The New York Times on Carnegie Hall Performance

The members of the M6 first met while working with legendary composer/ vocalist/ filmmaker/ choreographer Meredith Monk in a workshop on her music, hosted by Carnegie Hall. The weeklong experience culminated in a full concert of some of her most significant works in Zankel Hall at Carnegie, billed as the Meredith Monk Young Artists Concert. The New York Times covered this experience in a feature article, excerpted here.

January 29, 2006
Ms. Monk’s Master Class: Advanced Cries, Clucks and Panda Chants
By ANNE MIDGETTE

Meredith Monk, addressing the contemporary music workshop class
assembled by the Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall.
While firm about how to perform her work, Ms. Monk said,
“It’s important to share the joy of doing it.”

MEREDITH MONK’s music is ethereal, visceral and direct. It relies on building blocks of sound, bits of chanted tune interwoven with cries and clucks and other manifestations of what is known as extended vocal technique. It is about using the voice as expression without mediating elements, like words. And people often describe it as simple.

But anyone who thinks it is easy has never tried to sing it.

This month, 19 singers learned firsthand just how “simple” Ms. Monk’s music is. Brought together in a professional training workshop offered by the Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall, they stood in a semicircle in a rehearsal studio on the far West Side of Manhattan one cold afternoon and nearly foundered on a complicated vocal piece. The basic elements didn’t seem hard: a catchy tune for the women, a constellation of sounds refracted out of it for the men. But the tune was repeated in a four-part canon and varied subtly with each repetition at the direction of one of the singers, so that everyone had to watch for what was coming next. …

One participant, Holly Nadal, said later: “You listen, and it sounds so free and improvised. You don’t realize how much structure is there until you start trying to pick it apart. A lot of people who love her music, and who hate her music, think there’s a certain randomness there. But it’s highly, highly structured.”

Ms. Nadal, a big fan of Ms. Monk, has transcribed many of her pieces from recordings. Yet, Ms. Nadal said, even she had been “surprised at, I don’t want to say rigid, but how firm and sure she is: this is right and this is wrong.”

If it was new territory for the singers, the workshop, which culminated in a concert on Jan. 15, was also a departure for both Carnegie Hall and Ms. Monk. … [Ms. Monk] has long resisted allowing anyone else to perform her work. Having begun the exploration of extended vocal technique with her own voice in 1965, she focused on solo work for years before moving on to ensemble pieces like “Quarry” (1976), or “Dolmen Music” (1979), which incorporated male voices for the first time. In 1978, she founded her own ensemble, and while she has cautiously expanded her reach over the years - creating pieces for the New World Symphony or the Houston Grand Opera, which commissioned “Atlas” in 1991 - she has generally guarded the pieces created for it.

Working like a choreographer, in that she develops her work with the people who perform it, she was even reluctant to write her music down. It took the publisher Boosey & Hawkes five years to get permission to publish selected works, and only two are available. (Others are in preparation.)

So it was a major step last November when, as the culmination of some 18 months of events celebrating her 40th anniversary of performing, Ms. Monk allowed a marathon concert at Zankel Hall in which a number of different artists, from Bjork to the contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, offered her work back to her. The workshop furthered the idea of Ms. Monk’s passing on her work, although she still didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the idea.

“I sometimes think, ‘Why bother with paper?’ ” Ms. Monk, 63, said of the labor of scoring her pieces. ” ‘Let it die with me.’ But members of my ensemble, like Tom Bogdan and Katie Geissinger, said, ‘We want to keep performing this music.’ It’s important to share the joy of doing it.” It sounded like a reminder to herself.

Young singers today may be more open to Ms. Monk’s work than those of an earlier generation. Ara Guzelimian, the senior director and artistic adviser of Carnegie Hall, who helped pare the original pool of more than 50 applicants to the final 19, said, “This generation of performers is naturally able to do a wide range of things.”

The participants came from many countries - including Norway and the former Yugoslavia - and represented an eclectic range of backgrounds. … For singers, the workshop was a rare chance not only to work with Ms. Monk but also to get any kind of formal training in contemporary music.

“There’s not much conservatory training for this,” said Silvie Jensen, a mezzo-soprano who has sung everything from Hildegard von Bingen to a setting of the American Constitution by Ben Yarmolinsky. “And we all sing in ensembles to make a living, but there is no vocal degree in America for ensembles. We just learn to do it on our own.”

There were challenges from the start. For Mr. Koopman’s Bach workshop, participants had to show up knowing their music. But it is difficult for the uninitiated to learn Ms. Monk’s music on their own. The singers were sent CD’s and the scores that exist: often transcriptions of single performances, which weren’t necessarily the most helpful means of conveying what was actually going on in the music. Ms. Monk and her ensemble members repeatedly urged the singers to create their own maps or cheat sheets, setting out clearly, for example, how many repetitions of a given unit they had to do, or in what order.

“If you look at the score, it will drive you batty,” Ms. Monk said of an excerpt from “Atlas.” At one point in “Dolmen Music,” one of Ms. Monk’s greatest and most difficult pieces, the transcriber seemed simply to have given up.

Furthermore, because Ms. Monk is concerned with the way her music looks as well as how it sounds, it is not something you can perform while holding a piece of paper. So the performers had a week to learn an entire two-hour concert of extremely tricky music, far outside their comfort zone, by heart. …

[H]er focus extends beyond music. Often called a choreographer, and embraced by the dance world as one of its own, she integrates movement into the fabric of her pieces to a higher degree than may be immediately evident (as in the “Panda Chant” from “The Games,” which has everyone stepping to 6/8 time while chanting in 4/4, something Ms. Monk equated to rubbing your tummy while patting your head). She is also concerned with how the piece looks onstage, down to the last detail of what everyone is wearing.

“It’s the 20th-century version of the gesamtkunstwerk,” Mr. Hoch said, referring to Wagner’s ideal of a total work of art. “It’s about the whole thing.”

For this reason, it is impossible to codify Ms. Monk’s work into a series of performance directives. She equates her work to a sculptor’s, molding a vowel color here, a movement there, illustrating with her own body and voice what she wants.

“We work years on pieces,” she said of her ensemble. “There’s a commitment of understanding that’s different from me just handing people scores. These are living forms. They need time to be nurtured, developed. Each piece is a world, and the techniques of that world are revealed by that world.… [I]t’s special to pass this on and feel that the music will go on.