I Still Have My Mind-ah: Meredith Monk's "Dolmen Music" and "Memory Game"
Some of the weirdest singing out there, 40 years apart
This weekend (August 1st-3rd), I went to the annual Bang on a Can festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA. Some of the foremost avant-garde classical musicians in the world gather here for performances, among them Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and the legendary Meredith Monk. I saw dozens of performances - gamelan, solo cello, large and small ensembles, the famed Bang on a Can All-Stars - but my favorite by far was the last one, Monk's performance of the "Memory Game" suite with her vocal ensemble.
Monk is an odd figure. Originating in the '60s New York avant-garde classical underground after a 1965 "revelation that the voice could be like an instrument," the same scene that produced such giants as Julius Eastman, she focuses on the outer limits of the human voice: wordless wailing vocals, meaningless lines delivered with the seriousness of an opera singer, and extreme high and low pitches. (It might sound a bit disturbing at first - you’re not hearing anyone make these kinds of sounds in daily life - but keep an open mind!) Her album Dolmen Music (1981) collects five pieces composed throughout the '70s, all performed by Monk herself:
Opener "Gotham Lullaby," from the score to Ping Chong's Fear and Loathing in Gotham (1975), is an excellent introduction to Monk's world. After a piano introduction that evokes a pop ballad with relatively normal singing, it evolves to a middle section with high-pitched, seal-like cries of longing that somehow fit perfectly into the tune. Fear and Loathing in Gotham, one of the better-known works in Chong's repertoire, is a theater work about cultural estrangement, exploring (through a "shadow play" with no audible dialogue) the social dynamics of an Asian serial killer being pursued by a white detective. If you only listen to one Monk song, make it this one.
"Travelling" is one of three songs here taken from Monk's performance-art piece Education of the Girlchild, about the different phases in a woman's life, from birth to death. This one uses 5/4 to create a rollicking, wave-like atmosphere. As a vocalist, she takes an aggressive, swashbuckling tack here, interspersing odd interlocking melodies with fits of hearty laughter.
"The Tale," the shortest song on the album, is also from Girlchild. Described by Monk as an inventory of the main character's life, it features unsettling, manic, inhumanly high-pitched rhythmic laughter, plus a thrillingly horror-movie-like high voice speak-singing the only actual lyrics on the album, which must be heard to be believed.
"Biography," the archenemy of people looking to research Monk's backstory with a Google search, is the final piece from Girlchild, and possibly the best. Its most striking feature is a deeply emotional mimed 'dialogue' towards the end, between a shaky, elderly voice and a deeper voice that seems to be berating or arguing with it - impressively, both are sung by Monk live. The two go back and forth as a melancholic, lonely chord progression unspools itself on piano.
Finally, the title track takes up the entirety of Side B, clocking in at a massive 23 minutes and 48 seconds. Divided into six movements, it progresses from a near-silent intro into a multi-voiced work that evokes tribal percussion - there's a definite atmosphere of a pre-linguistic cave sermon, simultaneously alien and unmistakably human. The cello and some vocal parts here were also sampled by DJ Shadow for the middle part of "Midnight in a Perfect World" (starting around the 1:45 mark).
Side tangent: Monk’s fellow composer Julius Eastman's deep baritone voice shores up the bass end of the spectrum in “Dolmen Music.” Eastman had a tragic life story, shunned by both the conventional and unconventional musical establishments due to being gay and Black, despite his immense compositional talent. John Cage was even quoted as saying that he was “closed in on homosexuality” and had “no other idea to express” - pretty rich coming from someone whose most famous piece is literally silence. His music, underrated to this day, was also on display at Bang on a Can, where they played a chamber arrangement of his tense piano piece “Gay Guerrilla”:
The whole album of Dolmen Music, even though it's obviously from a fundamentally classical idiom, seems more like pop or folk music in some regards. Monk’s instrumentation is spare and pretty simple, leaving the focus on the all-important voice. There's a clear emphasis on accessibility - unlike some of the out-there material coming out of the New York scene at the time, I could picture a totally unpretentious person enjoying most of this, even with all its transgressive weirdness.
Fast-forward 40 years of madness later. In 2020, Monk made another recording, Memory Game, with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a group of elite musicians connected in various ways to the avant-garde festival. They provide excellent backing to the songs. The album begins with five songs from The Games (1984), Monk's twisted "science fiction opera" about post-apocalyptic survivors led by a David Bowie-like dictator. Like Dolmen Music, these pieces also feature odd, extreme vocals, but here they have lyrics, distorted and repeated until they hardly sound like English.
The characters in the opera speak a post-human language based on found objects (you’ll know what I mean when you hear it), designed to come across with only brief, yet deeply haunting, flashes of meaning.
The Memory Game album also includes several songs from other pieces, including the vibrant "Tokyo Cha Cha" from the stage work Turtle Dreams (Cabaret) (1984), heavily inspired by a trip to the surreal, futuristic cityscape of '80s Tokyo.
Live, they did the whole show with the same sequencing as on the album. It's like something from another planet - certainly one of the best shows I've been to since the pandemic, right up there with Black Midi in Queens that one time. They had an encore of "Panda Chant II," a fun short piece I’ve actually performed with Lehigh's Glee Club (more on my adventures with LU Choral Arts here) and "The Tale" - a high-energy finish to an already exhilarating performance.