‘The voice is my river’: Meredith Monk reflects on 6 decades of music-making

If Meredith Monk had a business card, she might need to print on both sides to adequately represent her career. Few artists have opened their minds as wide or embraced as much as Monk has over a span of nearly 60 years, including indelible work as a singer, composer, pianist, filmmaker, director, choreographer, dancer, recording artist and educator. Manfred Eicher, founder of the ECM label, for whom Monk has recorded since 1981, classifies her as “one of the truly original artists of our time.”

Now 81, the New York native remains best known for her extended vocal technique, a concept she found her way to in the 1960s that has come to comprise everything from piercing, animal-like ululations to hushed lullabies, all delivered in her own phonetic system that bypasses language and aims directly at the senses. Though she now counts pop auteurs like David Byrne and Björk as ardent fans, her theatrical presentations weren’t always embraced as she carved her distinctive path. She has told the story of a 1970s Montreal performance that nearly broke into a brawl when one agitator was clobbered over the head with a motorcycle helmet for making too much noise. When another performance was met with booing, her friend John Cage congratulated her, advising that if nobody boos, you’re doing something wrong.

Monk’s interdisciplinary work is often described as “avant-garde,” a term she has long resisted because of how it tends to paint the art in question as inaccessible. “I always wonder, ‘avant’ of what?” she asks. “New discoveries are as old as the sun.” While Monk says she is always exploring what can’t be named and trying to make pieces that can’t be made, she wants her music to benefit listeners — either to provide a reflective space or, as she puts it, “to wake people up.”

From her home in upstate New York, where she often retreats in the summer to focus on her work, Monk joined a video chat for an expansive conversation about searching for new art forms between the cracks of existing ones, how her spiritual practice dovetails with her music, the career-shifting epiphany she experienced while listening to Janis Joplin and her new piece Indra’s Net, coming to New York’s Park Avenue Armory in September.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tom Huizenga: The last time you and I spoke, it was nearly 30 years ago and your opera ATLAS had just been released on CD. It’s inspired by an early 20th century explorer, but I’ve always thought of ATLAS as your own story — like this real-life adventurer, you’ve been an explorer yourself, with a strong drive to seek out the unknown, the mystery, the clarity in life. What prepared you, early on, for this journey of artistic exploration?  

Meredith Monk: I've always been very curious, and from a pretty early age I knew I wanted to make things. My grandfather was a carpenter who came to America and opened up a lumber yard in the East Bronx, and my father felt obligated to go on with it. He was an incredibly creative person, who turned the yard into an interactive space called Lumberville. And my mother was a wonderful commercial singer on the radio. Usually, I think I got my inspiration from my mother's side of the family — her father was a bass-baritone from Russia, and my mother's mother was a concert pianist — but when I actually think about it, my father's lumber world also gave a lot to me as a child.

What kind of music did you hear around the house growing up?

The first thing I remember is my mother singing “Danny Boy” to me as a lullaby. She was in the pop world, the soloist of the week on radio variety shows — The Prudential Family Hour, The Big Show. She was very flexible vocally, really a soprano, but they had her croon during that postwar period. She made a bunch of recordings with RCA Victor of shows like Finian's Rainbow and Annie Get Your Gun. Then it developed into singing jingles; in those days there was no tape, so she would sing a jingle every day at 1 in the afternoon on a radio soap opera called The Road of Life. She would drag me around — I'd be sitting on the organist’s lap or drawing on the back of the script as they were doing the show.

When you were young, you were enrolled in what is called Dalcroze Eurhythmics. It's an approach developed by the Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze as a way to teach music to students through movement in the body. How old were you when you started?

It was from when I was about 3 to 6 years old. The Dalcroze was really wonderful for me because I was very musical, but movement was not so easy for me. I think a lot of the other children were learning music through their bodies, whereas I was learning my body through music.

Dalcroze said all musical ideas reside in the body. He had a three-pronged pedagogical system that was rhythmic training, solfege — which is the “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do,” but we learned it by moving our arms in space so we could know what low to high was. Some people don't have that concept of music — it sounds like some foreign language to them — but if you actually work it out physically, you start to understand how you hear pitch. And the third prong was improvisation, which I always loved.

It sounds like Dalcroze gave you the essential building blocks for your entire career.

I think it did, but I wasn't aware of it until I was working on ATLAS. When I had my first ensemble, [the performers] were very young, and they grew up on my way of doing things — most of them came from both singing and movement backgrounds. But when I started working with classically trained singers in ATLAS, a lot of the cast were taught line and long phrasing, but not that much precise rhythmic articulation. So they would get confused with how intricate my rhythms were, and they'd say, “Well, how do you do that?”

