CD ECM Records Meredith Monk: Do You Be

iunie 1986 , ianuarie1987

Meredith Monk Ensemble :

Meredith Monk - voce, pian, sintetizator
Nurit Tilles - pian, voce, sintetizator, claviaturi
Edmund Niemann - pian
Robert Een - voce
Andrea Goodman - voce
Wayne Hankin - voce, claviaturi, cimpoi
Naaz Hosseini - voce, vioara
Ching Gonzalez - voce
Johanna Arnold - voce
John Eppler - voce
Nicky Paraiso - voce

Unsurprisingly, Monk began singing at a young age, even before she was able to formulate words. Perhaps this pre-verbal immersion in music helps to explain her lack of interest in setting words to music, even now. Like the Dadaists, she believes that language can become pure sound, a direct conduit to deeper truths. “The voice itself is a very eloquent language,” Monk has said. In her compositions, the voice has been restored to its role as a kind of ancestral, perhaps pre-historic human utterance, beyond language, a sound capable of forming multiple timbres and textures: yelping, keening, clucking, moaning, ululating. Through her exploration of the voice’s potential—known as “extended voice techniques”—Monk has produced music as rigorous as a medieval motet and as stirring and unfamiliar as the call of a wild animal from another planet.

After training in operatic technique (as well as in dance and theater) at Sarah Lawrence in the early 60s and moving to New York to create her own multi-disciplinary work, Monk experienced a kind of revelation. As she told Bogart: “I realized in a flash that my voice could be a instrument… It could be any age. It could be animal, vegetable, mineral… It could be a landscape.” Boundless vistas of sound, timbre, volume, and texture opened up to her. This aural terrain could be made even more variegated and rich by adding more voices, layered in contrapuntal harmonies or organized into minutely varying rhythmic patterns. To this end, she created Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble in 1978. She has spoken of the radiance of her collaborators, and of the utopian spirit that the ensemble represents: “Singing together is very intimate… You’re so in tune with each other. It’s such an amazing template of the possibility of human behavior, of generosity and… being sensitive to the environment and to the other people.”

Marina Harss

The appearance of words in Meredith Monk’s work can be rather jolting, as it is so easy for one to get used to the lack of semantic footholds. Like few other vocalists (Elizabeth Fraser comes to mind), Monk grinds the surface of what is being conveyed to such a fine patina that quantifiable meaning is often no longer necessary. Her vocal ramblings are mimetic, purposeful. Monk ably switches between registers and modes with lightning precision, creating a veritable conversation in and through a single body, gazing in multiple directions in the same breath.

Do You Be is a Meredith Monk hodgepodge culled from an assortment of operas and theater pieces. As such, it contains more in the way of quantifiable semantics. [ ecm reviews ]