[Dixielandjazz] The Musical Clucks of Ms. Monk

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - LONG ARTICLE FROM THE "CLASSICAL" MUSIC FORUM OF THE NY TIMES.
DELETE NOW IF NOT A LOVER OF CLASSICAL(?) MUSIC.

HOWEVER, KINDA INTERESTING. IF YOU ENJOYED JOHN CAGE'S: 4:22, YOU ARE GONIG
TO LOVE MS. MONK'S CRIES, CLUCKS AND PANDA CHANTS.

Maybe good for a slow Sunday Afternoon.

Cheers,
Steve




Ms. Monk's Master Class: Advanced Cries, Clucks and Panda Chants

NY TIMES  By ANNE MIDGETTE - January 29, 2006

MEREDITH MONK's music is ethereal, visceral and direct. It relies on
building blocks of sound, bits of chanted tune interwoven with cries and
clucks and other manifestations of what is known as extended vocal
technique. It is about using the voice as expression without mediating
elements, like words. And people often describe it as simple.

But anyone who thinks it is easy has never tried to sing it.

This month, 19 singers learned firsthand just how "simple" Ms. Monk's music
is. Brought together in a professional training workshop offered by the
Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall, they stood in a semicircle in a
rehearsal studio on the far West Side of Manhattan one cold afternoon and
nearly foundered on a complicated vocal piece. The basic elements didn't
seem hard: a catchy tune for the women, a constellation of sounds refracted
out of it for the men. But the tune was repeated in a four-part canon and
varied subtly with each repetition at the direction of one of the singers,
so that everyone had to watch for what was coming next.

There wasn't much margin for error. Ms. Monk had a gimlet eye for detail,
zeroing in on every bar. "Your entrance was great," she told one singer.
"But on the second repetition, your pitch was flat."

One participant, Holly Nadal, said later: "You listen, and it sounds so free
and improvised. You don't realize how much structure is there until you
start trying to pick it apart. A lot of people who love her music, and who
hate her music, think there's a certain randomness there. But it's highly,
highly structured."

Ms. Nadal, a big fan of Ms. Monk, has transcribed many of her pieces from
recordings. Yet, Ms. Nadal said, even she had been "surprised at, I don't
want to say rigid, but how firm and sure she is: this is right and this is
wrong." 

If it was new territory for the singers, the workshop, which culminated in a
concert on Jan. 15, was also a departure for both Carnegie Hall and Ms.
Monk. For Carnegie, it was part of an effort to vary the format of the
large-scale choral workshop that has been an annual feature since Robert
Shaw founded it in 1990. Last September, the Weill Institute offered a
smaller workshop led by the Bach specialist Ton Koopman, an oddly matched
partner to the Monk event. In addition, the Monk workshop was a step toward
incorporating the broader definition of music that has been evident in
programming at Zankel Hall into educational initiatives.

For Ms. Monk, it was possibly even more of a departure. She has long
resisted allowing anyone else to perform her work. Having begun the
exploration of extended vocal technique with her own voice in 1965, she
focused on solo work for years before moving on to ensemble pieces like
"Quarry" (1976), or "Dolmen Music" (1979), which incorporated male voices
for the first time. In 1978, she founded her own ensemble, and while she has
cautiously expanded her reach over the years - creating pieces for the New
World Symphony or the Houston Grand Opera, which commissioned "Atlas" in
1991 - she has generally guarded the pieces created for it.

Working like a choreographer, in that she develops her work with the people
who perform it, she was even reluctant to write her music down. It took the
publisher Boosey & Hawkes five years to get permission to publish selected
works, and only two are available. (Others are in preparation.)

So it was a major step last November when, as the culmination of some 18
months of events celebrating her 40th anniversary of performing, Ms. Monk
allowed a marathon concert at Zankel Hall in which a number of different
artists, from Bjork to the contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, offered
her work back to her. The workshop furthered the idea of Ms. Monk's passing
on her work, although she still didn't seem entirely comfortable with the
idea. 

"I sometimes think, 'Why bother with paper?' " Ms. Monk, 63, said of the
labor of scoring her pieces. " 'Let it die with me.' But members of my
ensemble, like Tom Bogdan and Katie Geissinger, said, 'We want to keep
performing this music.' It's important to share the joy of doing it." It
sounded like a reminder to herself.

Young singers today may be more open to Ms. Monk's work than those of an
earlier generation. Ara Guzelimian, the senior director and artistic adviser
of Carnegie Hall, who helped pare the original pool of more than 50
applicants to the final 19, said, "This generation of performers is
naturally able to do a wide range of things.
 
The participants came from many countries - including Norway and the former
Yugoslavia - and represented an eclectic range of backgrounds. Caleb
Burhans, for one, is a composer, violinist and singer who, as a member of
Alarm Will Sound, performed at the Zankel Hall tribute in November. Another,
Matthew Ryan Hoch, is a classical singer and an assistant professor of music
at the University of Wisconsin.

For singers, the workshop was a rare chance not only to work with Ms. Monk
but also to get any kind of formal training in contemporary music.

