Do You Be?
An Appraisal of Meredith Monk
Introduction
Several decades ago, when I was a mere teenager in Würzburg, Germany, some mad visionary decided to open a record store focusing on music that, at the time, still had the whiff of being avant-garde or even experimental but really is the contemporary branch of classical music. At the time, Würzburg was a blessedly small city with only 126,000 inhabitants. Of course, that also meant that Würzburg was a cursedly small city, hence me now living in a city of barely acceptable size. Either way, given Würzburg’s size, it was all too predictable that I would find myself standing in said store within days of its opening. Now “store” is too grand a word for what really was the large living room of a ground-floor apartment, reachable through a long hallway from the entrance of a residential building and converted to a record store with custom press wood shelving best described as barely functional.
Sadly, I have no mental image of the proprietor, whose labor of love forever opened my ears to sounds that I can’t fathom living without. It is thanks to him that I discovered many of my favorite composers of contemporary classical music. The one dearest to both my heart and soul is Meredith Monk. It was Dolmen Music that opened the door to an entirely different world of music, soon thereafter joined by Turtle Dreams, also acquired from said store. Meredith’s music is unique and special because it comes from that most essential and most human of instruments, the voice. But it dispenses, for the most part, with human language, which at its most benign can get in the way of just being, of experiencing.
Other Worlds Revealed
Meredith’s gift to this world is music that sings, wails, chirps, growls, purrs, clicks, and, most importantly, always breathes. It is music about the fleeting moments of the everyday and the mysteries of the sacred alike. It largely ignores the classical arrangements of classical orchestras and instead is so sparse in non-vocal instrumentation as well as complex melodic expression that one might call it “minimalist”. But it also reminds of folk music, which—just like Meredith’s compositions—are part of a more oral, community-based, nurturing, and often female tradition. Over the years, I have encountered many a music critic who describes Meredith’s work as somewhat comparable to or reminiscent of Gregorian Chant. That comparison seems like a disservice to me because it zooms in on one aspect of her music, a sometime sparse aesthetic of mysterious remoteness, but neglects so many other aspects of what she calls extended vocal technique that are equally important. It also has the faint malodor of sexism, since Gregorian Chant often was an all male affair. Meredith’s work obviously is not and, in fact, her most recent work, Cellular Songs, derives its amazing power in part from being an all female performance.
To better understand the limits of that comparison, let’s consider Astronaut Anthem from Meredith’s 1987 album Do You Be, not coincidentally also the title of this appraisal. The song starts with an undistinguished, low grade murmur by Meredith and her ensemble accompanied by the piano’s exceedingly slow four chord repetition. Out of that grumble then emerges a celebratory chorus that indeed is reminiscent of Gregorian Chant and similarly heavy on male voices. As the song progresses, the chorus grows in intensity and slowly reaches upwards. The melody also becomes more complex with different singers providing point and counterpoint. But just before the chorus reaches its presumptive climax, out of nowhere, the women join, sharp vocal glissandi rising to higher registers, blaring a dissonant alarm that envelops and then subdues the refined chant and thereby grinds the song to a halt. Any listener at the time of the album’s release would immediately recall the images going around the world just a year prior: On , the space shuttle Challenger broke apart into flight, killing all seven astronauts and showering earth with pieces of debris.
Quite clearly, Astronaut Anthem draws on Gregorian Chant to commemorate and celebrate the deceased. Yet it also makes the horror of an exploding spacecraft viscerally audible through human voices calling out in severe distress, a moment that still makes me cry over 30 years later. But it doesn’t stop there. The sum of the song distinctly is greater than its parts. The song serves as celebration of human ingenuity, in awe of us literally reaching for the sky. Yet the song also is warning that any flight of human fancy must necessarily end back here on earth. The question then is whether we can meet our maker with integrity and, ideally, love. If you think that’s putting too much into of music or that the sentiment is somewhat trite, that’s fair. But I would also counter that the song is delivered with deep sincerity and honesty. The emotions and thoughts I just described are right there for you to hear as well. The lesson, while familiar to all of us, is so very challenging, since it requires tending and nurturing at all times. The ultimate wonder of Astronaut Anthem, beyond being a beautiful and touching song, is that it helps center the listener and thus prepare her to do just that tending and nurturing. It even gave my ailing aging cat King Arthur a final moment of peace just before passing. So, I encourage you to trust Meredith and let her guide you on a journey unlike few in this world.
