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 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)