1/9/2023 0 Comments Meredith monk dolmen music![]() ![]() But, by just going into my own voice, my own instrument, and exploring it deeply, you start to come across sounds that have been created by people across the world, throughout history. “I’ve never studied world music I don’t love the idea of going to a culture and exploiting it. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that before there was language there was music,” she says. And I was never really a minimalist: any repetition in my music comes from the folksong tradition.” Where Glass’s instrumentals often invoked early forms of baroque and renaissance composition, Monk’s vocal-based work reached much, much farther back into musical history – investigating the prehistoric roots of music itself. “As a singer, I was rooted in folk music and the body. “They were always much more conservatory based,” she says. Monk’s musical peers include her fellow downtown composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, friends she is often lumped together with. She’s talking to me via Zoom from the loft apartment in Tribeca in which she has lived since 1972, with only a tortoise called Neutron for company. It’s why I consciously tried to pull my range out, to find unorthodox ways of creating sound using my entire body.” I started to think what a spinning voice could be, what a jumping voice could be, how could a voice move like a spine or a hand? I was very aware of the ancient power of the voice. It could contain landscapes and genders and characters. “The human voice could delineate shades of feeling. ![]() “When I first came to New York, I had a revelation that the voice could be an instrument,” says Monk. ![]() This is music that can tell stories and convey emotions without words music that can be joyous or mournful, comforting or distressing, often all at once. Some of what Monk does could be described as “sound poetry” but it is never ugly or wilfully experimental. She integrates animalistic grunts, growls, chuckles, chirrups, howls, gasps, whispers, clicks, squeaks and yodels into her vibratoless, three-octave range. Listen to her piano songs such as Do You Be, or her staged works such as Atlas, and she can resemble a babbling child, a primeval shaman, or a shrill, operatic mezzo-soprano. Her voice is a truly remarkable instrument. A true original, Monk‘s work should be sought by anyone with an interest in vocal exploration.M eredith Monk is – among other things – a composer, a pianist, a dancer, a choreographer, a film-maker, a playwright and a curator. Listeners will also be very pleased to find that her wonderful voice is not crowded or overshadowed. This minimalist support only furthers Monk‘s vast vocal language as the prominent focus in the recordings. 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’). 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. Listeners who can get past just how unique and abstract her approach is will find immense joy and sadness deep within her pieces. “ 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. ![]()
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