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.
