Edinburgh International Festival: Performance art pioneer Meredith Monk's Songs of Ascension will bring her dancing voice and singing body to Edinburgh

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

"I am not a noun, I am a verb," responds the youthful-sounding 67-year-old New Yorker, speaking from St Louis, Missouri, where she's preparing for the world premiere of a new orchestral piece. "To have to keep struggling with this – it seems like such a logical stance. Weaving things together seems to be such an apt metaphor for the society that we live in. To actually keep on having to fight the fact that people just can't handle that I don't fit into one category or ano

Weaving not waving, then? "Exactly!" exclaims Monk, whose acclaimed 2009 work, Songs of Ascension, will be performed at the Edinburgh International Festival by herself and her ensemble with the Elysian Quartet and the Edinburgh University Singers.

"My life is a braid," she continues, another apt metaphor since the diminutive Monk always wears her long, dark brown hair in pigtails that snake down to her waist. "I weave together three aspects of my life and my work in New York and my time in my studio in New Mexico."

She goes on to speak of "the dancing voice" and "the singing body", constants in her work since even a contemplative, elegiac piece such as Songs of Ascension – Monk is a Buddhist and has performed in concert for the Dalai Lama – has her using not only her singers but the musicians and their instruments like dancers. When did you last see a graceful peripatetic percussionist? Or a violinist still playing while flat on his or her back on the floor? Or even a cellist and her cello circling a stage?

Monk, whose beautiful voice has been described as "a folk singer crossed with a baby bird", created Songs of Ascension with video artist Ann Hamilton, whose projections for the piece return almost obsessively to an image of a galloping horse. Monk is obsessive about riding herself – it's "integral", she says.

The reflective Songs of Ascension grew out of conversations she had with her poet friend, Norman Fischer, formerly abbot of San Francisco's Zen Centre. "He was translating psalms from the Old Testament into a more contemporary and Zen-inspired language and he spoke of the poet Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew and Holocaust survivor, who had written Songs of Ascent, which were sung as people proceeded up a mountain.

"This idea of worship, walking up something and singing, even using instruments fascinated me. I thought, 'why is up sacred and down not sacred?' Then, 'synchronicitally' my friend Ann Hamilton called me to invite me to sing at the opening of a tower she'd been making in California. So we performed Songs of Ascension there, with the Kronos Quartet. It was glorious – the strings and the voices together, very emotional. So I hope it leaves people in Edinburgh with a similar sense of magic and aliveness."

The recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award, two Guggenheim fellowships and three Obie awards, Monk has even been nominated for a Grammy and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Last year, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented a four-hour, one-day-only marathon performance spanning 43 years of Monk's work. "It had a lot of heart, I think," she says.

Her pioneering work as a theatre performer, composer and singer has inspired others, including the Icelandic singer/songwriter Bjork, who's performed Monk's 1975 song Gotham Lullaby several times in concert.

Monk's own distinctive vocal work has appeared on countless recordings and in numerous films, including the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. Her multi-media pieces range from ground-breaking solo performances and site-specific work (she once bussed people around Manhattan for a piece about Joan of Arc) to an opera, Atlas, which included farmers who started out as singing haystacks.

Some of the Houston audience didn't stay. Nonetheless, Monk is praised lavishly by reviewers, if it can be decided which critic should review her. The New York Times once dispatched "a committee of music, dance and theatre writers to assess her," according to the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross, author of that "maker of uncommon evenings" tag.

He's written of her work: "Later generations will envy those who got to see her live." Reviewing Songs of Ascension at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, last November, he wrote: "Her voice remains incomparable: the dancer-like flexibility, the microscopic control of pitch, and the pure, raw tone are all intact." The Los Angeles Times reviewer thought it "a major Monk work. The music (is] glorious... a listener feels somehow in communication with another, perhaps wiser, species."

Certainly, Monk, who could read music before words, comes from a musical species. "I'm a fourth generation singer," she explains. "One of my great-grandfathers was the cantor of a Moscow synagogue and my mother's father was an operatic bass-baritone, who fled Russia and founded a conservatory in Harlem."

Her glamorous mother, Audrey Marsh, was a jingles singer on radio. "She was the voice of Chiquita bananas and the Muriel cigar girl singing, 'Why don't you pick me up and smoke me some time?'"

When she was born, Monk's blue eyes didn't "fuse" and synchronise properly. Her mother recognised her daughter's innate musicality, though, and sent her to classes where they taught music through the rhythm of the body, which solved her visual problems.

"Music really got my body going," she says, adding that as a child she remembers loving all things Scottish. "I learnt the Highland Fling when I was ten," she says.

"I can't wait to do it in Edinburgh, because I've dreamt of performing on the Festival ever since.

"I may have to get a kilt."

&#149 Songs of Ascension is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Sunday 29 August and Monday 30 August.

&#149 Supported by the American Friends of the Edinburgh International Festival