Meredith Monk: On Behalf Of Nature

Name: Meredith Monk: On Behalf Of Nature
SKU: 72800
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Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble

For five decades, vocalist-composer Meredith Monk has explored what she calls “primordial utterance,” or non-verbal vocal sound that lay beneath and beyond language, expressing “that for which we have no words.” This exploration has led her to create music that The New Yorker describes as simultaneously “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt,” an art that “sings, dances and meditates on timeless forces.” With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Monk aimed to address ecology and climate change, she says: “Believing that music speaks more directly than words, I worked to make a piece with a fluid, perceptual field that could expand awareness of what we are in danger of losing. On Behalf of Nature is a meditation on our intimate connection to nature, its inner structures, the fragility of its ecology and our interdependence.” Voices and instruments have equal weight: sometimes each is heard alone; sometimes they are blended to form a new, mysterious sound; sometimes they are combined to create intricate, layered, yet transparent sonic landscapes.

In nunmehr fünf Jahrzehnten hat die Sängerin und Komponistin Meredith Monk das erforscht, was sie als "Ursprung des Ausdrucks" oder auch nonverbalen Vokalklang jenseits der Sprache bezeichnet und jenes ausdrückt, "für das wir keine Worte finden." Das ließ sie eine Musik schaffen, die The New Yorker als gleichzeitig "viszeral und ätherisch, roh und andächtig" und als eine Kunst, "die singt, tanzt und auf zeitlosen Kräften sinnt", beschreibt. Mit ihrem neuesten, multivalenten ECM New Series-Album rückt Monk die Themen Ökologie und Klimawandel in den Fokus: "Im festen Glauben, dass Musik mehr als Worte zu sagen vermag, verfolgte ich das Ziel ein Werk mit einem fließenden, wahrnehmenden Feld zu komponieren, das ein Bewusstsein für das schafft, das wir Gefahr laufen zu verlieren. On Behalf of Nature ist eine Meditation über unsere enge Verbindung zur Natur, ihre inneren Strukturen, die Fragilität ihrer Ökologie und unsere gegenseitige Abhängigkeit. "Stimmen und Instrumenten fällt das gleiche Gewicht zu: manchmal sind sie nur alleine zu hören; manchmal verbinden sie sich, um einen neuen, geheimnisvollen Klang zu bilden; manchmal werden sie auch kombiniert, um komplizierte, vielschichtige, aber dennoch transparente Klanglandschaften zu schaffen.

Featured Artists

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Sidney ChenVoice
Ellen FisherVoice
Katie GeissingerVoice
Meredith MonkVoice
Bruce RamekerVoice
Bohdan HilashBurmese Piccolo, Clarinet, Contra Alto Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Contra Bass Clarinet, Sopranino Recorder, Seljefløyte, Macauan Bird Calls, Burmese Whistle, Horanåva, Sulittu
John HollenbeckMarimba, Prepared Marimba, Vibraphone, Prepared Vibraphone, Toy Glockenspiel, Rasping Stick, Percussion, Bowed Flexatone, Cuica, Bells, High-Hat Cymbals
Allison SniffinVoice, Piano, Violin, French Horn
Laura ShermanHarp

Recorded

June 2015, Avatar Studios, New York

Original Release Date

21.10.2016

1Dark/Light 1
(Meredith Monk)04:27
2High Realm
(Meredith Monk)01:26
3Fractal Activity
(Meredith Monk)02:57
4Environs 1
(Meredith Monk)01:51
5Eon
(Meredith Monk)02:56
6Duet with Shifting Ground
(Meredith Monk)05:22
7Environs 2
(Meredith Monk)00:56
8Pavement Steps
(Meredith Monk)02:04
9Evolution
(Meredith Monk)04:40
10Ritual Zone
(Meredith Monk)04:08
11Water/Sky Rant
(Meredith Monk)05:48
12Memory Zone
(Meredith Monk)04:23
13Environs 3
(Meredith Monk)00:55
14Harvest
(Meredith Monk)03:18
15Dark/Light 2
(Meredith Monk)03:07
16High Realm Reprise
(Meredith Monk)01:01
17Fractal Mirror
(Meredith Monk)01:56
18Ringing
(Meredith Monk)03:29
19Spider Web Anthem
(Meredith Monk)06:07

In a way, everything she does is about ecology – that interconnectedness; those wild vocal noises – and ‘On Behalf of Nature’ is a treatise without text, an outcry without words. […] Sometimes it feels weird being a bystander to her music: this kind of elemental rite should involve us all.

Kate Molleson, The Guardian

On Behalf of Nature is titled after one of Monk’s recent, wordless stage shows: a meditation on ecological themes, including climate change. Despite that impassioned editorial focus, her resulting suite of songs and motifs avoids coming across like a lecture. And because she always revises the music from a dramatic piece before creating an album, ‘Nature’ sounds purposeful and complete throughout its hour-long running time. Aside from her vocal troupe, the instrumental forces include ace percussionist John Hollenbeck, harpist Laura Sherman, and the reed-instrument player Bohdan Hilash. […] In her liner notes to ‘Nature’, it is acknowledged that ‘the voices and instruments have equal weight’ this time—a state of play that might startle those who think of her talent in narrower terms. Still, she’s always been more than one of the world’s great singers. Some of Monk’s best pieces, like the 1991 opera ‘Atlas’, have also boasted dazzling instrumental writing. Her vocal instrument remains the envy of singers fifty years her junior. But on ‘Nature’, the uniqueness of her compositional vision is just as impressive.

