Browse by Artist: MONK, MEREDITH

Artist:	MONK, MEREDITH
Title:	Key
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1051

This album contains Meredith Monk's earliest compositions for voice. The songs that make up Key were composed and performed in a 3-year period between 1967 and 1970, when Monk collected them into this 45-minute "invisible theater" experience. Monk (travelling voice, electric organ, jews harp), Daniel Ira Sverdlik & Dick Higgins (companion voices), Collin Walcott (companion voice & mrdingam), Lanny Harrision and Mark Berger (vision monologues). "In 'Key" I wanted to create a constantly shifting ambience. Each song dealt with a different vocal character, landscape, technical concern or emotional quality. I was trying for a visceral, kinetic song form that had the abstract qualities of a painting or a dance. I knew that I didn't want to set music to a text; for me, the voice itself was a language which seemed to speak more eloquently than words. I chose certain phonemes for their particular sound qualities. In a sense, each song became a world in itself with its own timbre, texture and impulse." -- Meredith Monk.

Artist:	MONK, MEREDITH
Title:	Our Lady Of Late
Label:	WERGO/SPECTRUM (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$22.00
Catalog #:	SM 1058-50CD

Fantastic and largely forgotten work of hypnotic music for voice and glass, recorded in 1973. "'Our Lady Of Late' begins with Collin Walcott playing a rhythmic, tapping introduction to the commonplace object -- a goblet of water -- that will provide the backbone of the work. The suite then opens with one of the most transfixing sections. Monk coaxes a ringing vibration from the water glass by rubbing a finger along its rim, as she will do throughout the piece. Then she matches the tone with her voice, joining its timbre and texture to that of the droning crystal. The contrast and kinship of the two sounds -- one living and organic, the other fixed and implacable -- are equally striking. They become more vivid as Monk tests here own harmonic flexibility against the goblets unchanging ring, playing a subtle game of semitones and overtones... She swoops and soars, skyrockets and nosedives, passes from guttural stops and strangled screeches to lyrical glissandos and the keening ululations of a lullaby... it's hard to encounter the purity and single-mindedness of this piece without thinking of the vibrant 'minimalist' style of composition...[it] recalls the drone of Indian music and the overtonal experiments of composers as different as La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier." --David Sterrit.

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page