Her stature is small and now also somewhat fragile, but Meredith Monk, the American pioneer of contemporary vocal music, fills the packed Amare concert hall in The Hague with her presence alone. Tension is in the air when this woman walks onto the gigantic stage next to the three singers of her Vocal Ensemble. Recognizable from the thousands, with the long black braids on her shoulders and as always dressed in a cubist kimono creation.
She will be 80 this year, and her arrival at the festival for progressive music Rewire in The Hague is a programmatic hit. Not only because her oeuvre is unique and it is special that the composer and voice artist is still performing at such an advanced age, including the dance movements she is known for. But also because during the festival, Rewire presents Monk as a great source of inspiration for many new generations, especially female vocalists, who use their voice as an instrument, just like the New York innovator.
On Saturday, after Monk’s concert with the Bang on a Can All-Stars company, a long line will be drawn through the program with followers and new voice warriors. And that makes it possible to compare the work, which in the eighties was still avant-garde, but can now be considered part of the canon of modern classical music, with new vocal pop and experimental music.
Monk has drawn a strong selection from her catalog, especially work she wrote in the 1980s. The opening piece of the science fiction opera The Gamescomposed in 1984, still sounds modern, thanks to the stuttering keyboard tune and the clarinet that waltzes through it. migration after that is such a Monk composition that hypnotizes you, with voices that only say ‘wah wah wah’, but always in a different timbre, so that as a listener you also end up in different areas of feeling. Monk’s voices usually have no meaning, but a lot of eloquence, as they scour the gamut of human emotions, sometimes taking you to heaven and then straight to hell again, with high-pitched guttural sounds that laugh you in the face.
The harmony vocals, the timing and the playing with marimba and keyboards is breathtaking, even though you can hear that the precision in Monk’s voice decreases a bit. It makes her work even more impressive, because it is precisely the somewhat older voice that makes such a moving human sound, and reports on life.
The high level makes the work difficult for her successors. The American singer Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater, a new avant-garde icon, attracts a cult-like following to the Grote Kerk, but her performance lacks persuasiveness, and that magnetism of Monk. Her folk with scratching violins and laptop ambiance is mysterious, but remains a bit too whispery floating under the church eye.
Norwegian singer Jenny Hval also has trouble with the stage and the hall. Her latest, literary album Classic Objects is beautiful, and her soft, clean and sometimes mean voice comes into its own there. But in the sound mix in stage Paard, drums and guitars that are too brutal push her under, so that the poetic lyrics can hardly be followed.
And then at 1 a.m. you think back almost with nostalgia to that great performance by Monk and her ‘folk from another planet’, as she once described her music. You would like to grab a rocket and fly towards it.
The Games
Meredith Monk wrote her voice opera The Games in 1984 in Berlin, in the midst of the Cold War. The threat came from the east, the nuclear warheads were supplied from the west, she herself said as an introduction to her performance in the Amare concert hall in The Hague. Monk wrote her songs about the apocalypse and a new human trying to remember the culture of the previous humanity wiped out by a nuclear disaster. Due to the situation on the world stage, the piece again seems topical, and for that reason it was also impressive. In 2020 Monk re-recorded her opera for the album Memory Game†
rewire
Festival
With Meredith Monk, Jenny Hval, Eartheater, ea
7 to 10/4, various locations, The Hague.