A 2012 tribute album, Monk Mix, featured covers and remixes of her work by the likes of Caetano Veloso, Nico Muhly, Don Byron, DJ Spooky, Lee Ranaldo, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Gabriel Prokofiev and Björk. Brian Eno invited her to his studio on 8th Street in 1978, telling her, “your music is so beautiful people aren’t doing beauty enough now.” In 2015 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Obama. David Byrne befriended her and asked her to score and choreograph a scene in his film True Stories. Monk’s music has attracted many prominent fans. Monk receiving the 2014 National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2015. They were the ones who were saying ‘Girl, go for it!’” When I started investigating these extended vocal techniques, the people who were most encouraging were jazz musicians like Sam Rivers, Collin Walcott, or Naná Vasconcelos. Finding my voice was a lonely process – in a good way. Each of us has a unique vocal language, but we’re also part of the world vocal family. But, by just going into my own voice, my own instrument, and exploring it deeply, you start to come across sounds that have been created by people across the world, throughout history. “I’ve never studied world music I don’t love the idea of going to a culture and exploiting it. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that before there was language there was music,” she says. And I was never really a minimalist: any repetition in my music comes from the folksong tradition.” Where Glass’s instrumentals often invoked early forms of baroque and renaissance composition, Monk’s vocal-based work reached much, much farther back into musical history – investigating the prehistoric roots of music itself. “As a singer, I was rooted in folk music and the body. “They were always much more conservatory based,” she says.
Monk’s musical peers include her fellow downtown composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, friends she is often lumped together with. She’s talking to me via Zoom from the loft apartment in Tribeca in which she has lived since 1972, with only a tortoise called Neutron for company. It’s why I consciously tried to pull my range out, to find unorthodox ways of creating sound using my entire body.” I started to think what a spinning voice could be, what a jumping voice could be, how could a voice move like a spine or a hand? I was very aware of the ancient power of the voice. It could contain landscapes and genders and characters. “The human voice could delineate shades of feeling. “When I first came to New York, I had a revelation that the voice could be an instrument,” says Monk.
This is music that can tell stories and convey emotions without words music that can be joyous or mournful, comforting or distressing, often all at once. Some of what Monk does could be described as “sound poetry” but it is never ugly or wilfully experimental. She integrates animalistic grunts, growls, chuckles, chirrups, howls, gasps, whispers, clicks, squeaks and yodels into her vibratoless, three-octave range. Listen to her piano songs such as Do You Be, or her staged works such as Atlas, and she can resemble a babbling child, a primeval shaman, or a shrill, operatic mezzo-soprano. Her voice is a truly remarkable instrument. M eredith Monk is – among other things – a composer, a pianist, a dancer, a choreographer, a film-maker, a playwright and a curator.
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