Meredith Monk

For more information on Meredith Jane Monk, visit Britannica.com.

Since the 1960s, American performing artist Meredith Monk (born 1942) has earned renown as a composer, singer, dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and critic. Although trained originally as a dancer, she pioneered the multi-textured extended vocal technique and her vocal compositions and performances are known for their emphasis on sounds, syllables and invented language. Monk has received numerous prestigious awards, including a McArthur Foundation "genius" grant. In 2004, the Danspace Project and the House Foundation for the Arts honored Monk's 40-year career at St. Mark's Church in New York.

Monk was born on November 20, 1942, in Lima, Peru, to Theodore Glenn Monk and Audrey Zellman. Her mother, a pop singer who performed as Audrey Marsh and was a vocalist in radio commercials for Muriel cigars, was performing in Peru when she was born. Monk was raised in New York until age seven and then in Stamford, Connecticut. The family's musical talent covers several generations. Monk's great-grandfather was a cantor in a Moscow synagogue and her grandparents founded the Zellman Conservatory of Music in Harlem. Monk was exposed to music and dance at an early age. She began piano lessons at age three with a teacher who shunned traditional lessons and instead introduced her to such composers as Dmitry Kabalevsky, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok. "Much of my early childhood was spent in radio control rooms, watching and listening to my mother sing jingles for soap operas, or ballads and swing tunes for radio variety shows," Monk recalled in a 1999 essay for the New York Times. "I remember hot summer nights, sitting in the corner of a huge studio while men in undershirts sweated as they played their saxes, violins and trombones, and the singers, with their backs to me, crooned the same eight bars over and over before the actual recording session."

To improve her daughter's physical coordination, which was hindered by a visual problem, Monk's mother enrolled her in Delcroze eurhythmic classes. The courses, which taught movement through music, profoundly affected Monk. "Usually, what happens is, kids learn music through movement, dancing, and catching balls in rhythm," Monk told Gus Solomons, Jr., in a 2001 interview for Dance Magazine. "Most people were learning music through movement, but I was learning movement through music. Movement and music are so unified for me." Monk began studying ballet at age eight and composing piano pieces while still in high school. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, near New York City, where she continued her classical dance studies and also studied modern dance with Bessie Schoenberg. Courses in music for dance with Ruth Lloyd greatly influenced her.

Paired Dance and Voice

Upon graduating from Sarah Lawrence with a degree in dance in 1964, Monk joined New York's Judson Church group, a well-known downtown avant-garde ensemble. She eventually developed a three-octave range and pioneered a vocal approach called "extended vocal technique," which incorporates overtone, throat singing, yodeling, keening, percussive sounds and micro-tonality. "[I] had a revelation around 1965 of singing - doing my own singing - that idea of exploring my own instrument: seeing all the things it could do, stretching the range, combining male and female within a voice, and so forth," Monk told Solomon. "By applying what I had come from in dance to my voice, I found I had a much more virtuosic instrument as a singer." Two of Monk's best-known pieces composed for the Judson Church ensemble, both from 1966, are "Duet with Cat's Scream and Locomotive," a collaboration with Kenneth King, and "16-Millimeter Earrings." Both are interdisciplinary pieces emphasizing communication themes. "Duet," based on the interactions between a man and a woman, employed the sounds of a roaring engine and a howling cat, while "Earrings" used props, film and a recording of Monk's own voice repeating the word "nota."

Monk founded her own company, The House, which emphasized interdisciplinary works, in 1968, and the Meredith Monk Dance Ensemble as well as a second group, Vocal Ensemble, 10 years later. During this time, she became known both for her defiance of easy categorization and her nontraditional approach to performance. "I think of myself as a verb, not a noun," Monk told the Chicago Tribune's Sid Smith in 1996. "I compose. I do movement. I deliver text. And, depending on the form I'm working in, I orchestrate. Another way to put it is I make a mosaic. I lay down tiles and make an overall configuration from those strands." Monk's performances typically focused less on technical skill than on raw energy and creativity, which riled some audiences and critics. "We're purposely not doing a virtuosi kind of movement. It's more primal, not striving for that Western European tradition of line in space and geometry. It's more an axial idea of the body," she told Solomon. "When we did 'The Politics of Quiet' [1996] the first time in Copenhagen, people really hated the folk dance; they said, 'Some of these people are not dancers!' To me, the way they did the movement was so authentic! The idea of a folk dance is that everyone in the village can do it."

