Attending a typical Meredith Monk performance — if there is such a thing — can be like stepping into Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or. The blend of lighting, otherworldly music, images, film, and often-silent players moving on the stage becomes its own surreal world, where actions may mean the same as they do in ours or have a very different significance. Whatever their intent, the things that happen during Monk’s pieces have a way of adding up that touches the heart and the mind. And it’s impossible to leave without carrying away parts of what you’ve witnessed, whether it’s a scene from a movie where tiny humans clamber about in a gigantic abandoned stone quarry, lost and alienated, or the sight of a destitute prisoner hemmed in by a wall of light, which is part of Monk’s most recent major work, mercy.
Monk and her Vocal Ensemble will bring the music for mercy to Harvard’s Sanders Theatre for its Boston-area premiere next Saturday, November 9, just 11 days before her 60th birthday. mercy was originally a collaboration between Monk, who has been practicing interdisciplinary performance art for nearly 40 years, and installation artist Ann Hamilton. It was commissioned for the American Dance Festival in Durham, where it debuted last July 21. Although it’s been presented just a few times, the full work — which combines dance, acting, projections, live video, and Monk’s music for seven voices, keyboards, clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and percussion — has already been heralded as perhaps her most poignant effort. The New York Times called the Durham performance "extraordinary," saying it offered "a multitude of visual and sonic wonders."
Given Monk’s history of innovation in dance, music, movement, and theater, which has transformed elements from butoh to ballet to classical balladry into her own fascinating and unpredictable hybrid, that’s extraordinary praise. After all, she’s one of the inventors of the hard-to-define discipline she practices, and her earlier works have won her a MacArthur "Genius" Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a long list of other prizes and recognition.
Perhaps one reason mercy has received such a warm reception is that it fits handily into the post–September 11 spectrum. The piece is a meditation on the quality of mercy through the ages and how it is a much-desired balm in troubled times. On the just-released recording of mercy, Monk’s intentions emerge without the benefit of theatrics via her wordless vocal music. The album, which the Cambridge concert will mirror, plays out as a kind of rhythmic and melodic Esperanto, carrying you through emotional terrain that ranges from jagged peaks of fear to seas of joyful tranquillity. To those who’ve heard her earlier albums, or even the vocal works of Philip Glass, who shares some members of her ensemble, it will seem familiar, with its tides of calm and then surging rhythms often spun from overlapping melodic patterns.
But Monk’s writing for the human voice is more expressive than Glass’s, allowing soloists to emerge from the sonic weave with swooping lines, smooth modulations, or clusters of interjections that disrupt the flowing patterns. For her this is part of a decades-old strategy that has even influenced pop-world singers from Kate Bush to Björk to Diamanda Galás. She became an early investigator of what went on to be known as extended vocal technique in 1965, when she had what she’s described as an epiphany. "It was as if the whole world opened up, and I saw that within the voice there could be different textures, colors, ways of producing sound, different genders and ages, character, ways of breathing, landscape." Since then, she’s never stopped exploring.
Meredith Monk and her Vocal Ensemble will perform mercy and other works at Sanders Theatre next Saturday, November 9, at 8 p.m. Call (617) 867-4275 or (617) 496-2222.
