Mountain Record: When you were starting out after college and had a calling to explore and develop your art — what were some of the questions that propelled you to move forward?
Meredith Monk: I had a number of interests that were all strands of my childhood. I come from a musical family — I’m a fourth generation singer. My mother was a commercial singer and my grandfather had been a bass baritone who came from Russia to the United States, so music was very strong in my family. I loved to sing; even before I spoke words I was singing melodies. And I had some movement background because I was not very coordinated as a child so I studied Dalcroze eurhythmics. That was my first study of movement. I also did a lot of theater. I needed to try to weave those multiple interests together, so when I was at Sarah Lawrence College I designed a combined performing arts program for myself.
When I first came to New York — I had already done a lot of performing and had done some work while I was still in school — I started performing mostly in art galleries and other kinds of alternative performing spaces in New York. And so those pieces were mostly solo pieces combining gesture with image and a little bit of sound. I somehow sensed when I was a teenager that I wanted to do my own work. I was quite clear that I didn’t want to be an interpretative kind of artist. I had an intuition about wanting to create my own form, in one way or another, whatever that would be.
After about the first year in New York, I really missed singing, so I started sitting at the piano and vocalizing again — regular Western European vocalizing. And I had a revelation that the voice could be like the body and that it could have a kind of articulation and flexibility and fluidity like the body has. That I could find my own way of singing that was built on my own voice — that I could find my own vocabulary. And because I had already, as a choreographer, found my way of finding movement, even being quite limited in my technical abilities as a dancer, I already knew that process of how to dig into oneself and find a kind of essential expression.
By taking that same principle and applying that to singing I was able to open up a whole world. Or, I would say, that the whole world of sound opened up to me, that within the voice are male, female, and different ages and landscapes and textures and colors and ways of producing sound. That was one of those moments — I think my whole life path evolved from that.
MR: Once you had found that principle, were there any key issues or areas where you felt compelled to explore and discover how to express your understanding of it?
Meredith Monk: That has been the journey, the path. It’s a continual excavation process, you could say. It’s like being an archeologist of your own instrument as a kind of microcosm of the human voice, of human utterance, of sound itself. By digging into my own voice I’m uncovering feelings and energies for which we don’t have words — it’s like shades of feeling, early human utterance, and essential human nature. All these years, I’ve tried to keep renewing, keep risking and keep trying to find new things.
MR: When you’re looking for new things — what happens when you don’t feel the muse, or the spirit propelling you? Here at the monastery, art practice is an important part of training for many people. One of the challenges for people is to engage the creative process on a schedule, always trying to discover something meaningful.
Meredith Monk: I think about that “empty” space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I’ve had to learn that over the years — because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.
I remember once I had a long period when I thought; “I’ll never have another idea again! I’ve explored everything.” You’ve got this backpack of your history that you’re carrying around — how do you throw that off and really start from beginner’s mind? That gets trickier and trickier as you go along, to not fall into your habitual patterns in the way that you create, in the work itself, or anything.
Well, during that long period when I was feeling really down I read about the Taos pueblo in a book by Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was a society woman in the early twentieth century, and she ended up going to Taos and marrying a Native American from the pueblo. During the winter she wondered why everyone tiptoed around wearing soft moccasins and there was a keeping of so much silence in the pueblo. She asked about it and they said, “We have to make sure that Mother Nature gets her rest. She needs her rest so that everything will bloom in the spring.” I was so touched by that and I realized that that’s the nurturing of those periods that you think are fallow but are actually rich with possibility. You’re alive then and part of the ebb and flow of creation.
MR: When you are working on a new piece how do you find its authentic voice?
Meredith Monk: I think that it is an uncovering process, and I try not to necessarily accept the first or easiest solution. Making a work is a digging down process. I was thinking about it last night — how one of the things in practice is to really be in the moment and accept things as they are. And I was wondering about that in terms of the dissatisfaction aspect, because often one of the problems in art is that people are too easily satisfied. There needs to be some kind of sifting process, where you take the time and patience to work through the easiest and most superficial solutions in order to discover something deeper.
I always think of the way that I work as similar to making a soup. You have vegetables and then you put them in the water and then the vegetables stay vegetables for a while. You just allow them to be separate — the carrots are carrots, the peas are peas and everything is just simmering. You’re working very slowly, and little by little the vegetables start boiling down, and then little by little the soup becomes absolutely essentialized. That’s what I really think the process is about. And that takes some time and patience.
I think I still have some confusion about the critical mind. But it seems that there’s a difference between the critical mind, which is a kind of judgment, and has a harshness built in, cutting off impulses before they can develop, and discriminating intelligence, which can differentiate between what is authentic or genuine and what is contrived or forced. That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.
MR: Last night you said it had been a while since you had performed “Our Lady of the Late.” When you revisit old works do you often find that more is revealed?