Rock and roll music largely influenced her approach to composition and performance, Monk said in her 1999 New York Times essay. "Rock-and-roll was also a strong presence for me and for many other composers at that time, reminding us to go back to the heartbeat, raw energy, blood, fearlessness, thrust," she wrote. "I was very much alone in those early experiments, trying to make my voice a conduit for the raw, essential vocal impulses that I was exploring and then shaping into pieces. Yet I was encouraged by my jazz and rock musician friends, who recognized in those first relentless songs the beginnings of an authentic musical sensibility."

Unconventional Performances

Monk also staged her pieces unusually. For example, "Juice: A Theatre Cantata," a 1969 piece, was staged in installments, beginning with a woman riding a horse down Fifth Avenue in New York, followed by 85 singers playing Jew's harps along the Guggenheim Museum's spiraling ramps and performances in front of paintings by Roy Lichtenstein. A second installment took place three weeks later in a theater on the campus of Barnard College and a third installment in Monk's loft. A 1971 piece, "Vessel: An Opera Epic," which sets the story of Joan of Arc in modern-day New York, began in Monk's loft, then took performers by bus to The Performing Garage performance space and concluded in a parking garage. Autobiographical elements entered Monk's work as well. One early piece, "Education of the Girlchild," featured Monk transforming from an old woman back into a small child. The 1976 opera "Quarry," contained childhood memories and referred to Monk's Polish and Russian Jewish ancestors.

By the late 1970s, Monk had begun to incorporate film into her work. "Ellis Island," the film sequence to the 1979 opera "Recent Ruins," which depicted archeologists of the future excavating New York, appeared on its own on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States as well as on European television. The film won a CINE Golden Eagle in 1982. Monk also created a feature-length film, Book of Days, in 1989, that was set in the fourteenth century, using that period in time as a metaphor for the modern world.

In 1985, Monk began practicing Shambhala meditation, which is associated with Tibetan Buddhism. The ritual has impacted both her approach to composition and her interactions with performers. In a 1998 interview with Gia Kourlas for Dance Magazine, Monk explained that she hoped her compositions and performances, too, were spiritual journeys. "It's a quest of trying to offer another kind of experience for people who are bombarded and who live in a world that has a lot of speed," she said. "In a sense, it's thinking of time as timelessness rather than being a mirror of the particular society that we live in. I realized that when you offer a mirror, people go home and don't have anything to work with because, in a sense, we all know what the problem is. What would happen if you showed a different kind of behavior, or if you offered a place for people to relax that part of their minds, to come out feeling a sense of revitalization and awakeness? I think, in both voice and movement, that you really can experience a depth of emotional experience. That you might want to demand more in your life."

Appreciated as an Artist

In 1991, the Houston Grand Opera commissioned a full-length piece from Monk. Employing wordless syllables in lieu of almost any text, Atlas centers on a small girl who grows up to become an explorer. In fairy-tale style, the girl visits farming communities, forests, a wilderness filled with icy demons, a desert and a joyful spiritual realm. The opera concludes with the explorer sitting at a table sipping a cup of coffee.

Amid a frenzied modern pace, Monk has continued to strive for a more relaxed, transformative tenor to her work. "Every piece is a journey into the unknown," she told Deirdre Mulrooney of the Irish Times in 2001. "I think that's really important in our world, because everybody wants to know what something is going to be before it's done. The business world people want to know how long is it going to be, what's the name of it, and what's your tech requirement two years in advance." Monk said she sees her job as resisting such demands. "What is really beautiful about making art is not giving in to that at all," she told Mulrooney. "And sometimes in that process, making it incredibly uncomfortable by allowing yourself to hang out in the unknown. And you really don't know. You have some clues and you keep following them; it's a very intuitive thing. Discovery is what, to me, makes everything worthwhile - as opposed to being a product-maker."

