The Meredith Monk Thread

January 29, 2006
Music

Ms. Monk's Master Class: Advanced Cries, Clucks and Panda Chants
By ANNE MIDGETTE

MEREDITH MONK's music is ethereal, visceral and direct. It relies on building blocks of sound, bits of chanted tune interwoven with cries and clucks and other manifestations of what is known as extended vocal technique. It is about using the voice as expression without mediating elements, like words. And people often describe it as simple.

But anyone who thinks it is easy has never tried to sing it.

This month, 19 singers learned firsthand just how "simple" Ms. Monk's music is. Brought together in a professional training workshop offered by the Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall, they stood in a semicircle in a rehearsal studio on the far West Side of Manhattan one cold afternoon and nearly foundered on a complicated vocal piece. The basic elements didn't seem hard: a catchy tune for the women, a constellation of sounds refracted out of it for the men. But the tune was repeated in a four-part canon and varied subtly with each repetition at the direction of one of the singers, so that everyone had to watch for what was coming next.

There wasn't much margin for error. Ms. Monk had a gimlet eye for detail, zeroing in on every bar. "Your entrance was great," she told one singer. "But on the second repetition, your pitch was flat."

One participant, Holly Nadal, said later: "You listen, and it sounds so free and improvised. You don't realize how much structure is there until you start trying to pick it apart. A lot of people who love her music, and who hate her music, think there's a certain randomness there. But it's highly, highly structured."

Ms. Nadal, a big fan of Ms. Monk, has transcribed many of her pieces from recordings. Yet, Ms. Nadal said, even she had been "surprised at, I don't want to say rigid, but how firm and sure she is: this is right and this is wrong."

If it was new territory for the singers, the workshop, which culminated in a concert on Jan. 15, was also a departure for both Carnegie Hall and Ms. Monk. For Carnegie, it was part of an effort to vary the format of the large-scale choral workshop that has been an annual feature since Robert Shaw founded it in 1990. Last September, the Weill Institute offered a smaller workshop led by the Bach specialist Ton Koopman, an oddly matched partner to the Monk event. In addition, the Monk workshop was a step toward incorporating the broader definition of music that has been evident in programming at Zankel Hall into educational initiatives.

For Ms. Monk, it was possibly even more of a departure. She has long resisted allowing anyone else to perform her work. Having begun the exploration of extended vocal technique with her own voice in 1965, she focused on solo work for years before moving on to ensemble pieces like "Quarry" (1976), or "Dolmen Music" (1979), which incorporated male voices for the first time. In 1978, she founded her own ensemble, and while she has cautiously expanded her reach over the years - creating pieces for the New World Symphony or the Houston Grand Opera, which commissioned "Atlas" in 1991 - she has generally guarded the pieces created for it.

Working like a choreographer, in that she develops her work with the people who perform it, she was even reluctant to write her music down. It took the publisher Boosey & Hawkes five years to get permission to publish selected works, and only two are available. (Others are in preparation.)

So it was a major step last November when, as the culmination of some 18 months of events celebrating her 40th anniversary of performing, Ms. Monk allowed a marathon concert at Zankel Hall in which a number of different artists, from Bjork to the contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, offered her work back to her. The workshop furthered the idea of Ms. Monk's passing on her work, although she still didn't seem entirely comfortable with the idea.

"I sometimes think, 'Why bother with paper?' " Ms. Monk, 63, said of the labor of scoring her pieces. " 'Let it die with me.' But members of my ensemble, like Tom Bogdan and Katie Geissinger, said, 'We want to keep performing this music.' It's important to share the joy of doing it." It sounded like a reminder to herself.

Young singers today may be more open to Ms. Monk's work than those of an earlier generation. Ara Guzelimian, the senior director and artistic adviser of Carnegie Hall, who helped pare the original pool of more than 50 applicants to the final 19, said, "This generation of performers is naturally able to do a wide range of things."

The participants came from many countries - including Norway and the former Yugoslavia - and represented an eclectic range of backgrounds. Caleb Burhans, for one, is a composer, violinist and singer who, as a member of Alarm Will Sound, performed at the Zankel Hall tribute in November. Another, Matthew Ryan Hoch, is a classical singer and an assistant professor of music at the University of Wisconsin.

For singers, the workshop was a rare chance not only to work with Ms. Monk but also to get any kind of formal training in contemporary music.

"There's not much conservatory training for this," said Silvie Jensen, a mezzo-soprano who has sung everything from Hildegard von Bingen to a setting of the American Constitution by Ben Yarmolinsky. "And we all sing in ensembles to make a living, but there is no vocal degree in America for ensembles. We just learn to do it on our own."