Is it true that you never went to a conservatory to study music?

I didn’t go to a conservatory, but I've been thinking a lot about so many people I’m grateful to. My early piano teacher began teaching me Kabalevsky’s children's pieces, rather than the 19th century repertoire, so my ear was very tuned to composers like Bartók and Gershwin. I was already writing pieces that had a little bit of that feel to them. In high school I had a wonderful theory and harmony teacher; I was making little piano compositions and he was very open to them. Then, at Sarah Lawrence College I was in the music and the dance departments, and making pieces for a wonderful teacher named Ruth Lloyd. I remember in the concerts I would be down in the pit playing four-hand piano with her, and then running backstage to be in a dance piece. But I was also in the voice department, singing opera and lieder.

It seems like, almost from the beginning, you were an interdisciplinary artist, weaving music, singing, dance, objects, film and aspects of theater into your work. How do you decide what to include for a particular piece when so much is at your command?

Each piece is kind of a world, and I feel that the piece tells me what it needs. Does it need images? Does it need light? Does it need objects or not? Is it just a music piece? That's part of my exploration every time.

There was a piece called The Politics of Quiet that I made in the mid-’90s. I came into rehearsal with most of the music done, but I felt that I wanted to make a more theatrical piece with it — and every time I tried images or thinking about film or narrative elements, it just did not want it. What I'm interested in is finding new forms between the cracks of the art forms, so the piece ended up being music with various formations. It did have some movement, but it was not theatrical. What I ended up realizing was that it was more like a nonverbal oratorio form. And it didn't want anything more than that.

You've spoken before about what you call “beginner's mind” when approaching a new piece. How does that work?

Well, usually I'm scared to death [laughs]. I start from different places, but normally I start with the music, at the piano. It's a pretty intuitive process at the beginning, and then I find one clue, or an accumulation of clues where I realize, “Oh, I think this is going to be the beginning of an entity.” And then my anxiety changes more into interest and curiosity. Then it just builds from these fragments of ideas. At a certain point, I ask that question: What does this piece need? Is it going to be a large theatrical piece? Is it going to be a chamber piece? What's the sound world that this piece is asking for?

Thinking of beginner's mind reminds me of when I met Arvo Pärt. He told me about the importance of tabula rasa, a blank slate — which is also the name of one of his compositions. He said you shouldn’t be afraid of the empty canvas.

I say “starting from zero.” Just try not to have the backpack of the past influencing this moment. If you can do that, and have that kind of quiet, then things start revealing themselves. Because ultimately, I feel like the music is coming through me — I'm working very hard on it, but listening for it is a lot of the process.

After Sarah Lawrence, in the mid-1960s, you returned to New York City and absorbed all of the avant-garde art, theater and dance happening. What was that scene like?

There was a sense of adventurousness, because the whole society was changing at that point. There was a community called the downtown arts scene, and people from all disciplines were trying to go past their own discipline and find new ways of doing things. For example, there were wonderful dance pieces made by sculptors. There were wonderful music pieces made by poets. People were really trying to find the boundaries, or lack of boundaries, of their art forms. And then years later, they went back to their own mediums, but with insight they gained from stretching out.

I wish I could have been there to see some of your early work in the ‘60s. There is, at least, an excerpt of your piece 16mm Earrings from 1966 on YouTube. You’ve pointed to it as a “breakthrough” piece for you — it incorporates vocals, objects, movement and film.

I always glimpsed the possibility of weaving a form together with these different perceptual modes. Could that be done? Could I make a kind of visual and oral nonverbal poetry, and keep it very integrated? Because there were a lot of people throwing films on a screen and dancing in front of them — you put anything on and “the medium is the message.” But I never thought that. I always wanted to make something that had an inevitable form, that was like a woven poetry of the senses. For some reason, that piece just came flowing through me; it was like worlds opened up that I knew were there, but I had never known how to work with them.

Pop music was also in flux then, with British bands like The Beatles suddenly dominating. You met Yoko Ono in 1965, even before John Lennon had met her.

I didn't know her too well, but I met her. She was part of that Fluxus group and she was not doing music at that time; she was a very early conceptual artist. I remember a piece … at the Judson Gallery that I think was called Stone, where they had built a white room. Outside the room you put on a black bag that you zipped up, that you could see through. And you stepped up into that little white room and just sat there, and you looked like a rock. It was really beautiful.

Had you heard The Beatles? Did you listen to much popular music then? 

