Who is Meredith Monk?

Composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer to name but a few skills testing the strength of the hinges of her locker; Monk has been testing the boundaries of categorisation since the 1960s. 

So you could forgive us if this summation of the artist ran into reams rather than paragraphs. But to save your scrolling thumbs, we’ve dissected it all down into nine sections. It may not be a comprehensive look at a remarkable career, but it certainly gives an aptly eclectic snapshot into the variety of her work, before we get to welcome her in person to the Southbank Centre for our SoundState festival.

Music runs in her family

Meredith isn’t the only member of her family to turn to music. Both of her maternal grandparents were musicians; her grandfather, the Russian Joseph B Zellman, was a bass-baritone, whilst her grandmother Rose Zellman, née Kornicker, was a concert pianist from Philadelphia. Monk’s mother Audrey, born in New York, was also a performer; a professional singer of popular and classical music, performing under the stage name of Audrey Marsh.

Her first solo stage performance came as a dancer

Though known primarily as a composer and musician, Monk made her stage debut at the Actor’s Playhouse in Greenwich Village as a dancer. In 1961, at the age of 18, she danced as a soloist in Scrooge, an Off-Broadway children’s musical theatre adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by Norman and Patricia Taylor Curtis.

She has been exploring the musicality of voice for approaching 60 years

Monk began her innovative exploration of the voice as a multifaceted instrument in 1965, just a year after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She composed solo pieces for unaccompanied voice, and voice and keyboard, as well as experimenting with new technology through pieces such as 1967’s Dying Swan with Sunglasses for Solo Voice with Echoplex and Tape. 

She has long been a pioneer of site-specific work

In the summer of 1967 Monk began working in unconventional spaces with her work Blueprint, expanding this work towards the end of the decade to perform works in buildings including the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and a factory in Buffalo. With Juice (1969) Monk was the first to create a piece in the rotunda of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and has continued to combine sound with new spaces into the 21st century through works such as Songs of Ascension (2008), composed for visual artist Ann Hamilton’s tower.

She took her site specific approach into opera

With the human voice serving as the prominent instrument in much of her work, the line between opera and composition in Monk’s back catalogue is decidedly blurry. But Vessel, first performed in October 1971, was undoubtedly an opera, albeit one where each of its three sections – Overture: Open House, Handmade Mountain and Existent Lot – took place in different environments in, or near, Greenwich Village, New York. Opening in Monk’s own loft, Vessel’s second act took place at the Performing Garage (a former truck garage), before the opera concluded in a parking lot on Wooster Street. 

Twenty years later Monk was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, and Philadelphia’s American Music Theater Festival to produce another opera. Atlas, for which Monk also wrote the libretto and choreographed the dances, is scored for 18 voices and a small chamber orchestra, although it boasts a much more conventional set than Vessel.

She has written and directed two films

A polyglot of artistic mediums, Monk wrote and directed two films in the 1980s; Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988). She has explained that the concept  for the latter came to her whilst she was doing housework. ‘One day during the summer of 1984, as I was sweeping the floor of my house in the country, the image of a young girl (in black and white) and a medieval street in the Jewish community (also in black and white) came to me.’

…whilst her music has appeared in many more

Beyond her own celluloid safaris, Monk’s music has been chosen by a number of top directors to soundtrack their own films. David Byrne elected to feature Road Song in True Stories, whilst Do You Be can be heard in Jean-Luc Goddard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990). And perhaps most notably, Monk’s Walking Song is the piece of music chosen by the Coen Brothers to announce the arrival of Maude in their 1998 cult classic The Big Lebowski. A musical cameo which had Monk herself ‘laughing [her] head off’.

She has been bestowed with high audiences and high accolades

There are a whole host of highlights when it comes to Monk’s performances from the last 25 years, but one which stands out is her Vocal Offering for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, delivered as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles in October, 1999. Sixteen years later, she appeared in front of another notable leader, this time it was President Barack Obama as Monk was awarded the National Medal of the Arts; the highest honour for artistic achievement in the United States.

She has also been the subject of musical tributes

Monk’s long and consistent body of work has undoubtedly influenced a huge number of artists across six decades, and probably as many continents. Among those to credit that influence through homage are the French singer Camille, whose 2008 song ‘The Monk’ also evokes the composer’s work through it’s construction, and hip-hop artist DJ Shadow, who sampled Dolmen Music on his track ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’.