Composer and performance artist Meredith Monk’s uncanny ability to express universal truths through highly evocative, elemental sounds has kept her in the forefront of contemporary music for over four decades. Now, just days after her groundbreaking collaboration with Bay Area women’s vocal ensemble Kitka on May 15, Songs of Ascension (2008), her latest recording for ECM New Series, confirms that her work remains as vital as ever.
The composition — a performance piece, really — also shares a new aspect of Monk’s work: the incorporation of classical string quartet and instruments from the East and West into her writing for voices. Inspiration for the work came in part from an exchange with poet and Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer. When Fischer referenced Paul Celan’s writings about the “Song of Ascents,” 15 of the Psalms said to have been sung by people ascending to heaven during pilgrimages, Monk began exploring the association of ascension with an upward movement toward heaven.
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At the same time, visual artist Ann Hamilton invited her to perform in an eight-story tower she had designed on the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville. The tower, conceived to suggest the shape of double-helix DNA, includes two interior spiraling staircases that rise up opposite each other, only intersecting at the top. Intrigued by the connection with ascension, and certainly by the fundamental nature of the design and the unusual acoustic, Monk designed a site-specific piece that included her own seven-person vocal ensemble, vocalists of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, and the Todd Reynolds Quartet; all were capable of carrying their instruments up the stairs. (New music pioneer Pauline Oliveros premieres her Tower Ring on the same site on June 4 and 5.) For the CD, Monk augmented her vocal ensemble with vocalists of The M6 and the Montclair State University Singers. She also augmented the Todd Reynolds Quartet with a violinist, woodwind player, and percussionist.
Recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Songs of Ascension reveals Monk far more a primordialist than a minimalist. Whoops, gongs and drums suggest ancient rituals from faraway lands, while consoling vocal harmonies and vaguely Native American vocalizations bring her musical language close to the heart. There is an extraordinary track on which siren-like waves of sound pass between correctly spaced stereo speakers while singers vocalize at different specific points in the sound field.
At times, the string quartet plays with almost savage intensity, joined by rattles and clapping that simulates the unusual rhythms of Indian ragas. But then the music subsides, leaving the silence punctuated by occasional whoops and peeps. As the piece evolves, Monk and the other singers seem to emote from a place before vocalizations formed into identifiable words. The sounds are part-prehistoric, part interplanetary, with baby-like cries and wails summoning forth images of beings hailing each other across vast spaces.
Songs of Ascension is so all-encompassing in scope as to call for documentation in both high-resolution download formats and surround-sound Blu-ray. Even in its current CD format, Monk’s latest masterpiece immerses listeners in a rare experience of grace and beauty.