The Standing Room

The M6 at Symphony Space Tonight

Emily Eagen and Peter Sciscioli rehearsing Hocket (from Facing North),
which reminds me of Inuit throat-singing with its playful and
mind-bogglingly virtuosic sharing of breath

We've had a couple of runs at tonight's Symphony Space program already this week, including a performance at Sarah Lawrence College last night and an open dress in front of our various posses on Tuesday. The question that people asked me after both runs was, how much is "written" in these pieces, and how much is interpretation? 

This is, of course, probably the biggest question we have to grapple with in this project, and by "we" I mean both The M6 and Meredith Monk herself. I hope I'm not putting words in her mouth, but it must be both exciting and jarring to see and hear work that had previously never been separate from her own presence set into different bodies and voices. And since it's both impossible and undesirable for us to be clones of Meredith, in each of our coachings we have to work continually on honing in on where the essence of each work lies. Often the insights provided are about form, proportion, impetus, imagery, color, spaciousness—things that can't necessarily be communicated through notes and dynamic markings on paper or just by imitating a recording, especially since the pieces themselves are also somewhat malleable. In both cases, a transcription or a recording is just one snapshot of one performance or one possible form in which the piece can take shape. Patrick Vaz observed in a comment below that that this method of learning "sounds like the way dance tradition is passed on—training directly from the creators rather than interpretation of notation," and this is exactly on point(e).

Claire Bryant (cello) and Silvie Jensen (chopsticks) rehearsing Dolmen Music,
which has the sense of a ritual removed from time or history

I echo something that M6er Holly Nadal said in the NY Times: "You listen, and it sounds so free and improvised. You don't realize how much structure is there until you start trying to pick it apart. A lot of people...think there's a certain randomness there. But it's highly, highly structured." I would add that though there's a certain amount of freedom, there's no randomness at all. Depending on the piece, the structure can expand or contract a certain amount, depending on the individual performance. But only through rehearsing and performing these pieces has the essence of the structure, proportion and form really become apparent and internalized. What I've come to realize is that this process is the nuts-and-bolts work of building a legacy.

The M6 Performs Tablet

The first half of our Symphony Space program ends with a 20-minute work called Tablet, for the three women of The M6, who play piano and recorders in addition to singing. Tablet was the first piece that Meredith Monk had ever created for an ensemble, originally for four women and later revised for three. (Before Tablet was mostly solo work, and out of Tablet came Dolmen Music; our program follows a similar trajectory, for those who are interested in the structure behind it.) The only available recording of the piece is on a Wergo album that isn't even distributed in the US, as far as I know.

Last year, Tablet was heard in concert again for the first time in nearly two decades, first at La Mama and then at The Stone. I recently heard someone talking about how, in performing or listening to Meredith's music, which is often sung on unintelligible syllables, you start out thinking that these syllables mean nothing, but eventually come to realize they actually encompass everything. The three performers in Tablet move through a number of characters, archetypal women who appear in various guises throughout Meredith's work. They chatter, laugh, mourn, berate, flirt, comfort. The ending of piece includes a persona Meredith described to Holly during one of their coachings as The Oldest Woman in the World. An excerpt from The Stone performance is below.

Pictured above: Emily Eagen, Holly Nadal, and Silvie Jensen (standing) in a coaching with Meredith Monk and Andrea Goodman, one of the original Tablet performers

New York Stories: Music Bloggers in the Wild

Pictured: At least three music bloggers (including ACB on stage)
Not pictured: At least another two music bloggers
(including grecchinois who appeared on stage later)

When I passed through New York late last month for some rehearsals (M6 show on Thursday; did I mention?) I caught one of the Saint Louis Symph Orch's concerts at Carnegie. It was a magical evening: I showed up at the box office just as someone was giving away comps in Parterre Row U! (The concert was nice too.) Huzzah for not planning ahead.

Sometime during intermission the empty seat next to me was filled by a young man with program, pen and digital camera in hand. Something about his set-up seemed strangely familiar. When David Robertson came out, the camera went up. During the applause between pieces, furtive photos were taken and quickly reviewed with head bowed over the tiny screen. During the Doctor Atomic Symphony my peripheral vision caught sight of frantic scribbles in the program. Either he's an obsessive-compulsive, I thought, or...

"Pardon me," I said as we stood to put on our coats, "but do you happen to have a blog?" I had considered at one point taking a photo of him taking a photo of the stage, because watching him felt uncomfortably like watching myself in a funhouse mirror. (For Peter Matthews' post about the concert, visit Feast of Music.)

Photo from Anne-Carolyn Bird's Sing for Hope birthday concert benefiting The Children's Aid Society, which offers tuition-free musical training for under-served children in the New York area

Hey, That's Me!

No, you're looking at Bruce. To your left. Down a bit. Yes, there you go.

from the lobby of Symphony Space

New York Stories: War and Piece

Not pictured: The guy who stole my wallet

One night in December, when I was back East for some M6 rehearsals, I had one of those typical, overbooked New York nights where there was simply too much to hear. So after passing the early part of the frigid evening wandering through the East Village, bundled up tightly for Unsilent Night, I found shelter uptown in the decidedly warmer climes of the Met standing room to catch War &... (a.k.a. intermission + the second act of Prokofiev's War & Peace).