Seth Colter Walls, Pitchfork

Eine akustische Abenteuerreise voller Kurzweil und Überraschungen, die tatsächlich – lässt man sich denn darauf ein - einen autonomen Raum, eine erstaunlich transparente Klanglandschaft schafft, die teilweise (‚Eon‘, ‚Harvest‘) mit einem Steve Reichschen Impact aufzuwarten versteht.

Ulrich Kriest, Konkret

Meredith Monk’s compositions and performances transcend genre, conjuring bold soundworlds, through innovative vocal techniques and, perhaps most profoundly, rediscovering music as as a site of ritual and transformation. This magical disc is both rite and protest […] In 19 short movements, the work is scored for vocal ensemble and shifting configurations of winds, percussion, keys and harp […] the recording is crisp and all performances strong.

Kate Wakeling, BBC Music Magazine

Die Musik basiert auf kleinen, repetitiven Fragmenten, die Monk über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg in skizzenhaften Notizen festgehalten hat. Sie basiert dennoch ihrem Wesen nach schon insofern nicht auf Notation, als außergewöhnliche Klänge, Vokaltechniken und körperliche Resonanzen des Stimmklangs im Mittelpunkt der Aufmerksamkeit stehen […] Die in der Regel kurzen rhythmischen Motive schichtet Monk zu dichten, vielstimmigen Texturen und kreiert auf diese Weise 19 Miniaturen von einer bis zu sechs Minuten Länge, die allerdings keineswegs uniform und zugleich so in Zusammenhang gesetzt sind, dass sich ein Bogen durch das gesamte Werk zieht.

Dietrich Heißenbüttel, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

On ‘Behalf of Nature’ is in itself a force of nature, the kind of performance that makes a deeply memorable impact even if the music itself is something for which you might find yourself having to acquire a taste. Meredith Monk has for many years been exploring what she calls ‘primordial utterance;’ non-verbal vocal sounds that take the place of conventional language but which easily convey as much meaning and emotion as sung words. […] This is a ‘meditation on out intimate connection with nature’ and by no means a lecture on where we are going wrong. This is visionary stuff and is something which we should all seek out and embrace. To put it in a nutshell, Meredith Monk is the Hildegard von Bingen of our times, and if Hildegard was still around you'd surely want to hear her latest album.

Dominy Clements, Music Web International

For six decades, vocalist-composer Meredith Monk has explored what she calls “primordial utterance,” or non-verbal vocal sound that lay beneath and beyond language, expressing “that for which we have no words.” This exploration has led her to create music that The New Yorker describes as simultaneously “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt,” an art that “sings, dances and meditates on timeless forces.” With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Monk aimed to address ecology and climate change, she says: “Believing that music speaks more directly than words, I worked to make a piece with a fluid, perceptual field that could expand awareness of what we are in danger of losing. On Behalf of Nature is a meditation on our intimate connection to nature, its inner structures, the fragility of its ecology and our interdependence.”

To that end, voices and instruments have equal weight across On Behalf of Nature: sometimes each is heard alone; sometimes they are blended to form a new, mysterious sound; sometimes they are combined to create intricate, layered, yet transparent sonic landscapes. The winds of Bohdan Hilash and violin of Allison Sniffin rustle and sing by turns, as the tuned percussion of John Hollenbeck plays a melodic as well as rhythmic role. The six singers (including Monk) offer melodious, harmonic and hocketing lines, murmurs, chants and keens as they communicate in a language beyond words. There is a sequence of pieces for voices alone (“Environs”), while the luminous minimalism of “Eon” is for instruments only. “Water/Sky Rant” is a feature for Monk’s solo voice, with rippling harp among the accompaniment. But most of the album’s 19 pieces meld singing and playing in a tapestry of sound.

Praising Monk’s 2011 ECM album Songs of Ascension, for voices and strings, the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote: “Monk’s most significant growth over the past decade or two has been as a composer. She is a great master of utterance… A listener feels somehow in communication with another, perhaps wiser, species.”

Discussing her compositional process for On Behalf of Nature in her liner essay for the album, Monk says: “As I began working on the music for On Behalf of Nature, I asked myself the question: ‘How would one make an ecological art work, one that didn’t make more waste in the world?’ What came to mind was the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and his notion of bricolage: the process of assembling or making something from what is already at hand. In pre-industrial societies, one object could function in many different ways by an act of imagination. We now speak of this process as re-purposing. Part of my process as a composer includes creating music notebooks that function like journals. Within them, I write themes, fragments and phrases that are not ready to be made into complete forms. They are like seeds, filled with potential, waiting for the right moment to sprout. While I began by composing new pieces for On Behalf of Nature, at a certain point, I decided to play through fragments and phrases in a few of my notebooks to see if anything resonated with what I was now exploring. I then built new forms from that raw material. It was gratifying to see that the time that had elapsed between the original impulses and the present served to shed light upon and enrich the original ideas. The notion of spiraling around to the past to make something completely new is also a way of appreciating what is here in the present and working with what we have.

For Monk, On Behalf of Nature conjures “multiple realms including the celestial, human, microscopic, animal, plant and mineral, as well as the underlying processes and rhythms of nature,” she explains. “The overall structure is an arch with some of the themes from the beginning reoccurring near the end but in a varied or modified form. The last two pieces serve as an extended coda suggesting the continuity and resiliency of the natural world.”