MEREDITH MONK | INTERVIEW
One of the most esteemed figures in American avant-garde music, Meredith Monk has kept creative during lockdown with Zoom workshops, performances and her latest piece, ROTATION. James Ellis was granted a highly stimulating interview.
How has your day been so far?
Full of activity. I wrote a little birthday song for a dear friend who turned 40 and I’ve known them before they were born in her mother’s stomach, so I’ve mixed that down today and sent that to her. I had a tech rehearsal with our wonderful engineer Daniel Newman – we’re having a rehearsal for Indra’s Net [Meredith’s new work; ROTATION is a part of this]. Also, we got the photographs to you, signed!
You’ve returned to New York City a few times during the pandemic. Have you noticed any changes?
I had been alone in the loft for almost four months. The decision to make a change at a time like this seemed heavier than usual. But when I did get out to the country, I was there for five months. I was very happy to have gotten out. New York at that point: George Floyd had just been killed, the helicopters were going overhead, because a lot of the marching was going on outside my window. There were boarded up buildings. It was kind of like a warzone in New York and it was very intense.
I had planned to leave around that time anyway. It was the time to leave. Just being up in the country and being able to be outside, without what I call my plague paraphernalia on, was a real relief. To see green. All the things we sort of take for granted. Everything seemed very fresh up there, which is about three and a half hours away from New York. There were hardly any cases at that point, and yet people were being very conscientious, very careful. I’m glad that I did it…very much.
Then I came back for a few days in September, for one or two doctor’s appointments, and actually had the feeling that a lot of life had come back into the city. New Yorkers are very interesting in crises. It’s a good place to be during crisis because people are pretty inventive. I remember before I left, being so moved every night at seven o’clock – everybody banging on pots, yelling, saying yay for people on the frontline. It was not happening up in the country. On some levels, I was glad I had been in New York for that four months – to know that it was really happening. It was too easy to be up in the country. In a way it seemed like a dream… like people didn’t really know the intensity of what was happening.
I came back about two weeks ago and I’ve pretty much quarantined myself, so I don’t really know what’s going on in the streets so much now. It kind of goes up and down. A week and a half ago the schools closed. It keeps on rising, ebbing and flowing here.
There are a number of people who lean towards the conspiracy theory approach. I tried to be open about their way of thinking: to say, “well, I hear what you say and I really want you to know that I know people that have had it, people who have died.” A young man up there said he was so sorry. We had this sort of moment of communication – of opening the door to one another. He didn’t know. They’re getting different kinds of information, basically.
What was the last live event you saw before lockdown?
I remember more the last event I was part of. I received the John Cage Award from the Foundation For Contemporary Arts; I realised that was the last grouping of people that I saw. It was little bit like a performance – we had just come back from Germany in February, performing in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. At the very beginning of March we want to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and did a performance of Cellular Songs [below], the concert version with the five women – which was such a wonderful experience – and that was when we first were getting the news. Starting to say hello to people with my elbow; Allison Easter in my group telling us to wash our hands, washing everything down on the airplane. But we didn’t have masks at the time. Then I got back to New York and it was like a volcano.
[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lee3TFChZyY[/embedyt]
Let’s talk diet and meditation. Do you have any advice and recommendations?
I try to sit a little bit every day. Today I had to work a lot this morning, so I haven’t, but I’m doing a meditation tonight. It doesn’t have to be this formal meditation that has to be transmitted to you – more the idea of taking the time to hear yourself, notice what is going on.
If you live in a place where you can walk outside, just walk outside and pause. Let whatever is out there come in. Our minds are going so fast; we miss so much. You know, you could walk by something so beautiful and not even notice it. We have a chance now to try and be as in the present as possible and notice things. Give ourselves sometime for quiet.
As far as diet is concerned, I eat a little fish, some chicken. I try to eat as many vegetables as I can, even in this situation. Try to eat small meals: I think that’s a good way to keep our bodies healthy. Try to get exercise: I do Pilates three times a week and then try to exercise in between. That’s very important now, I think, because we’re sitting in front of the screen kind of hunched over our whole day and I can’t imagine that it’s good for us.
Your new work Anthem was performed online this year. How was the experience of playing in separate spaces?
It was satisfying on one level, in that we used a computer programme called Jamulus and this wonderful engineer, David Newman, who is such a lovely person to work with, very calm and very analytic. It was ultimately a very touching experience.
This was the first time, from when the pandemic started, we had no delay. Right now, you and I are so far away – sometimes I’m talking over you and I don’t mean to, because there’s a delay. With the Jamulus, we could literally play together and that was just the most moving experience. But, as a composer working on this piece, why I wanted to work with Alan Pierson and Alarm Will Sound was to be able to keep working on my material. We’d have these rehearsals and I’m getting all this information from 16 players and four singers through these two little headphones. What’s missing is space! If we’d been in the same room, I’d hear what was going on immediately and make adjustments. Especially with this music for Indra’s Net – space is the primary element for the piece. I just did the best I could. What was very satisfying when we did the performance – I think we did three takes – it was obvious that one take was better than the other two. One was the magic take.
What’s the most interesting sound you’ve ever heard?
Oh my gosh… interesting? I have to really think about that. Can I veer a little bit from it to most interesting sound in a film? Satyajit Ray, the great Bengali film maker, who did the Apu Trilogy, these beautiful films from the late 50s/early 60s. The first film is about him as a very young, poor boy; the second is him aged more like 12, and the last is more of him as a young man. Ray was not only a film maker, he wrote it and drew the storyboards. I watched it last summer – I hadn’t seen it since my early 20s – it’s remarkable how timeless it is. Because he is also a musician [Ravi Shankar also wrote the score], he had that kind of ear.
