Meredith Monk

“Directness, purity, asymmetry, and above all transparency have always been important to me.” Composer and singer Meredith Monk’s work has always defied categorisation. Throughout a professional career that began in 1964, she has not only experimented in a wide variety of fields – embracing film, installation and site-specific work as well as music and dance – but also frequently blazed new trails. She has, in particular, been a pioneer in what is now called interdisciplinary performance and extended vocal technique, earning her plaudits as “a magician of the voice”. Meredith Monk was born in New York City in 1942 and studied at Sarah Lawrence College. In the early 1960s she began her exploration of the voice as a multi-faceted instrument, drawing on its ability to create drones, explore modes and wordless vocalisations. She subsequently composed and performed many solo pieces for unaccompanied voice and voice/keyboard. In 1968 Monk founded The House, a company dedicated to interdisciplinary performance, and a decade later set up Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble to further expand her range of musical textures and forms. Since the release of Dolmen Music (1981), Monk has made more than a dozen recordings for ECM’s New Series, including the 2008 Grammy-nominated impermanence and the highly acclaimed Songs of Ascension (2011), which brought together voices and instruments in a way rare in Monk’s earlier work. Book of Days (1990) was described as “a film for the ears” by ECM producer Manfred Eicher,and had its origins in a film of the same name, and Piano Songs (2014), played by two of new music's most distinguished interpreters, American pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker, cast light on a lesser known aspect of her instrumental output which is at once direct, specific and imagistic. Tom Service has praised Monk’s “extraordinary ululations and incantations, vertiginous leaps, drops, cries and other wordless acrobatics,” adding that her great achievement has been to make them sound “completely natural, central, and essential.” In the words of the Washington Post: “In originality, in scope, in depth, there are few to rival her.” Meredith Monk is the recipient of numerous international awards, including a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award in 1995. In 2015 she received the US’s National Medal of the Arts from President Obama at the White House.