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On the eve of her 80th birthday, Meredith Monk is busier than ever. In the last six months, a new creation, a French-language book and a European tour have added to her admirable career. And to demonstrate the relevance of this timeless music, whose healing power is more necessary than ever.
A winter with Meredith
I spent the winter with Meredith Monk. Commissioned by Ircam (thanks Philippe Langlois) to write the "parcours de l'oeuvre" of this extraordinary artist for the demanding and excellent Brahms database, I immersed myself in her life and work for many weeks. And to me, who thought I knew both of them well, having to describe and analyze, in a finite number of characters, this "journey", at once extremely coherent and radically protean, appeared much more arduous than I had imagined. But how fascinating! And how consoling, in this sad winter of war, when this music has revealed all its virtue, its primitive, energizing force! Meredith Monk's music is truly, like few others, a repository of that quality and wholeness "found in cultures where performance art is considered a spiritual discipline, with the power to heal and transform", as she herself wrote in 1983 in a programmatic text, Mission Statement (1).
For many weeks, our house resounded to the voices of Meredith Monk and his band, transforming itself into a tropical forest, a medieval synagogue, a New York loft or an African village, as I discovered and rediscovered the treasures - Dolmen Music (1981), Do You Be (1987), ATLAS (1993), Volcano Songs (1997), Impermanence (2008), Memory Game (2020)? - a discography that must, once again, be credited to Manfred Eicher and his irreplaceable ECM label. Do You Be, for example, brings together pieces from Vessel: An Opera Epic (1971), Quarry: an opera - an emblematic piece from 1976, of which a film version was completed in 2019, the fruit of twenty years of patient restoration work -, The Games (1984) - a science-fiction opera co-written with his long-time companion Ping Chong - and Acts From Under And Above (1986)... I also loved revisiting the early recordings made by Meredith Monk before signing - 41 years ago, for Dolmen Music, after a brief spell with Wergo, Schott's contemporary music label - with the Munich label: the album Our Lady of Late in particular, released in 1973, in which she explores the most extreme and minute possibilities of her voice, accompanying herself with drones made from a single glass of wine:
It's true that the autumn-winter of 2021-22 has been a busy time for this musician, who will celebrate her eightieth birthday on November 20 - and who always impresses with her radiant youthful grace.
First of all, on November 12, 2021, at Mills College, she premieredIndra's Net, a stage work that brings to a close a trilogy - begun with On Behalf of Nature (2013) and Cellular Songs (2018) - about our relationship with living beings and nature. The composer recently confided to me that her memories of this creation are not particularly fond: given in front of an almost empty auditorium due to sanitary constraints, the premiere ofIndra's Net was mainly followed by streaming. Deprived of its essential dimension - the audience's co-presence - Indra's Net was unable to fully set itself in motion...
This winter, Meredith Monk, in the company of percussionist John Hollenbeck, one of the pillars of her ensemble, continued her Duet Behavior series - duet conversations initiated in the 1980s with her friend Bobby McFerrin - with several concerts, including one at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.
And then there was the reissue in January, by Le Mot et le Reste, of Jean-Louis Tallon's book, Meredith Monk, a mystical voice. Initially published in 2015 by Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut, this collection of interviews has been revised and expanded for the occasion: an essential complement to Deborah Jowitt's 1997 book, it retraces step by step the path that has guided this woman born into music(2) since childhood. As in his other collections of interviews (with Gavin Bryars, Philippe Hersant and Pierre Bergounioux), Jean-Louis Talon proves himself to be both a zealous and delicate interlocutor.
It's true that this fascinating book is of particular importance to me, since I have the immense honor (and pleasure) of being quoted in it... In any case, it has only strengthened my admiration for this artist-maverick who has followed her path with disarming integrity and sincerity - " I was considered crazy, or almost," she says. Men found it hard to admit, let alone understand, that a woman could have a vocation, a purpose, that she would be tempted to go to the very end of the artistic adventure to give it meaning, body, while remaining, at the same time, a woman in her own right... " - without ever being cold-hearted.
A flourishing spring
Last but not least, in the spring of 2022, Meredith Monk and her Vocal Ensemble were on tour in Europe. A tour that has just taken in France - between London, The Hague (for a rich portrait at the Rewire Festival) and Luxembourg: in Nantes and at the Philharmonie de Paris (3), she offered spellbound audiences the concert version of Cellular Songs, for five female singers.
I was lucky enough to be present in Nantes on April 19, where she performed in the sumptuous Italian-style hall of the Théâtre Graslin, as part of the Variations festival organized by Lieu Unique with the BNP-Paribas Foundation, whose 2022 program is no less sumptuous. I hadn't seen her on stage since her May 2014 concert at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux, the culmination of a collaboration with the Microcosmos chamber choir directed by Loïc Pierre. And as soon as the lights went out, I immediately rediscovered the unique, profound magic of Meredith Monk's concerts.
Cellular Songs was inspired by her reading of Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Emperor Of All Maladies (2010). Subtitled A Biography Of Cancer, it was the starting point for a reflection on the cell as a life force, and a model "for a possible society", she adds. On stage, four female singers (and occasional instrumentalists) surround the composer. We recognize the faithful Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Allison Sniffin, and a newcomer who dominates them with her tall stature, the young Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, spotted in 2019 in the cast of director Yuval Sharon's revival of the opera ATLAS (1991), at Disney Hall, as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's centenary. All wear black ankle boots and white costumes subtly adapted to their morphology and personality. The stage is bare, except for a piano and five stools. The lighting is in tune with this graphic simplicity: apart from a few color variations on the background cyclo, it sparingly cultivates the art of chiaroscuro.
The stage version of Cellular Songs included numerous video projections, projected from above onto a white floor, and concluded with the appearance of a chorus of ten little girls and teenagers (recruited each time from the concert town) who eventually mingled with the singers. Here, in this tighter version, which offers, as the composer puts it, "the essence of Cellular Songs ", the five female singers occupy the space with confounding naturalness, in a few imperceptible movements, inextricably linked to the music.
By its very subject, this piece summons one of the most precious qualities of Meredith Monk's music: its organic dimension.
Cellular Songs thus asserts itself as a powerful meditation - in the most spiritual sense of the word - on the individual and the group; on cooperation and interdependence, an idea that also lies at the heart ofIndra's Net (in the Buddhist tradition, Indra's Flet is a metaphor for the universe, describing the interconnection of all living beings). Each of its three parts is punctuated by a solo: the first concludes with a version of Happy Woman in which the almost octogenarian demonstrates impressive vocal agility, and whose text (a rare commodity in Monk's work) takes on poignant resonance; the second features a no less breathless vocal solo by Katie Geissinger; and finally, at the heart of the third part, an extraordinary choreographic interlude by Ellen Fisher, one of the company's leading performers. Lying balanced on a stool, she mimes (she tells me after the concert) a body plunging into the water to the bottom of the ocean, bringing back to the surface the pearl collected in an oyster... A weightless moment, whose power is due in no small part to Ellen Fisher's physical presence, and to that hairless skull which resonates intimately with the subject of the piece...
In counterpoint, Cellular Songs offers marvellous moments of collective communion. At the end of the second part, for example, when the five musicians end up gathered around the piano, each playing on the keyboard, as if they were one with the instrument. Or in the third part, when, seated in a circle, they seem to pass the note to each other in a single breath, like a candle that must not be allowed to go out. They end the show tightly entwined, like so many cells of the same organism. An organism which, for 1h10, never ceases to transmit its positive energy, its serene and beneficial magic. Just like the music that, six decades later, continues to blossom.
David Sanson