There were challenges from the start. For Mr. Koopman's Bach workshop, participants had to show up knowing their music. But it is difficult for the uninitiated to learn Ms. Monk's music on their own. The singers were sent CD's and the scores that exist: often transcriptions of single performances, which weren't necessarily the most helpful means of conveying what was actually going on in the music. Ms. Monk and her ensemble members repeatedly urged the singers to create their own maps or cheat sheets, setting out clearly, for example, how many repetitions of a given unit they had to do, or in what order.

"If you look at the score, it will drive you batty," Ms. Monk said of an excerpt from "Atlas." At one point in "Dolmen Music," one of Ms. Monk's greatest and most difficult pieces, the transcriber seemed simply to have given up.

Furthermore, because Ms. Monk is concerned with the way her music looks as well as how it sounds, it is not something you can perform while holding a piece of paper. So the performers had a week to learn an entire two-hour concert of extremely tricky music, far outside their comfort zone, by heart.

SURPRISINGLY, perhaps, given the kinds of sounds Ms. Monk's work demands, her vocal technique is relatively straightforward. The workshop focused less on the mechanics of making the unusual sounds in her pieces than on getting the forms of the music right, drilling rhythms and notes as one would in any kind of music. Morning warm-ups included a range of exercises promoting breathing and diaphragm support, including a couple handed down from Ms. Monk's mother, Audrey, who sang jingles on the radio for Muriel Cigars.

Ms. Monk herself has taken voice lessons for more than 20 years with Jeannette LoVetri, who, Ms. Monk said, has given her "a strong technical basis." Ms. Monk is as interested as any singer in promoting vocal health; she wants to be able to go on singing for as long as possible. She isn't about to shred her voice. But she does want to push the envelope.

"Sometimes in the classical tradition there's a small parameter of what's possible," Ms. Monk said, adding that teachers can "transmit fear to people: 'If you do this, you'll ruin your voice.' Of course, you don't do an extended technique 19 times. You just do it once."

But Ms. Monk's aesthetic does run against conventional wisdom in that she is not interested in who can make the most beautiful sound. She is looking for other qualities. "The best singers aren't always the best performers," she said. For some of the singers at the workshop, even those with extensive backgrounds in contemporary music, this concept took a lot of getting used to.

Furthermore, her focus extends beyond music. Often called a choreographer, and embraced by the dance world as one of its own, she integrates movement into the fabric of her pieces to a higher degree than may be immediately evident (as in the "Panda Chant" from "The Games," which has everyone stepping to 6/8 time while chanting in 4/4, something Ms. Monk equated to rubbing your tummy while patting your head). She is also concerned with how the piece looks onstage, down to the last detail of what everyone is wearing.

"It's the 20th-century version of the gesamtkunstwerk," Mr. Hoch said, referring to Wagner's ideal of a total work of art. "It's about the whole thing."

For this reason, it is impossible to codify Ms. Monk's work into a series of performance directives. She equates her work to a sculptor's, molding a vowel color here, a movement there, illustrating with her own body and voice what she wants.

"We work years on pieces," she said of her ensemble. "There's a commitment of understanding that's different from me just handing people scores. These are living forms. They need time to be nurtured, developed. Each piece is a world, and the techniques of that world are revealed by that world. It's not, 'I'll just throw in a ululation here.' "

For the singers, the intensity of the experience was made all the more nerve-racking by the demands this music makes on each and every performer. "It's more like a string quartet," said Mr. Hoch. "Everyone has his own individual responsibility."

The key to Ms. Monk's ensemble work is maintaining a balance between following the rules and allowing individuality to shine through, which lends the performers onstage an extra dose of vulnerability. Ms. Nadal equated it to "soldiers at the front lines."

"If you're not covering each other's backs," she said, "you're really in trouble." Of course, as Ms. Monk pointed out to them repeatedly beforehand, the audience wouldn't be able to tell if there were mistakes. But she could.

Simple? No. The Sunday concert, the culmination of all this hard work, was imperfect. Yet it was effective and impressive, given the speed at which it was put together. And Ms. Monk, conflicted to the last minute by the contradictory impulses to praise the singers' hard work and cringe at their mistakes, conceded that "it's special to pass this on and feel that the music will go on." She has agreed to another teaching stint this year, at the Bang on a Can summer institute in North Adams, Mass.

She is now rehearsing her continuing piece "Impermanence"; the latest incarnation will open in Tempe, Ariz., next Saturday and tour before coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November. Dealing with terminal illness, the piece, too, raises thoughts of her legacy.

"What have you left behind?" Ms. Monk asked. "What have you given? What are all of us doing here?"

Discounted in this is the illuminating revelation of her process that the workshop afforded - even if it ultimately confirmed that the best exponent of Ms. Monk's music remains Ms. Monk herself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/arts/music/29midg.html?ei=5088&en=5d948e0b98deefb6&ex=1296190800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print