Oh, yes. To me, The Beatles were artists. I felt very inspired by them, even though the way it manifests was totally different. I was very good friends with the keyboard player for The Mothers of Invention, so I knew Frank Zappa. I don't think there was that much separation between what was going on in the art world and what was going on in the pop world, because everybody was trying to find these new forms. We felt the art world and the pop people were just one revolution.

And then, I understand, you had an epiphany listening to Janis Joplin.

I had already started working with my voice -- that was in the mid-’60s. Then for about a year I was doing more architectural kinds of pieces, and I was working my way into, you could say, kind of an intellectual corner. I was a little depressed, and then I heard her. I thought, “Oh!” Because what I was doing vocally before that was very raw, very primal. I was exploring my range and it was pretty wild; you can hear some of that on the album called "Beginnings." Hearing her was such an affirmation. “Go back to that primordial thing you were already exploring,” I said to myself. She was such an extraordinary musician, and the rawness of her sound really brought me back to a path that I had left.

Speaking of paths, when did you decide to find your own? The way your career has gone, it seems like you essentially had to create a path before you could proceed down it.

Even as a teenager, I was making pieces and I knew it was something that really gave me a lot of joy, but I didn’t fit into the conventional world — I was more idiosyncratic, you could say. I came to New York, and after two years I said to myself, “I have to renew my commitment to being an artist.” I don't know why it came up, but I remember being in my little apartment on Bank Street, lying on the bed all day, and I knew that it would either be, I'm going to commit my life to art by the end of the day or I'm not. That was in the summer of 1966. And then I made 16mm Earrings in December.

I feel like you're called to being an artist. I made that decision to commit, but sometimes I feel like it's a choiceless choice. I don't know how to do anything else [laughs].

The composer Julia Wolfe once told me: “People like Joan Tower, Tania León and Meredith Monk, they really had to get the machete out and carve a path. Nobody was really, truly recognizing women composers in that generation.” Do you recall any barriers you had to bust through early on, as a woman?

I wasn't aware of all the barriers out there — I would find out they were there in retrospect. I was always surprised, because I felt like I just needed to do things my own way. But there was a lot of suffering from being a female artist, for sure. You were made to feel that there was something the matter with you as a person, because you had your vision and you were going to do it. You're not a “good woman” then.

You’ve been known to perform at Carnegie Hall one week and then at a New York public school the next. Do you think about exactly who your audience is?

I love being flexible like that. I love going from Carnegie Hall to P.S. 120, because I want my work to be accessible to anyone. That's why I feel it's so important that music education stays in the school systems — because what people don't know, they don't know. If they're not exposed to something, it's really hard for them to have the reference points. I do believe in the healing power of art. I believe in the power of art to nourish children to grow in so many areas — not just the arts. They say that when children have music in their school system, they do math better, they do English better, they do everything better. Art is like breathing. And that's why I’ve taught all these years, because I want people to go on and find their own way.

I was reading something you wrote for a recent box set of your recordings and it made me pause — you said, “One of my earliest memories is singing myself to sleep.” I’m sure you’ve talked about this many times, but I’d love to know how you first came to understand the potential of your voice.

Growing up in a singer's family, singing was very natural. I had one sister and we sang with my mother. We had trios washing the dishes. We sang in the car. It was like second nature. But the first year I came to New York, I was working a lot in galleries and non-theatrical spaces, and there was some vocal work in it, but not much — it was more gestural. I missed singing, so I sat down at the piano and I started my regular, Western European vocalizing. And one day, I just had this revelation: I saw, I felt, that my voice could be an instrument, and within it was the whole world — male and female, different ages, animals, different ways of producing sound, very ancient, and right at the center of the body. That was the beginning of knowing that the voice is the primary instrument of human beings. And it has the power to travel through time, from the ancient to now. The voice is the center of my work. The voice is my river.

You sing somewhere between words and not words. It's like a separate language.

I was always looking for a universal language, and yet I wanted the music to have the feeling of language. Most of my pieces are nonverbal, but I try to find a language of phonemes for the world of each piece. And what it has allowed me to do is to tour all over the world, either alone or with my ensemble, and reach people in a very direct, heart-to-heart way, without the filter of language.

Did you have any role models for this type of vocalizing?

No, but the people who were the most encouraging to me when I first started out were jazz musicians — they were like, “Keep going, you're really on to something here.” I feel like I came up in a time when I was quite lonely, but in a way, I'm very grateful for that aloneness, because we didn't have the internet where we're hearing everything. I had to just quiet down and listen to what my voice was telling me, explore with my own instrument and what it had within it.

