Instrumental music from Meredith Monk

 Meredith Monk - Realms

This valuable album includes Meredith Monk's only string quartet, Stringsongs, a work written in 2004; Backlight, written in 1999 & revised in 2015 for a small ensemble of piano, winds and strings; and the title piece, Realms for six voices & a small group of instruments, from 2012. In the conversation Monk has with Phillip Granell in the liner notes,  she talks about how these three pieces are related: "... all the pieces are sonic landscapes, each a different one. Each piece explores new colours and textures." Together they make a substantial, challenging and appealing hour of music.

An almost completely instrumental album is a first for Monk, who has always worked primarily with the human voice. For the "Phantom Strings" movement of Stringsongs, "I actually wrote it by laying tracks with my voice. I even sang the cello part!" It's perhaps for this reason that the work doesn't have the String Quartet Common Denominator sound, with Joseph Haydn still lurking in the background of so many works in that form. As well, we should note that the string players - violinists Phillip Granell & Chihiro Ono, violist Richard Jones and cellist Sergio Serra - provide the rich and full sound of a superb madrigal ensemble, recorded in a churchlike acoustic.

Backlight, scored for five woodwinds, piano, violin and cello, was conceived by Meredith Monk to evoke nighttime in New York City. It's a noir piece that's built on a modernist chamber music sound rather than the romantic Hollywood orchestral scores of the great film noir composers Miklós Rózsa, David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann. The cinematic nature of the work is especially evident in the third & final movement, where the city awakes. It reminded me of a comment Debussy made about Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben: "He definitely thinks in colored images. Ein Heldenleben is a book of images, cinematography even." Backlight is the noir version of this.

Realm Variations brings back the human voice, but as Monk notes, "In Realm Variations, while there are voices, I think of them as instruments and the instruments as voices." This is an important work, from one of the most important musical voices of this century.

The cover image is by Kyungwon Yi.

Inspiration for the Apocalypse

Meredith Monk, with the Bang on a Can Allstars: Memory Game

These Meredith Monk songs, which date from 1983 to 2006, are expanded, refined, opened up, multiplied and divided in new orchestrations by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. This is authentic Meredith Monk, with her own vocal contributions, as well as those of her Vocal Ensemble: Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, & Allison Sniffin. But there are very impressive contributions as well from the Bang on a Can All-Stars: much more than simple arrangements and instrumental accompaniment, they're closer to re-compositions. Monk's music is rich and diverse enough to play the role that Bach plays in Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras.

The highlight on the disc is Waltz in 5s, originally written in 1996. This vocalise with a quirky rhythm is a kind of hybrid of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 and Paul Desmond's Take Five. Many of the pieces, whether they're inspired by musical theatre (Memory Song) or Weimar Berlin (Totentanz), are haunting and often disturbing, no matter how light and frothy they may sound. But in spite of this, there is still an optimistic, uplifting note. As Monk says in her Composer's Notes:

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I made a number of apocalyptic pieces that were a reflection of the fragmentation, violence and speed of the time. Soon after that, I realized that instead of stating the problem, it would be more useful and inspiring to return to the notion of offering an alternative. I wanted to create a musical world in which members of the audience could have a pure, direct and immersive experience.

In the middle of our own apocalyptic time there is much inspiration and encouragement to be found within this intriguing album.

This album will be released on March 27, 2020.