MONK Songs of Ascension
Todd Reynolds Quartet, The M6, Montclair State University Singers.
ECM 476 4307
Across the many media in which Meredith Monk has worked, her wonderfully unclassifiable art remains grounded in a unique understanding of the flexibility
and expressive depth of the human voice – and of creating new contexts in which to explore it. The result is music that sometimes sounds as if
it had been quarried from an archeological dig or beamed in from a distant future. Both impressions emanate from Songs of Ascension, the tenth project Monk has recorded for ECM since her path-breaking Dolmen Music was released three decades ago. That discography charts her intrepid forays “between the cracks,” as Monk likes to put it, where different ways of perceiving the world through art converge. (You can read Monk’s interview with The Classical Review here.)
On one level, the new recording encapsulates Monk’s aesthetic outlook over a long career, one in which the voice serves as a guiding thread for her interdisciplinary performance pieces. But it also reveals the undiminished curiosity of her artistic quest by incorporating the expanded musical language Monk has evolved over the past decade. With Possible Sky (2003), her first work for orchestra, Monk began to apply her intuitive sense of the voice as a complex and sophisticated instrument to larger ensembles, teasing out the reciprocal interaction between singers and instrumentalists in ways that rethink the very basis of composition.
Songs of Ascension is the most ambitious example of this development to date. One stimulus for the work was Monk’s encounter with poet Norman Fischer’s translation of the Psalms into a Zen-infused language. His imagery led to further reflections on the trope of worshippers ascending a mountain and pausing periodically to sing a psalm of praise. A simultaneous invitation to collaborate with visual artist Ann Hamilton further clarified her evolving musical images, adding a site-specific dimension. Hamilton’s project involved performing while ascending a new “acoustic tower” she had designed
in Sonoma County, California, inside which a pair of staircases that resemble a double helix spiral upward. In this form Songs premiered
in October 2008.
To explore her fascination with the connection between worship, transcendence, and images of ascension, Monk interweaves a fabric drawn from her recent experience writing for string quartet and the signature extended technique of her own vocal ensemble (with the added contributions of a cappella vocal sextet The M6 and the Montclair State University Singers). Other threads she includes are woodwinds, an array of percussion, and a blend of Western and Eastern sonorities (with a prominent role for the harmonium-like shruti box, which is associated with Indian music).
As Monk fans will expect, in place of a libretto the ‘text’ consists of unpredictable patterns of abstracted phonemes, fluid vocalise, and shaman-like incantations. Yet even as non-sense replaces the logic of language, the vocalizations by Monk and her collaborators seem to imply the origin of speech rather than the disintegration of Babel.
The effect is especially enchanting at the beginning of the piece, which the string quartet inaugurates with sustained whispers of just a few pitches: a gentle fog which rises to reveal the echo of human voices. These “clusters” (in Monk’s terminology) set the stage for the sprouting of song, the blossoming of harmony. The interlinked sections are the first two of 21 that comprise Songs of Ascension. Monk’s titles cue us into recurrent patterns – and are also provocatively enigmatic (why are the seasons out of order, and why are winter and autumn instrumental-only while summer and spring include voices?).
Monk’s continual intercutting of highly varied textures builds a sense of larger-scale momentum. The section ‘mapping,’ for example, suddenly introduces a new tone of festive tintinnabulation, while the gliding swoops of strings and voices in ‘falling’ convey the curious sense of whimsical archaism that tempers the more meditative sections crisscrossing through the work. The range of Monk’s vocal idiom is literally breathtaking: a strangely beguiling repertoire of aviary microtones, robust yodels, insectoid whispers, and (in the penultimate ‘fathom,’ a lengthy solo for Monk as she accompanies herself with a shruti box), dusky, low-range chanting. The final number, ‘ascent,’ makes for an inspiring conclusion to the adventure, its layered sonic tapestry suggesting an endless procession or quest as solo lines leap in ecstatic figures from the drone-like foundation.
Though the original Songs of Ascension was conceived as an “immersive experience” with video and site-specific movement,
Monk’s musical imagery is wonderfully evocative on its own. ECM’s engineering not only gives the music rich, warm resonance but also manages to convey something of Monk’s spatial acoustic. The recording was made in 2009 at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. The booklet includes a smart essay by composer Kyle Gann and a color-photo essay from the premiere in Hamilton’s tower. Songs is further confirmation of the musical treasure we have in Monk, who shows no signs of slowing down.
Posted Dec 24, 2011 at 7:00 am by The Classical Review CDs / DVDs » Blog Archive » The Classical Review’s Best Recordings of 2011
[...] MONK Songs of Ascension (ECM) On the eve of her 70th birthday in late 2012, Meredith Monk’s tenth recording for ECM produced one of the iconoclastic composer-performer’s most ambitious projects to date. Calling on the combined forced of her eponymous nine-strong vocal and instrumental Ensemble, the Todd Reynolds Quartet, the a cappella sextet The M6, and the 63-mixed voice Montclair State University Singers, Songs of Ascension proved to be an intricately conceived, immaculately execute altogether involving patchwork of ideas, texts and sounds that revealed an artist at the height of her powers and offered, as Thomas May remarked in his review, “further confirmation of the musical treasure we have in Monk.” [...]