Meredith Monk: Sometimes in the past when I was going to perform a piece again I would listen to old recordings and try to reproduce the material. This time I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn’t work.
So this time I didn’t do that. I did listen to an old recording, once, to familiarize myself with the music. But then I rehearsed singing with the glass, exploring the world of each song and went into the performance feeling prepared but with a sense of trust in the moment, rather than saying to myself, ‘I have to remember this little piece of material and that little piece of material.’ Last night I was beginning from a place of freedom and newness in the music. Not having sung it for so many years, I felt like I was really open to discoveries. That’s what the beauty of live performance is, it’s that you’re always in process.
For example, I must have sung the song cycle “Songs from the Hill,” more than a thousand times — I mean I’ve just sung it and sung it and sung it. But every single time there’s something new in it. It’s so interesting, different aspects just reveal themselves every performance; it changes all the time. Even within forms, the form is very disciplined, it’s very precise, but within those forms is incredible freedom. So it’s a kind of balance between discipline and freedom.
MR: That sounds similar to the senior monks’ descriptions of monastic life. There’s this form, this container — the Monastery — and they talk about the freedom within it. Not so different.
Meredith Monk: Yes, the more I go through life I realize that there’s really no separation between practice and art at all. The two things more and more become one rather than two different aspects of my life. Originally, when I started practice I didn’t see how it affected my art particularly, in terms of sheer artistry. I did feel that it affected the way that I worked with other people and the way I viewed my whole life. When I was young I was very developed as an artist but I never really paid much attention to the life part of my life. I was doing my own work by the time I was twenty years old, and I was very driven and very intense. So before I began practice there was this separation — it was like figure/ground. My art was the figure and the ground was the times I wasn’t doing art. So, when I began practicing I was working consciously on the ground, but now its become just one thing. There’s no figure, no ground, or they shift back and forth all the time.
MR: One of the things you’re working on is called the “Impermanence Project.” I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.
Meredith Monk: A group called Rosetta Life, that sends artists out to hospices in England, came to talk to me in February 2003. I lost my partner of 22 years in November 2002, so I was really in my grieving process — I still am — but I was thinking of nothing but impermanence then.
This organization sends artists to hospices and they work with people who would like to create something of their own, artwork of some kind — it could be photographs, it could be videos, about the dying process. They have a web site where every person that wants to be in the program has their own web page and they make poems. It’s unbelievable. And it’s people from all different classes, even people that are not literate, old, young, all kinds of people in this program.
They were doing a festival in London and they wanted me to contribute something. They said my music could express the voice of the dying. I wasn’t sure whether they wanted me to make a score for work that they were doing with the people in hospice, but I said, “It seems it would be better if I tried to make my own piece, because I do multimedia kind of work and I’d like to try to make my own piece.” And they said, “We’d like the hospice people to recognize themselves in your piece.” And I said, “I’m not sure that I am able to do that because I can’t really make pieces to order. I’m not sure that I could work with other people’s material, because I’m not a storyteller or playwright or something like that.” So I said, “I’ll go there and speak to some of the patients” — that was the first part of the process — “and we’ll see what happens.”
So I went last October. We had a group of six people the first day and six people the second day. The foundation had gotten participants to come to an arts center in London from different hospices. It was a neutral ground. Some of them had never met each other. It was beautiful because they were very supportive of each other’s process. And I sang for them a little bit and we talked about their process, almost as a catalyst, as an inspiration for energy.
My partner sometimes liked to go into the studio and improvise voice things just for fun. When I returned from England I transcribed one of her melodies, and had some of the hospice participants sing it, because they said they liked to sing. Their singing is very raw, but I’m going to use it for the final work. The first half will be a music concert with the Ensemble. After intermission with the house lights up you will hear the hospice patients singing my partner’s melody one by one. Then the house lights go down and the piece begins with a video of extreme close-ups of their faces just looking out, being. There will be very slow dissolves between their faces. Then John Hollenbeck, who’s a wonderful percussionist, will intermittently and softly play the spokes of a bicycle wheel. It’s unbelievable, the sound of the spokes going around and around. Then at the end of the piece, we sing the melody again, but I’ve added harmony and counterpoint to it, and you hear my partner’s voice on tape singing over the voices of the Ensemble at the very end. So, it comes full circle. Within the piece I also sing a solo called “Last Song” with words by James Hillman. The words are a list of phrases using the word “last” in ways that we take for granted — some of them are ironic and some of them are very profound. They are recognizable as words but then they become more and more abstract, dissolving into pure sound.
I’m sure that some of the hospice participants will be in the audience. One of them has already died. And, you know, all of us have impermanence in common. It’s something that all human beings share. We don’t know when, but we do know that we’ll die. So my big aspiration is that whatever we do in July, it will honor these particular people as well as acknowledge that we are all part of the same process of living and dying.
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