In response to this impetus, Monk created her 1999 touring work, "A Celebration Service." The piece served as a retrospective of sorts on Monk's long career, incorporating both old and new material, along with a range of spoken texts. Monk told the Christian Science Monitor's Karen Campbell in 1999 that the piece was, in part, a reaction to the frantic pace of contemporary culture. "I had been wondering how to make a form that offers a sense of sacred space. The community, the communion experience is still very valuable. I think it's nice to offer people a space in time where they can let go of the discursive yakety-yak that's going on in the mind all the time," she said.

Monk celebrated her 40th year as a professional artist in 2004. That year, the Danspace Project and the House Foundation for the Arts staged a weekend-long anniversary festival and tribute to her work at St. Mark's Church and Monk performed a four-and-a-half hour concert at Carnegie Hall featuring several well known contemporary avant-garde artists, including DJ Spooky, John Zorn, the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Björk. Several years earlier, Kourlas explained Monk's enduring appeal, in her 1998 Dance Magazine article. "[S]he has carved out a unique, brilliant style of wordless singing that treats the voice as a dancing voice and movement as a singing body," Kourlas wrote. "Her voice has all the character, texture, sensuality, and color of her movement."

Periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 1999.

Dance Magazine, July 2001.

Houston Chronicle, October 6, 1985.

Irish Times (Dublin), October 25, 2001.

New York Times, October 31, 1999.

Online

"Meredith (Jane) Monk," Biography Resource Center Online, Gale Group, 2005, http://galenet.galegroups.com/servlet/BioRC (December 13, 2005).

"Merdith (Jane) Monk," Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com (December 13, 2005).

Monk, Meredith (b New York, 20 Nov. 1942). US dancer, choreographer, composer, film-maker, and performance artist. She made her debut as a performer in New York in 1964 after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. Originally one of the leading voices on the American avant-garde scene, her interest in an interdisciplinary approach to performance often led her away from dance into theatre and opera. Her productions are frequently set outdoors or in novel performing spaces. Vessel (1971) was set in three different locations, the first part in Monk's loft, the second at the Performing Garage and the third in a car park. Juice (1969) started at the Guggenheim Museum and worked its way back to Monk's loft. In 1968 she formed a company called The House; in 1978 she added the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble. She has made many recordings and films, including Book of Days (1989). A list of her stage productions includes Me (1963), Blueprint (1967), Title: Title (1969), Needle-Brain Lloyd and the System's Kid (1970), Education of the Girlchild (1973), Quarry (1976), Recent Ruins (1979), Specimen Days (1981), The Games (1983), Book of Days (mus. Monk, 1985), Three Heavens and Hells (mus. Monk, 1992), American Archaeology No. 1: Roosevelt Island (mus. Monk, 1994), The Politics of Quiet (mus. Monk, 1996), and Magic Frequencies (Munich, 1998). She wrote the opera Atlas in 1991, which uses almost no text, only vocal sounds. In 1996 she was commissioned to create a Celebration Service, a non-sectarian worship service, for the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Similar Artists:

Sun Rushing In, Graham Connah, John Zorn, Henry Threadgill, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, David Murray, Dennis Chambers, James Blood Ulmer, Matthew Shipp, Ivo Perelman, Gerry Hemingway, Charles Gayle, David S. Ware, Baikida Carroll, Yosuke Yamashita, Archie Shepp, Roscoe Mitchell, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, Tim Berne, The Art Ensemble of Chicago

Followers:

Helga Pogatschar, Ivo Perelman

Worked With:

Robert Een

Formal Connection With:

John Hollenbeck, Patrick Wolf, Theo Bleckmann

• Born: November 20, 1942, Lima, Peru
• Active: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Avant-Garde
• Instrument: Vocals, Piano
• Representative Albums: "Key," "Turtle Dreams," "Facing North"

Biography

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