Grateful to have a chance to warm up, I took off my jacket and placed it on the ground before the curtain rose. Sometime before Moscow caught fire, my intrepid companion for the evening, Sr. R-, left the hall to use the restroom. Mesmerized as I was by the rotating wedge and the horse (because, really, when there's a horse on the stage, you can't look at anything else, can you?) I was only vaguely aware of the gentleman who slid into Sr. R-'s position at the rail. If I had to make a guess, I'd say he was a not-thin not-fat white guy in his 30s with brown hair and a roundish head, standard issue white sneakers and an unremarkable blue jacket. I didn't pay much attention as he was only there for a scene or so, and he left before the end of the show. Sr. R- and I capped the evening over drinks across the street afterwards, and when I went to cover the check, to thank him for weathering wind and cold both outside and on the stage, I discovered my wallet (which had been in my jacket pocket) was gone.

Here I must give a hearty shout-out to the security staff at the Met stage entrance, who at 1am on a freezing, wet New York winter night were the kindest, most understanding people you could imagine. They heard me when I said I needed my ID for my flight on Monday, they checked the lost and found, and most amazingly allowed me to look in the theater by my standing room place while the strike was going on. So thank you; I try not to depend on the kindness of strangers, but it certainly is appreciated when offered.

Of course I emerged empty-handed, and I went back to start the credit card cancellation process.  It was at this point I discovered that someone had gone straight home after the show to order hundreds of dollars of INTERNET PORN. Because isn't that what everyone does after four hours of War & Peace? Don't you turn into a total horndog after watching Napoleon's army retreat across Russia? I'm sure 80% of the audience that night found themselves with the uncontrollable urge to settle in and pull a wad after listening to Ramey ruminate on the greatness of the Russian people.

It was pretty nasty porn, too. (I checked.)

EPILOGUE

On Thursday, two months later, the day before heading back to New York, I got a package in the mail. A padded envelope that cost $1.89 at the post office. $1.81 in postage. No return address but NY, NY. And my wallet, with everything in it except for the (signficant amount of) cash.

And a note, scribbled on a Priority Mail label.

:) ?!?

Getting My Sea Legs

Inle Lake, Burma

NPR: There was a critic who suggested the whole point of your music is—and I'm quoting here—"transformation and transport." Would you agree with that?

Terry Riley: Well, that would be a goal... Definitely one of my goals would be that music should somehow change our lives; if we practice it enough, it will make us better people. And by that token, if we give our music to the world, it should help other people in changing their lives.

—from an NPR Weekend Edition segment about The Cusp of Magic

The first piece I ever saw Meredith Monk perform live was a set of duets from Facing North, with Robert Een. As a listener/observer I was absolutely awed by the grace with which they performed this mind-blowing music, and the focused joy of performing that came off the stage. Neatly hidden from view, though, was the complete mental presence and mindfulness required on their part to get to that point.

One of the M6's interests is to explore some of the music that Meredith doesn't perform anymore (or often) with her regular ensemble. The March 6 program at Symphony Space, for example, opens with a set of solos from Songs from the Hill (1976) and Volcano Songs (1994); the piece I'm doing in this set, the solo version of "Boat Man," has never been performed by anyone other than Meredith. It's a piece I used to sort-of-kind-of sing along with while listening to the CD, and, as a passive participant, I was lulled into a sense of "hey, that's not so hard, I can do that."

Then I started to transcribe it.

Every single measure is different. Patterns can be found, but they are never carbon copies. If the notes are the same, the rhythm changes. If the notes and the rhythm are the same, the vowels change. If the notes and the rhythm and the vowels change, the timbre changes. Every time you think you've settled into a meter for a couple of measures, it pops from four to three or three to two or SURPRISE! let's just drop half a beat and continue on as though nothing's happened. The shifts are often miniscule and dramatic simultaneously. My transcription has track timings about every three measures so that I could find my place again each of the hundreds of times I hit rewind. It was an outrageously entertaining process, unraveling the structure behind the piece.

Then I started to memorize it.

That was when the panic set in, and when the anxiety dreams began. Imagine trying to memorize a pattern like

AABBAAbBAABBBa
AABAaABbaAAAb
aAAbBABBAAabABC etc.

and knowing that you will eventually have to recite it alone on stage, in a spotlight, in front of people—people who, I should like to point out, include Meredith Monk, the person who created the pattern in the first place. And that you have to do it kind of fast, and that you have to look like you're having a blast doing it. Actually, it's not even "looking like" you're having a blast; you actually have to be enjoying yourself literally beyond words, because the moment you think the words "ah, I'm at variation 1a the 2nd time but with the oo" is the moment you have stepped out of creation and into analysis, and then you're guaranteed to miss the shift into that 3rd iteration of figure 2 with that little 16th note squiggle you haven't named yet.

