ARTS

Words get in Monk's way
> BY A L E X A N D E R VARTY

ood news for Meredith
Monk: as I write this, the
October monsoons have
given way to clearer skies,
and she may not need to use the rain
gear I suggested she bring during a
recent telephone chat. The weather
was on the innovative singer and
composer's mind when I reached her
at her New York City loft, and not
just current conditions in the vicinity
of the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, where she'll perform with
her ensemble on Saturday (November 12). Global warming is one of her
pressing concerns, especially in light
of the three-year drought that has
parched the southwestern United
States, where she lives part-time.
"It's been terrible," she says, seemingly as eager to talk about this as
her work. "In New Mexico there's
been a devastating beetle infestation,
because the trees can't stay strong
enough if they don't have water. I
think they lost about 75 percent of
the pinon trees in the Santa Fe area."
And with that, she catches herself,
remembering that there's an interview to be done. "Oy, oy, oy!" she exclaims. "That's a good way to start off
our conversation! But music makes
everything better. All the more reason to keep on doing it, you know."
Monk has been making music on a
professional level for 40 years. In fact,
on the day we talk she's rehearsing
for a massive retrospective concert
at the World Financial Centre's Zankel Hall. Bjork, John Zorn, the Pacific
Mozart Ensemble, DJ Spooky, Terry
Riley, and a host of others are all convening to pay tribute to this innovative
and underappreciated artist, while
she herself is readying a new version
of Dolmen Music, one of the strongest
and strangest works in her canon. It
should be a memorable night—and so
should her Chan Centre appearance,
which is also a survey of a sort. The
evening, which is being presented as
part of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, encompasses solo pieces,
an a cappella duet, and two episodic
compositions for vocal ensemble,
piano, and percussion: 2001's Mercy
and 1980's Turtle Dreams.
"It's really a wonderful concert
to sing, and a very nice contrast,"
she says. "Mercy is very moving; it's
not exactly what I'd call pastoral,
but it has a more metaphysical kind
of quality, while Turtle Dreams is
more urban. It has an edge to it,
and it's very, very energetic. So it's a
very good way of showing the range
of what we do."
Granted, what Monk likes to do
is not always immediately apparent.
For one thing, the composer—who
will also discuss her art at Ironworks
on Friday (November 11)—loves to

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Though a musician first and foremost. Meredith Monk searches the spaces
between art forms for ways to immerse her audience in the moment.

blur the boundaries between different disciplines.
"People always say to me, 'How
can you be a musician and a composer, but you do dance and you
do film and you do this and you do
that?"' she comments. "And J say,
'I think of it as one thing, and each
piece is a different balance of those
elements depending on what the
piece really needs.'
"Music is still the centre of it for
me," she adds. "It's the core of everything. But from time to time these
other elements come up in my mind,
and I'll make a piece that includes all
these different perceptions. Things
that fall between the cracks of what
we call the different art forms are
basically where I've found a lot of
my discoveries."
Monk's art is also unrepentantly
abstract, to such a degree that she
eschews conventional storytelling in
favour of ritualized gestures, wordless arias, and polyvocal explorations
of sound. She's interested in what she
calls "primal, visceral experience",
and to that end her long-form pieces
are structured so that each audience
member can create their own narra-

tive from the visual and verbal cues
offered by her group. Words, she
says, would only get in the way.
"I hope that my work is immersive
for an audience, that they can just
drop down into it, and that they can
let go of the chatter of the discursive
mind for a short period of time," she
explains. "What I'm trying for is the
kind of direct experience that we
can't filter out. In a sense wefilterour
experience by labelling it; we have a
kind of verbal screen that filters out
direct experience, and I think that
the power of music is that you can
get past that to direct experience of
the present moment."
This might sound hard to grasp,
but in practice Monk's work is subtle,
complex, and immensely pleasing to
the senses.
"The most important thing to get
across is that people should know
that they can actually enjoy the concert," she says. "Sometimes seeing
people play new music can be like
'Oh, it's going to be this very hushed
sense of high art' and all that, but
the way to experience this music is
just to relax. There's nothing fearsome about it at all." 0

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