"There's not much conservatory training for this," said Silvie Jensen, a
mezzo-soprano who has sung everything from Hildegard von Bingen to a setting
of the American Constitution by Ben Yarmolinsky. "And we all sing in
ensembles to make a living, but there is no vocal degree in America for
ensembles. We just learn to do it on our own."

There were challenges from the start. For Mr. Koopman's Bach workshop,
participants had to show up knowing their music. But it is difficult for the
uninitiated to learn Ms. Monk's music on their own. The singers were sent
CD's and the scores that exist: often transcriptions of single performances,
which weren't necessarily the most helpful means of conveying what was
actually going on in the music. Ms. Monk and her ensemble members repeatedly
urged the singers to create their own maps or cheat sheets, setting out
clearly, for example, how many repetitions of a given unit they had to do,
or in what order. 

"If you look at the score, it will drive you batty," Ms. Monk said of an
excerpt from "Atlas." At one point in "Dolmen Music," one of Ms. Monk's
greatest and most difficult pieces, the transcriber seemed simply to have
given up.

Furthermore, because Ms. Monk is concerned with the way her music looks as
well as how it sounds, it is not something you can perform while holding a
piece of paper. So the performers had a week to learn an entire two-hour
concert of extremely tricky music, far outside their comfort zone, by heart.

SURPRISINGLY, perhaps, given the kinds of sounds Ms. Monk's work demands,
her vocal technique is relatively straightforward. The workshop focused less
on the mechanics of making the unusual sounds in her pieces than on getting
the forms of the music right, drilling rhythms and notes as one would in any
kind of music. Morning warm-ups included a range of exercises promoting
breathing and diaphragm support, including a couple handed down from Ms.
Monk's mother, Audrey, who sang jingles on the radio for Muriel Cigars.

Ms. Monk herself has taken voice lessons for more than 20 years with
Jeannette LoVetri, who, Ms. Monk said, has given her "a strong technical
basis." Ms. Monk is as interested as any singer in promoting vocal health;
she wants to be able to go on singing for as long as possible. She isn't
about to shred her voice. But she does want to push the envelope.

"Sometimes in the classical tradition there's a small parameter of what's
possible," Ms. Monk said, adding that teachers can "transmit fear to people:
'If you do this, you'll ruin your voice.' Of course, you don't do an
extended technique 19 times. You just do it once."

But Ms. Monk's aesthetic does run against conventional wisdom in that she is
not interested in who can make the most beautiful sound. She is looking for
other qualities. "The best singers aren't always the best performers," she
said. For some of the singers at the workshop, even those with extensive
backgrounds in contemporary music, this concept took a lot of getting used
to. 

Furthermore, her focus extends beyond music. Often called a choreographer,
and embraced by the dance world as one of its own, she integrates movement
into the fabric of her pieces to a higher degree than may be immediately
evident (as in the "Panda Chant" from "The Games," which has everyone
stepping to 6/8 time while chanting in 4/4, something Ms. Monk equated to
rubbing your tummy while patting your head). She is also concerned with how
the piece looks onstage, down to the last detail of what everyone is
wearing. 

"It's the 20th-century version of the gesamtkunstwerk," Mr. Hoch said,
referring to Wagner's ideal of a total work of art. "It's about the whole
thing."

For this reason, it is impossible to codify Ms. Monk's work into a series of
performance directives. She equates her work to a sculptor's, molding a
vowel color here, a movement there, illustrating with her own body and voice
what she wants. 

"We work years on pieces," she said of her ensemble. "There's a commitment
of understanding that's different from me just handing people scores. These
are living forms. They need time to be nurtured, developed. Each piece is a
world, and the techniques of that world are revealed by that world. It's
not, 'I'll just throw in a ululation here.' "

For the singers, the intensity of the experience was made all the more
nerve-racking by the demands this music makes on each and every performer.
"It's more like a string quartet," said Mr. Hoch. "Everyone has his own
individual responsibility."

The key to Ms. Monk's ensemble work is maintaining a balance between
following the rules and allowing individuality to shine through, which lends
the performers onstage an extra dose of vulnerability. Ms. Nadal equated it
to "soldiers at the front lines."

"If you're not covering each other's backs," she said, "you're really in
trouble." Of course, as Ms. Monk pointed out to them repeatedly beforehand,
the audience wouldn't be able to tell if there were mistakes. But she could.

Simple? No. The Sunday concert, the culmination of all this hard work, was
imperfect. Yet it was effective and impressive, given the speed at which it
was put together. And Ms. Monk, conflicted to the last minute by the
contradictory impulses to praise the singers' hard work and cringe at their
mistakes, conceded that "it's special to pass this on and feel that the
music will go on." She has agreed to another teaching stint this year, at
the Bang on a Can summer institute in North Adams, Mass.

She is now rehearsing her continuing piece "Impermanence"; the latest
incarnation will open in Tempe, Ariz., next Saturday and tour before coming
to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November. Dealing with terminal illness,
the piece, too, raises thoughts of her legacy.

"What have you left behind?" Ms. Monk asked. "What have you given? What are
all of us doing here?"

Discounted in this is the illuminating revelation of her process that the
workshop afforded - even if it ultimately confirmed that the best exponent
of Ms. Monk's music remains Ms. Monk herself.