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  • Performance and the Spiritual LifeMeredith Monk in Conversation with Bonnie Marranca
  • Bonnie Marranca

For more than four decades Meredith Meredith’s work as composer, performer, director, choreographer, and filmmaker has been influential in creating the new vocabularies of contemporary performance and media. She is a pioneer in what is known as “extended vocal technique,” introduced to a worldwide audience through her many concerts and CDs. In 1978 she formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, featured on numerous recordings, most recently, the music theatre work impermanence. Monk’s music has been performed by the New World Symphony, Musica Sacra, Björk, Kronos Quartet, and Bang On A Can All-Stars, and by many other musicians. Her operas and music theatre works include mercy (with the artist Ann Hamilton), Atlas, The Politics of Quiet, Quarry, Education of the Girlchild, and Vessel, an early site-specific creation. Monks films and videos count among them Book of Days, Ellis Island, and Our Lady of Late. Her visual art works and installations have been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Biennial, and the Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City. Monk has received numerous honors, including the MacArthur Award, several Obies and Bessies, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She performed a Vocal Offering for the Dalai Lama at the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles in 1999. Her newest work, Songs of Ascension, was first performed in a concert version in March 2008 at Dartington College of Arts (England) and later in a theatre version, with video by Hamilton, at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). In October the work had its premier at Stanford University, in addition to the site-specific performance of Songs of Ascension inside Ann Hamilton’s Tower, an eight-story structure on the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, California. This conversation was recorded on August 19, 2008 in New York.

I would like to start with the significance of the title of your new work, Songs of Ascension. It has an obvious reference in terms of Judaism to The Songs of Ascent and also to Christianity, which celebrates the Ascension on Easter Sunday, forty days after the Resurrection. There are Buddhist references as well. How did you arrive at the concept of “ascension” for your work? [End Page 16]

I think the best way I can talk about it is just to tell you a little bit about the process of how the piece began. The generative meeting was with a friend of mine, Norman Fischer, who was originally the abbot of the Zen Center of San Francisco. He was born Jewish, spent many years doing Zen practice, and now he has come back to also doing a meditation practice for Jews. So he is definitely trying to integrate these two things. We were having a conversation—this was many years ago—and he was talking about the poet Paul Celan who I had never heard of. Paul Celan referred to the Songs of Ascent. Now, I might have heard it wrong, because I thought I heard it as Songs of Ascension, but it was really Songs of Ascent. They are psalms from the 120th to the 134th. People from all around an area would come to a mountain, they would bring their best harvest, and they would recite or sing these songs going up the mountain. There were fifteen steps that went up. Apparently, at each of the steps one of these psalms was sung. Now I didn’t know all of the details of it but something intrigued me, and I was thinking—isn’t it interesting, first of all, that so many cultures go up to worship? Why is up better than going down? I was intrigued to know what those songs would have sounded like—and that idea of walking up and singing. I started thinking about other cultures, like the Mayan culture, the Inca culture, and in Buddhism there are stupas that you go up as well as the circumambulation aspect of going around them.

I wasn’t thinking of the Christian Ascension, to be totally...

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