There’s a scene in the first film [Pather Panchali]: the father has gone away, he’s a bit of a ne’er-do-well. A lovely man, but he’s not bringing home money. I think the subtext of that film is how poverty makes you more stressed. The mother is under such pressure all the time, and the sister dies while the father is away. The father comes back, and what Ray did with the sound – you just see the image of the mother telling the father the daughter died. At the same time there’s this screaming bird sound – I don’t know if it’s an eagle. What a use of sound! Words could never be as eloquent as that.
I could think about this question for many days. Maybe if I figure it out after two days, I’ll get back to you.
Your 1989 film Book Of Days deals with hatred, violence and disease. Is it more relevant than ever?
It feels like it’s pretty timeless. It feels like it relates to what’s going on today. Book Of Days was made during the AIDS crisis. I was contemplating where do these certain diseases come from – where did AIDS come from? In Susan Sontag’s essay Disease As Political Metaphor, she talks about different diseases and how they become emblematic to the time they occur – TB in the 19th century as an example. Why is this happening right now? I think in this situation, mother nature is flexing her muscles – we’ve been abusive to her. To me, this is a manifestation of nature.
One morning I woke up and I thought, you know we have to respect this tiny organism wreaking havoc on the entire planet. It is so efficient… brilliant, in a way. We are then in more of a dialogue with it.
There is another side to this. Most indigenous cultures in the world had this relationship to nature: a sense of awe, of respect and wonder. They reconsidered this power and tried to appease it, made prayers to it, to modify its power. In Book Of Days, I was trying to work in cycles – fundamental human qualities; fundamental behaviour; phenomena that do recur throughout the cycle of history. We have things in common with people from the Middle Ages and we have things that are very specific for us today; I was trying to play with that displacement of time. That was the humour of having a contemporary television crew in the Middle Ages and their time seeing our time, a kind of time travel. I also think that happiness was not so prevalent in the past, from what we know it as today.
Can you recall times spent with John Cage? What made him so special?
I didn’t know him so well towards the end of his life. From time to time, we would be at the same venue. I remember hanging out with him in maybe the late 70s, in North Carolina. We had so much fun. We were like bad kids! We were having a good time.
I met him for the first time personally in 1975. I was asked to do the music for a Merce Cunningham concert by David Behrman, who was the director of the Cunningham Company at the time. All the information I had was that the duration is 75 minutes and you can do whatever you want – so we never rehearsed or anything. I did it along with my organ. It was a lot of the music from Key, acapella things like Song From The Hill, some of the early music from Vessel, things like that. It worked beautifully with the dancers, so they asked me to do it again the next year.
John came to that and went to my dressing room, smiling from ear to ear. He said, “Meredith! Where did those voices come from?” I remember just putting my hands up in the air and saying I didn’t know! We laughed and just liked each other very much. He was just so supportive of my music. We really got to be good friends in the 80s – I think around 1983. I was upstate and they were doing a concert of his music, including the first piece I ever heard of his in college, The Seasons. It starts with a tritone and I remember just going nuts when I heard it. I just loved it. All these kind of skeletal intervals.
He came to my little house upstate twice. Once he brought Sydney Cowell, Henry Cowell’s wife. That little house where I did Anthem and Duet Behaviour is so tiny; I remember sitting in the back and John loving it, saying “this is so nice, Meredith!” I remember just being so touched by his presence of delight. I prepared brown rice and I think he might have brought mushrooms; the second time he came, he brought strict diet people. He had a macrobiotic diet. I love him because he was so flexible. I remember I didn’t realise they weren’t eating deadly nightshade, so from my garden I used eggplants [part of the nightshade family of plants] in a Szechuan sauce and his young friend wouldn’t eat them. John said, “Meredith made these, right from her garden and I’m going to eat them,” and I remember thinking that’s the way to be! Yes, you try to stay on with your discipline.
The most important things are graciousness and generosity. When he would come into a room everything would just light up. Such a wonderful person. I miss him so much.
[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBlnrRUVfo0&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=mmonkhouse[/embedyt]
I’ve got to ask – have you watched the Red Letter Media video on your piece Turtle Dreams?
No. What is it? [I explain the premise of their YouTube channel and tell Meredith that, somehow, they were sent a copy of Turtle Dreams] And…?
[I explain the differing reactions to the work and how, through the influence of RLM, Turtle Dreams went viral.]
What’ya know. I am completely not involved with any of this. I’m so shocked – when somebody showed me how many people have watched Turtle Dreams, I’m like wow!
[I recommend their video to Meredith]
I’m not sure I need to see it, really. Frankly. To be totally honest with you.
How is Neutron [Meredith’s pet turtle of 42 years, and the inspiration for Turtle Dreams]?
She’s doing great. Such a funny little being.
What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you on stage?
One thing happened to me during [Monk’s three-act opera] Atlas. Towards the end of act two, my character Alexandra, is trying to get one of the companions to come with us someplace. He has become corrupted and turned into some kind of a maniac dictator; I’m pulling him out of the military complex to take him to another realm, via a ladder. A cast member was pulling me up and I was kicking – somehow I hit my leg against this strong, boney leg. Second degree bruise, I was in so much pain in the back of my shin I couldn’t walk, but I had to finish the performance in agony.
Lastly, how do you find joy in the everyday?
There’s so many little joys. Some days I do wake and feel so grateful. First of all, how was I born a human? Secondly, how do I have so many people around me that I love and get so much love from? What gift came to me that I have this creative need, and the creativity’s following?
Some days I almost have to pinch myself from gratitude. So just that itself is so much joy.
Meredith Monk’s ROTATION will premiere online in spring 2021. Its Kickstarter page, including a video about the work, is here.
words JAMES ELLIS photos BRAD TRENT / CHRISTINE ALICINO