Meredith Monk: “Go as far into your dream as possible and find your own unique voice”

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Meredith Monk

“Go as far into your dream as possible and find your own unique voice”

Meredith Monk greets me warmly from her apartment in New York Tribeca’s district —  the same apartment she’s lived in since 1972, along with her beloved tortoise, Neutron. The artist, whose practice spans extended vocal improvisation, composition, piano, art, dance, film and drama, is in a reflective mood.

Monk turns 80 this year and the occasion has afforded the prolific performer time to look back — but it’s not something she likes to do too often or for too long, she quickly points out, tugging on her signature pigtail plaits. “I’m still more interested in what I’m working on now,” she laughs, explaining she’s currently busy in rehearsals for her upcoming appearance at Rewire. “The thing that’s interesting to me is that the ideas are still coming, which is all I ever wanted. I wanted to keep on working until I leave this planet and I feel very lucky that I’m still doing that. My mind is still very fertile.” Context — 9

Since 1965, Monk has been tirelessly creating and evolving her art. She was a pioneer of what is now called “extended voice technique”, but when Monk first began experimenting with her voice in the sixties, the practice didn’t yet have a name. It involves the use of her voice as a singular instrument for communication, making music that sounds as primordial as it does futuristic. She conveys feelings with phonetic devices like howls, gasps, clicks, trills, whispers and yodels to create emotive sonic soundscapes that tell stories without the need for words.

While her work that has influenced everyone from David Byrne to Brian Eno and Björk earned her a Grammy nomination and a Medal of Arts from former US President Barack Obama, she says starting out with this technique in the sixties wasn’t easy and required a lot of nerve: she spent a decade largely in isolation, honing her craft. “My experience at that time was pretty alone,” Monk explains. “But maybe lonely in a good sense of the word because looking back on it, I’m happy that I did have loneliness because I had to go deep inside the human voice. Up until that point, I’d been doing complex pieces that included other forms like gesture and image and I was still looking for that emotional centre to my work.”

It was a challenging time, Monk recalls, saying there were long periods of silences while ideas slowly formed. “We’re all frightened of space, aren’t we?” she says. “But these periods of what I call the desert, I realised eventually they needed to be nurtured. I had a period where I thought I’d never have a new idea again. I was quite depressed.”

Monk says she discovered a book by New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter In Taos, that helped. Mabel moved to New Mexico with her Native American husband and noticed how quiet her husband’s community became over winter. “Asking her husband why that was, he said: ‘Mother nature needs to rest in order to come forth’ and that helped me so much to not be fighting those times where it seemed like ideas weren’t happening. It’s a nurturing period to let those ideas come forth when they’re ready to come forth. You have to respect those periods. Inspiration comes when it comes.”

When inspiration did arrive, “it was an incredible moment”, Monk recalls, when she discovered the power of the voice, something she calls “the first instrument”. “It became the centre of my work and then everything kind of bloomed from that. I’d always made interdisciplinary works, but it took a number of years to find the core amid the mosaic, the ideas.”

Monk was from a musical family — her mother and grandfather were singers —  and part of her time in isolation was also about figuring out where she stood artistically within that heritage too. “Music was and is like a river in my life, the music is the driving force,” Monk begins. “Coming from a singer’s family, it was such an incredible feeling on one hand coming back to my bloodline and on another hand knowing that I’d found my place in my own way. To find your place in a family like that is not always easy.”

Monk eventually combined her vocal expressions with movement and image, something she also charts back to her family. As a youngster, Monk suffered from a visual impairment called strabismus, a condition that led to issues with physical coordination. Her family sent her to classes in ‘Dalcroze Eurhythmics’, a programme that combined music and dance to aid movement. Monk thinks this is why she always saw music “so visually” and why she ultimately built performances that added in

more visual elements. “I love films. Films get me from one day to the next and if I’m inspired by anything, its films. I’m a real movie buff,” she smiles.

It’s perhaps no surprise that filmmakers love Monk’s work too, connecting with the combined visual and sonic elements in her work. Filmmakers as varied as Terrence Malick, Jean-Luc Godard and the Coen brothers have all used her music in their films. She laughs recalling the Coen brothers using her track Walking Song in The Big Lebowski to soundtrack a naked Maud Lebowski (played by Julianne Moore), swinging over The Dude (Jeff Bridges) to throw paint at a canvas. “I thought it was just terrific”, Monk laughs. “Another person that used my music who I love was Terrence Malick. I feel like he uses music in such a beautiful way. I think his way is more of a collage,” she says, relating it to her own style of creating art out of disparate elements. “It was just such a wonderful experience, working with him.”

Film is also important to Monk for keeping visual reminders of her work for when she comes back to revisit performances: keeping a score of her vocal sounds is a complicated affair and not something she’s often keen to do. Many of her transcriptions resemble seismic voice graphs used by phoneticians to help identify voice patterns. “I am leery about the scoring process,” she smiles, half-grimacing. “I still have a very hard time with scores. I just feel that my music exists between the bar lines or just underneath the bar-lines. With my singers, we work viscerally and sometimes we do use scores as mnemonic devices, but I basically try to get away from the papers as quickly as I can because I do think it’s an extra step where you’re memorising it visually rather than kinetically. I think of [what I do existing] more in the oral tradition.” That oral tradition comes from the folk music Monk gravitated to as a young woman when she moved back to New York in 1964 (she was born there in 1942). She says that her return, plus the grittier mood of the city back then, bled into her work. “It was a wonderful time to move to New York,” Monk says, recalling her time in “a teeny, little attic apartment” in the West Village and later Great James Street, which was “pretty rough in those days”. “I loved the loft there, but it was like La Bohème with six flights of rickety stairs. One spark and that entire place would have gone.” She was burgled multiple times. “I’d come home, and my vacuum cleaner would be gone one day, something else the next!” After growing tired of carrying her electric organ and amplifier up six flights of stairs daily — and being robbed — she moved to her current apartment: she says the area was very different to the cosmopolitan centre it is now.

“This neighbourhood back then was so obscure that nobody even knew where it was, but the city had an edgy quality to it and I think you can hear that on my first album, Key. It reflected life in New York at that time. Edwin Denby [dance critic and poet who worked with Orson Welles] heard it and said this is like Manhattan folk music,” she says, explaining how the influences around her — from the sounds of the poets and folk artists playing bohemian coffee shops, to the experimental art of the Downtown scene — found its way into her work.

Monk says New York at that time helped her to be bolder in a multi-disciplinary sense too. “The Downtown world was more experimental with artists there exploring different mediums. The poets were making music, the artists were exploring movement, and everyone was just going across the board of various art forms. I think at a certain point, people went back