated me.” Monk told the New Scotsman newspaper. “I thought, 'why is up sacred and down not sacred?'”

As Monk was pondering this theme and its musical and sonic implications she received a serendipitous call from visual artist Ann Hamilton, inviting her to perform in an eight-story tower designed for a site in Sonoma County, California: “The tower was created in the form of a double helix, two staircases each spiraling up the interior of the structure opposite each other, only intersecting at the top. Not only did the performance space ascend, but the double helix suggested the shape of DNA, the blueprint of life itself. The staircases placed limits on the type of instrumentation – there could be no keyboards or mallet percussion, only instruments that could be carried up the stairs – and thus ‘Songs of Ascension’ had a rather site-specific origin.”

Nonetheless the piece has toured, to exceptional reviews: “The music is glorious”, wrote Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times. “Monk’s most significant growth over the past decade or two has been as a composer. She is a great master of utterance (…) A listener feels somehow in communication with another, perhaps wiser, species.” In the New Yorker Alex Ross suggested that “If Monk is seeking a place in the classical firmament, classical music has much to learn from her. She conveys a fundamental humanity and humility that is rare in new-music circles. She is a brainy artist but never a cerebral one; she shapes her ideas to the grain of the voice and the contours of the body.” Donald Hutera, writing for The Times of London, visited the work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where “Songs of Ascension” received a Herald Angel Award: “No matter what category you put it in, or by what criteria you judge it, this is a special experience. I left it feeling unexpectedly moved, deeply grateful and with a sense of privilege for having been there (…).”