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But from a classical point of view,
her vocal technique is really rather limited. [Again -- why on earth did I think this
mattered?] She says she has a four-octave range, but she doesn't have access to each
register on every vowel and at any dynamic, as classical voice technique would prescribe.
The extremes of her range have their own, apparently unchanging, character. Her highest
sounds are bright, sometimes wispy, never full; they're produced, oddly enough, on an
"ee" vowel, which classically trained sopranos would rather avoid in their high
range. Her gloriously wine-dark bottom register is much more open; even the "oo"
vowel, which she often uses there, sounds much more relaxed than it would, say, on Maureen
Forrester's bottom notes. Monk almost never changes register without a pause (which is why
the passage from Tablet is so exceptional). Most of her phrases lie --
regardless of the octave they're in -- within a very narrow compass.
 But why should she care about classical voice technique? Her field is
experimental music; she's interested in finding new ways to sing. ["Experimental
music?" Well, I guess we've got to give this style some kind of label, but
"experimental" hardly fits. These pieces aren't Meredith's experiments. They're
simply her art.] "Over the years I have developed a vocabulary and a style
designed to utilize as wide a range of vocal sounds as possible," she says in liner
notes to Dolmen Music. Or, as Robert Palmer quotes her in the liner notes for Songs
from the Hill/Tablet: "I've been trying to extend the voice in as many ways as
possible, utilizing as many resonating chambers, different kinds of syllables, positions
of the mouth, the inside of the mouth, the tongue, the lips, and breathing techniques
[sic]. " The results are extraordinary.
Yet I wonder -- even though I know she thinks about how she makes each sound --
whether she has really extended vocal technique in any extraordinary way. Or, to put it
differently: are her achievements really new techniques? Mostly not, I think. [Oh,
jeez -- who cares?] She's able to emphasize one overtone or another as she sings,
producing a filter-like, quasi-electronic effect, or sometimes (by strongly bringing out
one or another overtone) intones two notes at once. These things are techniques, because
in principle, at least, anyone could learn to do them and then use them for expressive
ends in ways that had nothing to do with Monk. (Actually, Monk herself doesn't use these
techniques much. Karlheinz Stockhausen mandates a much broader control of overtones for
anyone performing Stimmung; in Eight Songs for a Mad King Peter Maxwell
Davies requires a pinpoint control of vocal multiphonics that Monk may not have. Strictly
as a performer, she'd be unlikely to be in demand to sing anyone else's music,
assuming she'd want to.) She works with microtones; this seems as if it might be a
musical effect rather than a vocal technique, but her most characteristic use of them may
best be termed a "musical effect tied to the voice": an irregular glide down
from a sustained pitch. This is truly a technique, since anyone could learn to do it,
although its expressive uses seem more limited.[I'll say it again -- who cares?
Meredith is wonderful. Let's just leave it at that.]
The rest of what Monk might call her techniques strike me as being simply sounds
-- wonderful sounds, but still just sounds. They're very much her own -- it's possible
that no one else could produce them -- but in principle they're nothing new. [Sigh.] She
colors, modulates, and alters her voice, but so do pop, jazz, and rock singers and the
very few opera singers who are genuine vocal actors. Monk thins her sound to a wisp
without losing control; so did Maria Callas, when on the Angel recording of Bellini's I
Puritani she made each of the downward scales at the end of "Vien,
diletto" more and more ghostly and mad. Callas needed technique to do that, but she
wouldn't have called the process itself a "technique." Probably she'd have
called it acting, and in the same way, the most wonderful of Monk's sounds seem not so
much vocal or even musical achievements, but rather a strange and haunting kind of musical
drama [This still sounds like a good point. But why did I have to phrase it so
negatively?]
That's most obvious in many of the Songs from the Hill, where titles like
"Insect" or "Old Woman's Song" show how impressively specific her
vocal imagery can be. After only a few moments of "Prairie Ghost" -- wispy and
relaxed, but at the same time insistent; wistful, but also good-humored -- it's clear that
she's a great actress; she remains one elsewhere, even when her imagery isn't overt (it
usually isn't), or even when she's mannered or childish. (That happens all too often:
compare her cries, "I still have my hands!" "I still have my
me-mo-ries!" on side one of Dolmen Music. It is at once aloof, cloying, and
fey, though I'd never have thought such a combination possible. [Eek! Mannered?
Childish? I'd like to eat those words. When an artist is as wonderful as Meredith, you
just accept her.] I could argue that she's limited as a composer. [There I go
again!] The unaccompanied Songs from the Hill strikes me as her best work;
next are the songs with keyboard, buoyed by their accompaniments, but also a bit dragged
down by them because the keyboard licks seem conventional and because the vocal lines
dovetail with them too predictably.
Our Lady of Late is a special case, a timbral exercise more in a
generalized early-1970s experimental idiom than in Monk's personal style; I don't find it
especially convincing. Lowest of all I'd rank the ensemble pieces, which don't seem to do
enough with the ensemble possibilities Monk's specially trained singers ought to offer. In
Dolmen Music, for example, despite her talk of working with "the unique
quality of each voice," she doesn't do nearly as much with the three men in her
ensemble as with the three women. Perhaps this is due to compositional inexperience;
perhaps she understands women's voices better because she's worked so much with her own.
Another problem with the ensemble works is that they tend to be long: she's not good with
large-scale form. Tablet could very well end several times before its actual
conclusion. But at least it's held together by the same kind of keyboard accompaniments
that hold many of the solo songs in place; with no ostinato, Dolmen Music seems to
lack a musical spine and wanders.[Why on earth did I worry about all that?]
But so what? When I think of Meredith Monk, I think of what she does well, above
all of the opening song from her theater piece Quarry pouring forth in mournful
stasis from an old-fashioned radio near the center of the expansive performing area (which
the audience surrounded, like spectators at a football game). And I've always thought that
the theater works (which have toured the United States, Canada, and Europe) are her
best compositions, not because the songs in them are any better than the songs written
separately, but because here the interrelated sounds, movement, words, and imagery flow
into one another with all the assurance her purely musical composing doesn't always have. Key,
she says, is not so much a record as, in her words, "invisible theater," an
audio version of what she does on stage. In the same way, I'd call Quarry and other
works like it -- which move from point to point with perfect emotional grace, even if
their meaning is not entirely clear -- not theater, opera, dance, or even performance art,
but, to use a transformation of Monk's own phrase, visible music.[Originally published in The Musical Woman: An
International Perspective, edited by Judith Lang Zaimont (Greenwood Press, 1983)]
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