At this point, two disclaimers are in order. This is very much a personal appraisal for those same disclaimers. First, since childhood, music has been an essential force in my life. It nurtures, comforts, celebrates, distracts, energizes, and heals. But I have no ability to compose music myself. I did play the piano—for some definition of play—from my mid-oughts well into my teenage years. Towards the end of my piano playing days, I was competent enough to play Bach and Bartok. That seemed a perfect high note to stop playing. It also seems apropos of me straddling a classic education with years of Latin and Ancient Greek, yet working with that epitome of modernity, the computer, throughout my professional career. In simpler words, I have basic music literacy, but I certainly do not command the vocabulary or insight of a music critic, let alone a serious performer or composer. I am writing from the perspective of a well-informed fan, in the best sense of the word: somebody who is fanatic about something that matters.
Second, my personal perspective of Meredith’s work is necessarily lopsided because all early exposure was through recordings. I would argue that music is indeed the center of Meredith’s universe. But her art goes hand in hand with human gesture and motion. More fundamentally, Meredith’s work is inherently performative. It certainly also is a form of dance. It probably is for those very reasons that I cannot sit still during her performances. My body just needs to move with her music, even if I don’t know exactly how to. But those aspects were missing from my first forays into her work and it is only through the last 16 years of living in New York City that I was able to fill in some of those blanks. In some ways, my incomplete early experience of Meredith’s work mirrors the challenges posed by a practice of art that is closer to an oral tradition and thus so very brittle and possibly fleeting.
A New, Urban Tribe
How to preserve that practice has been an important consideration for Meredith as well as the House Foundation for the Arts, the charitable organization that supports Meredith’s work.—At this point, I must acknowledge that the executive director of the foundation carries much of the burden of taking a very distinct artistic vision and turning it into reality, which is limited by space, time, and funds. I had the pleasure of personally interacting with executive directors Barbara Dufty, Olivia Georgia, and Kristin Kapustik on many an occasion, and I am in awe of their work. Thank you!—But back to Meredith creating a new oral tradition: The very beauty of a city like New York is its lively arts scene. Yes, it is a mere shadow of the arts scene during the 1970s and 1980s, with many, especially younger artists displaced to neighboring Philadelphia or even far-away Detroit no thanks to ever rising real estate prices. Yet art still is what brings us together in this city.
As a result, the many efforts towards teaching and preserving the extended vocal technique, emotion, and wisdom of Meredith’s work are finding ready practitioners and thus are starting to pay off. For instance, in at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, 21 choristers—some so young they seemingly just started kindergarten—from the Young People’s Chorus of New York City joined the ensemble to perform Dancing Voices. A few months later in , several choristers again joined the ensemble, this time at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the amazing final moments of Cellular Songs. Having had the good fortune to be present for both events, I immediately saw the connection and am deeply appreciative of Meredith incorporating those young performers in what—in no small part thanks to them—turned out to be the grand finale of her latest work.
The changing ensemble itself also reflects this quest for continuity. Cellular Songs’ Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, and Allison Sniffin have been performing with Meredith for decades. Out of such a long and intense association comes a deep bond. I vividly remember Katie and Meredith performing a duet at Dancing Voices because, while I had seen both perform that same song several times, I had never noticed the love in Katie’s eyes before. That would be the purest love of all, the one that sees the other and accepts her unconditionally. But Cellular Songs very much includes a fifth woman, Jo Stewart. She may be considerably younger than the other four, but she certainly is performing as a peer. That is an amazing exchange to behold. The older women have accepted Jo into the ensemble and Jo has made Meredith’s new oral tradition her own.