But after many hours of work, the anxiety dreams have disappeared, and the pattern is pretty firmly implanted in my brain at this point. (Let's just say that it is alarming to discover you've been involuntarily singing Meredith Monk's music while lathering up your hair.) Now I'm on to the stage where I get to think about the Boat Man as an archetype, find his movement in my own body, and revel in the delight he's experiencing as he spontaneously creates these patterns through playfulness and improvisation. In other words, to try to find the joy that came from that first performance of Facing North I saw.

In the process of getting here, I was reminded of what Terry said, that in the practice of making music our lives can be changed and we can be made better people. This is the ultimate joy in preparing Meredith's work, for me. In learning the music, I learn another way to think. In preparing for performance, I must prepare not to perform and instead simply allow performance to happen. In making sense of her consciousness, I discover a different awareness of myself. Transformation and transport—if I practice enough, I will be a better person.

The Homecoming

Wednesday: Rain
Thursday: Rain
Friday: Rain
Saturday: Rain
Sunday: Rain

The M6:Meredith Monk Music Third Generation

Last week's Amtrak adventure was a byproduct of my need to get up to New York for some rehearsals: I have a March 6 performance at Symphony Space looming. Astute observers of TSR may have noticed that an icon for The M6 has appeared in one of the sidebars to the right; click on through for concert details.

One night about two and a half years ago, Heather Wings and I let ourselves into the basilica of Mission Dolores, dodging janitors and clergy, to record an audition tape. The yield from that effort was one of the most mentally vigorous weeklong experiences of my life, an experience shared with 18 performers who had come from Uruguay and Israel, Serbia and northern Wisconsin, to work intensively with Meredith Monk. We had six days to learn and memorize a full concert program from scratch, in many cases without notation, and with movement. We performed this program in Carnegie's Zankel Hall on the seventh day, which I assure you was among the least restful sabbaths in history. As Anne Midgette wrote in her NY Times feature about the project, "People often describe [Meredith's music] as simple. But anyone who thinks it is easy has never tried to sing it."

Amein, sister.

I can say with certainty that there's no way this group of performers would ever have come together on the same path without Meredith as a beacon. We were a professional whistler and a vocal performance DMA, a rolfing practitioner and a film actress, a Latin jazz singer and a performance art scholar—an almost absurdly unrelated group of people, who nonetheless shared the desire to understand Meredith's work better by performing it. The experience was exhausting, yet musically, intellectually and even spiritually satisfying and inspiring in ways I could never have anticipated. And we all then we went our separate ways, back to London and Den Haag and San Francisco.

Then last August, I got a call out of the blue from one of the performers, Holly Nadal, who has made a personal project of transcribing Meredith's work. "Do you want to sing Dolmen Music again?", she said, and that question has led to six of us—me, Holly, Sasha Bogdanowitsch, Emily Eagen, Silvie Jensen, and Peter Sciscioli—deciding to come back together, forming a new group called The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation.

Meredith's extraordinary, uncategorizable, four-decade career has been extensively documented, but for those who don't know, there are a number of works early in her career that were performed exclusively by herself or with a very small number of other people. A significant shift happened when she began to create works on other performers, but since much of her work is created and taught in the oral tradition, generally she has shared the stage in performances of her music.

The M6 has now found itself in the (kind of unbelievably!!) privileged position to be among the very few to be personally coached by Meredith—in some cases on pieces that have never been performed by anyone other than Meredith herself—to pass on these profoundly beautiful works that are part of a living icon's legacy. So for those of you who follow TSR regularly, there's some insight on why it seems like I've been out East seemingly every other week for the past several months.

As you know, I don't normally use this blog as a place to pimp the stuff I'm involved with, but I'm hope that perhaps some folks out there will find this project of interest. (If you're one of them, you're welcome to befriend us on MySpace and/or Facebook.) Our big show is on Thursday, March 6, and it closes the four-concert Meredith Monk/Multi-Musics series at Symphony Space that Steve Smith wrote about today.

Obviously this is going to occupy a certain portion of my thoughts for the next couple of weeks, so don't be surprised if you see some more posts on this subject. I hope you won't mind following along on the journey.

An Amtrak Narrative

The lovely and somewhat strident woman on the left has 21 people coming from Europe to her wedding. She's very excited. She doesn't want her father to spend too much money. She wants to help the people who need to travel, but she can't help everyone, you know? There are 21 people coming from Europe. They know that having the event at this place will exclude some people, but it's really making them think about who and what's really important, you know? One of her relatives definitely needs help to get there, but he would have trouble traveling anywhere. Her fiancé is interested but not so emotional about this planning, you know? She has a little notebook where she makes comments whenever she mentions that there are 21 people coming from Europe. There are 27 people coming from other parts of the world too. Meanwhile, she's going to New York for the weekend, baby!  Apparently there are 21 people coming from Europe. You're the *best*. She's looking forward to cuddling. Buh-bye.

Note to self: The Quiet Car is the last car, not the first car. (But if I can memorize music here, I can memorize music anywhere.)

Ich bin ein Washingtonian

All shows should have live peacocks.