CD ECM Records Meredith Monk: Book Of Days

1990

Meredith Monk Ensemble :

Meredith Monk - voce, claviaturi
Naaz Hosseini - voce, vioara
Robert Een - voce, violoncel
Andrea Goodman - voce
Nicky Paraiso - voce
Ching Gonzalez - voce
Timothy Sawyer - voce
Johanna Arnold - voce
Joan Barber - voce
John Eppler - voce
Wayne Hankin - voce, instrumente de suflat
Toby Newman - voce
Nurit Tilles - pian, claviaturi, Hammered Dulcimer

"Book of Days opens, in color, with 20th-century workmen blasting a brick wall, leaving a hole that opens into a black-and-white small town in the Middle Ages. Men, women and children glide about their daily tasks, stopping to answer sometimes tellingly anachronistic questions from 20th-century interviewers...

The medieval Christians are dressed in white; the Jews are in black robes, each marked with a yellow circle. Both are stricken by the plague, for which the Jews are blamed. A Jewish girl has visionary dreams that prompt her to draw crude objects identifiable as a car, an airplane, a gun. At the end of ''Book of Days'' the workmen enter the town and come across the drawings traced into a wall.

But there is no belaboring of those visions - or of the stylized plague. ''Book of Days'' is a very beautiful visual play of surfaces and textures, from brick to rough-plastered wall and from the luminous innocence that lights the girl's face to the canny innocence illuminating the face of the crone, played by Ms. Monk, who teaches her to embrace her visions.

Filmed in Cordes, France, Book of Days was exquisitely photographed by Jerry Pantzer. It is knowingly acted by a cast that includes Toby Newman as the girl, Lucas Hoving as the old physician, Greger Hansen as a young monk and Wayne Hankin as the traveling storyteller. The screenplay was written by Ms. Monk and Tone Blevins." -

Review by Jennifer Dunning for New York Times, January 22, 1990.


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 ]