The way Cellular Songs marks a rite of passage and also continuity reminds me of African and Australian Aboriginal tribes, who also practice art by passing performative and thereby sacred knowledge from generation to generation. As an example, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Trio Da Kali from Mali perform in New York City. The trio’s female vocalist, Hawa Diabaté, performed with such skill and depth, she single-handedly summoned the hot winds of Western Africa, from her home country at the edge of the Sahara to Brooklyn on a cold and rainy night. I swear, I could feel them blowing through the concert venue. And I was not alone. My friend Ako, who joined me for the show and whose father stems from nearby Ghana, reported feeling connected to her father more than seemingly possible an ocean apart from the place of his birth and also untimely death.
At some point during that amazing show, the vocalist’s father Kassé Mady Diabaté joined her on stage for a few songs. And suddenly the threshold of revelation became tangible: He too had that same skill and emotional depth to his singing. It distinctly is more than a performance to be witnessed or some recorded artifact to be consumed. It is a tradition and a way of life. That observation equally applies to Meredith Monk. Just maybe, Meredith’s visionary vision really is the seed for a new tribal art tradition, only this time the tribe emerges out of the urban jungle that is New York. The world would certainly be richer and stronger for it.
Cellular Songs is astonishing for two other reasons. First, a real challenge for an accomplished artist like Meredith Monk or the German painter Peter Tomschiczek—I happen to know Peter since childhood and both Meredith’s and Peter’s art adorns the walls of my apartment—is how to stay true to both yourself and your artistic vision without falling into the trap of increasingly mindless repetition. That trap is powerful because you just know that the repetition will find appreciation and even success. It probably is best illustrated by the many once ground-breaking and youthfully rebellious rock bands now performing the same set of songs over and over again to sport stadiums full of middle-aged people. It’s not that we don’t appreciate the performance, we most certainly do. But something essential to art has gone missing.
Cellular Songs points towards a remarkable solution for avoiding that trap. Meredith pared down her already sparse performative style to the bare essentials, possibly even less, to the point where it almost becomes a living glyph. That would not be the kind of glyph sent as warning to burn in the desert at night. But it nonetheless is a glyph of similar revelatory impact. That realization struck me as I was watching the five women stage Cellular Songs. At some point, a cell, really Jo Stewart, dies right there on stage while the other cells, really the other four women, tend and comfort her. All this was realized with highly stylized, sparse motion—remember that earlier disclaimer about having missed the motion; you really gotta be there if you can—and with only occasional hissing or clicking sounds. Yet the moment hit hard and stuck with me. I can feel shivers running down my spine as I write this. You really gotta be there if you can!
Second, Cellular Songs dispenses with male performers. This is not a principled rejection of men. Together with Meredith, Yoshio Yabara again delivered outstanding installation including costume design. When I tried to compliment him, he even had the good graces to admit that the visually striking contrast between white materials that reflected black light and those that didn’t was a fortuitous accident. But at a time when women finally had more than enough of toxic masculinity, it feels just right that Cellular Songs places women front and center. That is my take. But it also about sums up Meredith’s take. She told me so, when I asked her about it after the work-in-progress performance in . That performance, by the way, was a special treat because it provided a glimpse into a very organic process. The contours of the official performance a year later were very much the same. Yet the details quite clearly evolved and probably will continue to evolve.
That emphasis on organic growth and change was very much front and center during a private concert as well. As it turns out, money cannot buy happiness, but it can very much support an artist and her ensemble while also providing access to a spectacular experience. At that concert, Allison, Katie, and Meredith performed songs spanning a beautiful and varied repertoire. In the intimacy of a Brooklyn brownstone, with only 30 patrons attending, many a song took on an emotional immediacy and force that rendered me close to tears for much of the show, yet also had me burst out laughing once or twice. That show also marks a uniquely odd or oddly unique occasion, since the set list comprised almost only songs with words, as Meredith acknowledged mid-set much to her own surprise.
When performing Memory Song—a song written in mid 1980s Berlin in memory and warning of fascism and nuclear holocaust, a threat made tangible then by the US installing Pershing 2 missiles all over Germany, which also marked the point of my own political awakening—I was waiting for Allison to provide her usual counterpoint with the violin but instead Katie did so by vocalizing the same melody. It wasn’t that Allison didn’t have her violin with her. She pulled it out for the next song. No, the three women had changed the instrumentation of a familiar song, giving it renewed haunting license in these times of renewed nuclear threat. That subtle yet deliberate change stands in sharp contrast to the dictatorial male authorship of a George Lucas, who not only keeps on rewriting dear movies to suit his whims but also deprives us of previous versions along the way. Not so Allison, Katie, and Meredith: Both versions continue to exist, in a sonic garden marked by many a performance and recording, with the women gingerly tending to its plants and gently nurturing them to bloom after bloom.