In 1978 you created the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble, a group of singer-performers. How did you go about teaching them this vocalizing that you had, more or less, kept for yourself up to that point?

It was a little-by-little process. I had just finished Quarry, an opera about World War II, and I had a chorus of about 28 young, very good singer-dancers. I was longing to try to enlarge my textural possibilities, so I added three strong female singers, and I made this piece called Tablet. What I tried to do with that was not have people imitate me, but to light up each of their voices, their individual timbres, so that you heard four individuals. And that's something that I've done to this day — I pass on the material from my work to the ensemble, but then I sculpt it. Sometimes I even have their voices in mind when I'm working.

I saw your piece Cellular Songs at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2019, and On Behalf of Nature at the University of Maryland in 2013. This sounds cliché, but there is a quality to your work that can’t easily be expressed in words. It immediately disarms, yet at the same time supplies me with a type of self-reflection that seems completely organic — almost like meditation. Even in the midst of unusual vocalizations, or inscrutable images or movement, it’s welcoming, like coming home to the bigger picture of myself, my relationship to the world. After seeing On Behalf of Nature, I came away feeling like I had experienced some kind of timeless ritual. Is that the type of reaction you’re aiming for?

Yes. Especially in these last works, I've allowed myself to be a little bit more abstract, to open up the possibilities in order for you to have exactly your response — that it opens up a reflective space, resting the narrator of your experience, resting the thing in all of our minds that's always going blah blah blah all the time.

Is there a way that we can rest that part of our minds and let experience come in directly, and not point out what you’re supposed to experience? How do you do a piece called On Behalf of Nature? We're not going to be flying around the stage pretending we're animals or something. I realized I can offer glimpses of the processes of nature, the motor of nature, and a kind of elegy about what we're in danger of losing. That’s as much as I can do. This trilogy, including Indra's Net, which we're doing this fall at the Armory, these are more abstract because they are more meditative pieces. They're creating a kind of ritual of sacred space.

Indra’s Net is inspired by an ancient Buddhist-Hindu legend involving an infinite, bejeweled net that symbolizes humanity’s interconnectedness. How did this piece come together?

I always loved that image of the net, and these jewels that reflect all the other jewels: If you do an action, it resounds in the universe. I had that idea for a long time, and I even had an image — I would draw it. It was unusual because usually I start with music these days and then the concepts happen, but I had that spatial image and then started wondering, how could I make music? It took me 10 years, step by step.

The Hindu-Buddhist tradition has these things called teaching stories, a legend that illustrates one of the principles, and in this particular case it is interdependency. We had just started rehearsing in the spring of 2020 and then bang, the pandemic came in. But I was determined to let this piece come forth, because it was one of the pieces in my life where it was imperative — it was saying, “We need to exist.” So during the pandemic, I worked on sections of it and tried to offer them to people in the world to use as meditative pieces at home.

Speaking of which, I know that there are strong connections for you between creating your work and your spiritual practice.

I realized that I had always been a seeker, in the sense of spiritual practice. And I noticed how some of the principles that I had taken as aesthetic principles in my work were very close to what are fundamental Buddhist principles — like the fluidity of time and space, presence, immediacy and interdependence. It took me a while until I did formal practice. And in those days, people didn't talk about this very much, because it sounded like some new-age — I call it “hoochie-coochie” — stuff. You would never admit that you were doing your art as spiritual practice. But there was a certain point where I realized, you know, life is short. If there is a relationship between my practice and my artwork, why not? Why should one thing be over here and the other thing be over there? Why can't that impulse be unified? Because ultimately, I've always wanted my work to be of benefit. I've always wanted my work to be healing, or work that would wake people up.

And the two are integrated in many cultures throughout the world.

Exactly. In Bali, music and dance and making sculpture and making masks, that's all part of spiritual practice. I have felt that's very important in our world, because we don't have much of that.

Also, in many cultures, elders are venerated. Now that you've had almost six decades of creating this amazing, magical body of work, it’s safe to say you are an elder. Is there any advice you can give to performers, composers, even us listeners, in a world where so much art is at our fingertips, yet so much seems to be slipping through our grasp?

I always say, follow your dream, especially to the young people. Follow your dream and don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it, because to do something that you love, for your life, is the biggest gift you could have. Also, to not be afraid of your security and how you will manage. I know it's very difficult in this world, but you will find a way. And the second thing I would say is, follow your curiosity — and remain curious. Because the joy of learning, itself, is what keeps you young.