When the composer Meredith Monk began her career in New York, fifty years ago, you could rent a decent apartment in Manhattan for a hundred dollars a month, perhaps for much less if you were willing to venture into one of the scruffier parts of downtown. Monk has lived in a loft space in Tribeca since the early seventies; while the neighborhood has become a fortress of wealth, she has kept alive the dream of a bohemian metropolis, a place in which artists could afford to abandon convention and experiment at will. Drawing variously on choreography, filmmaking, and theatre, Monk has mapped a world that never quite existed in the history of the arts. At once visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt, her works banish the spurious complexities of urban life and reveal a kind of underground civilization, one that sings, dances, and meditates on timeless forces.
Monk now occupies the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, a post previously held by such eminences as Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and John Adams. A season-long series of performances hosted by Carnegie, including an event at Le Poisson Rouge on Nov. 20 (with the pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker) and an American Composers Orchestra concert at Zankel Hall on Nov. 21, will show the degree to which composition has dominated Monk’s later period: she has long displayed a refined ear for instrumental sound, but in recent years she has written several gently formidable pieces for orchestra and infused her theatre pieces with a sophisticated interplay of strings, wind, and percussion. Her symphonic sensibility makes itself felt in “On Behalf of Nature,” a kind of wordless ecological oratorio that BAM will present in early December. The work takes inspiration from the poet Gary Snyder, who has exhorted artists to speak for “non-human entities communicating to the human realm through dance and song.” Monk might have been born to play that shamanistic role. ♦
