The Standing Room

Wrap-Up

that's my head, directly above the white cap on the bicyclist

During the course of last night's performance, I honestly had no idea how many people were in the audience; there could have been, like, 5 people total, for all I knew. The house lights were all the way down and the stage lighting prevented me from seeing anything beyond the first couple of rows. I do remember thinking at one point, gee, it's strange that these people are sitting so close to the stage; people don't normally sit there unless they have to. And some part of my brain registered the fact that there were bodies in the loge-like seats on the side, but I chose not to give it much mind. So I hope my face didn't register the shock too obviously when the house lights came up for the composer acknowledgment after the second bow, because my first thought was actually, WHOA, who are all these people?!?!? I'm told that there were even a dozen+ standing-room folks in the back of the house.

My sincere thanks to everyone who turned up, and for being such a responsive and enthusiastic audience.  And thanks also to everyone who took the time to say hello afterwards and express the things that the program made them think about and feel. It means a lot to me that so many of the things people said went far beyond and far deeper than the usual "you have a lovely voice" or "well, that must have been hard!" type of comments. It was a very satisfying evening from the stage, and I hope it was equally so out in the seats.

Some reactions are up on Anne-Carolyn Bird's and Darcy James Argue's blogs, if you're curious.

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

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

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 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.