Companions and Campfires
So, here we find ourselves almost 2,800 words into what is intended to be a personal appraisal and yet, in passages so far, almost reads like a hagiography. In doing so, I have jumped from tender beginnings right to the current end, thus letting me take stock, ascertain, and weigh. That decisiveness of the critic—which reminds of a Caesar declaring veni, vidi, vici—may be necessary at times. But it also appears somewhat out of place in an appraisal that tries hard to give a female artist and creator of a new oral herstory her proper due. Still, I can’t take the male author out of this piece. My own maleness distinctly is part of who I am and how I write. And in being secure in my masculinity, I can also be secure in my purse-carrying femininity. But I can always do more of what we men too often forget to do, namely to listen. Thankfully, this appraisal is grounded in the very act of listening and the act of writing has provided ample of opportunity to listen again and to listen closely. But nonetheless it is time for a change of tone and also direction. Because, if you listen, you cannot but hear that Meredith’s work is less concerned with the ends as well. Instead, Meredith’s work is consistently concerned with the journey, both literally and figuratively.
One of those journeys is Meredith’s opera Atlas. Loosely inspired by the life and writings of real world explorer Alexandra David-Néel, the opera marks a journey that may start like many a journey, with plans made around the dining room table and teary farewells said at the airport. But it also is quite distinct. There is the choosing of companions, with my own introduction being a huge bouquet of wild-ish flowers I dropped off at the stage door when Meredith and ensemble were performing Atlas over the summer of 2001 in Berlin. Meredith graciously acknowledged the flowers in a postcard poignantly sent from Meredith NY later that fall.
Has anything changed? I had my actual audition in Meredith’s loft. Kidding! I can neither sing nor move nor do both at the same time. But after participating in a one day workshop with Meredith, I can attest that she is a most patient and inspiring teacher of her extended vocal technique and all that entails.
Can I find love? There are the campfires as the companions huddle tight at night. I had the distinct pleasure of serving on the board of the House Foundation from 2004 to 2009, with, amongst others, Haruno Arai, Ellynne Skove, and Frederieke Taylor as companions. Sadly, Frederieke passed this February and now is neither hungry ghost, nor ice demon, nor lonely spirit, but our guide from above. In life, she was a most amazing and generous patron and dealer of the arts. She also gave me the critical advice that turned a hobby into art, directly leading to my first group shows and competition win. I am so glad I got to thank her in person and exhort you to do the same for your mentors. It makes all the difference in this world.
But I still hear noise. Over the years, the most festive campfire with the most celebratory crowd of companions certainly was Making Music at Carnegie Hall in . It was a four hour marathon of all things Monk, which even included Björk’s only public performance that year. If there was a pristine audio recording of the proceedings, then you could consistently hear my delighted whoops and yells from my first row seat. But unfortunately there isn’t such a recording—at least not officially. Talking about Björk, in , I had the pleasure of lying a couple of feet away from her on the floor of the Guggenheim, while all of us were enchantedly listening to Meredith and ensemble performing Songs of Ascension in the rotunda above us. Wow, what a magical experience!
What is pain? , we held a board meeting at my new, new apartment in Brooklyn. One of the wild beasts circling that particular campfire was my cat Esteban. Meredith was already uncomfortable because she had forgotten to take her antihistamines against cat allergy, and Esteban certainly didn’t help matters when, after inspecting and ignoring every other companion, he jumped straight onto Meredith’s lap. I am glad that this encounter with the beasts of Brooklyn didn’t prevent Meredith from attending the glorious ceremony in her honor for the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize on the same block in . I am equally glad that I got to be there to cheer for Meredith as well.
Will all this last?
Meredith, I hear you and I love you. Thank you!