“[Meredith Monk is a] high priestess of enchantment . . . she invites you to bypass the part of your brain that craves logic and understanding and to respond intuitively to the wondrous qualities of her . . . sounds and images.” —The New York Times
Songs of Ascension, a major new multimedia production for the stage combining composer, singer, director/choreographer Meredith Monk’s pristine music and iconoclastic theatricality with raw, sensuous visual elements by visual artist Ann Hamilton, will have its first preview performances at 8 pm Thursday– Saturday, June 12–14, at the Walker Art Center’s William and Nadine McGuire Theater. Co-commissioned by the Walker, Songs of Ascension explores the spiritual, vocal, and physical notions of ascension across geography and time. This evening-length work, including the otherworldly sounds of Monk’s Vocal Ensemble and members of the Oratorio Society of Minnesota collaborating with a selection of top New York instrumentalists, will refocus perceptions of music-theater. Monk and Hamilton will be in residence at the Walker for two weeks prior to the performances to complete the final development of the piece.
Meredith Monk can chart every bead of inspiration on her new necklace of voice, music, and theater. She points to poet Norman Fischer’s translations of the Psalms, which she stitched to her own fascination with the human impulse to “ascend.” She tells of reconnecting with visual artist Ann Hamilton, a past collaborator, after hearing she was creating a tower. What Monk can’t do is say how Songs of Ascension, the show she’s stringing together with those beads, will ultimately look when she wears it in public. “We’re trying to hang out in the unknown right now, which is what art is about,” she says.
Nobody navigates the unknown quite like Monk. Through 40 years of composition and production, she has blurred, broken, and redefined the bounds of interdisciplinary performance—creating her own sonic pallet, experimenting with story forms, and influencing two generations of artists through her signature stew of movement, instrumental music, and vocalizations. With Songs of Ascension, she is working on a grand scale of gesture and ambition, melding chanted vocals and an orchestra score into a piece of multimedia theater honoring “architectural and ritual motifs of ascension from throughout the world.”
“There are certain psalms whose titles can be translated into ‘Songs of Ascent,’ and we have this tradition of going up mountains—going to the top of Mount Zion, the Aztecs climbing the steps of the temple—and this up-and-down movement is cross cultural,” Monk says of her initial creative sparks for this piece.” Ann called to ask if I would sing for the opening of her Tower, and I thought it would be interesting to pull those strands together.”
“There are certain psalms whose titles can be translated into ‘Songs of Ascent,’ and we have this tradition of going up mountains—going to the top of Mount Zion, the Aztecs climbing the steps of the temple—and this up-and-down movement is cross cultural,” Monk says of her initial creative sparks for this piece.” Ann called to ask if I would sing for the opening of her Tower, and I thought it would be interesting to pull those strands together.”
Earlier this year, Monk focused her attention on the music, transcribing her own recordings for her musicians and vocalists. This is no easy feat—time signatures can change from bar to bar, and the musicians will have to memorize the score. She also had her vocal ensemble sing to the sounds of Indian instruments called shruti boxes. The artist considers some of the music “processional.”
“The way voices are working together is so cool. Even though there are fewer people, it’s a bigger sound,” she says. “The music I’m working with already has this up and down dimension, and what I’m interested in is up and down and around—that sculptural dimension—and that’s something we’re working on for the theater, where the sound is really coming around you. The challenge for me right now is the orchestration—weaving together these different elements of who is going to be doing what.”
Unlike the Walker’s presentation of Mercy in 2001, which infused Hamilton’s visual imagery and physical presence through Monk’s theatrical/vocal performance, Songs of Ascension is less a collaboration than independent creative explorations that will, somehow, find their way together. Hamilton’s Tower is a 60-foot permanent installation in Healdsburg, California—photographs illustrating Songs of Ascension were taken there, when Monk’s ensemble sang at the unveiling of the work. Monk doesn’t want to create a set piece that replicates Tower, so she has her eye on the McGuire Theater’s upper reaches, including its three-sided balcony, to illustrate ascension—in body and voice.
Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music theater works, films, and installations. A pioneer in extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance, Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which we have no words. She has alternately been proclaimed as a “magician of the voice” and “one of America’s coolest composers.” During a career that spans more than 40 years she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts.
Since graduating Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, Monk has received numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1995, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three “Obies” (including an award for Sustained Achievement), two Villager Awards, two “Bessie” awards for Sustained Creative Achievement, the 1986 National Music Theatre Award, the 1992 Dance Magazine Award, and a 2005 ASCAP Concert Music Award. In 2006 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named a United States Artists Fellow, and holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Boston Conservatory. Her recordings Dolmen Music (ECM New Series) and Our Lady of Late: The Vanguard Tapes (Wergo) were honored with the German Critics Prize for Best Records of 1981 and 1986. Her music has been heard in numerous films, including La Nouvelle Vague by Jean-Luc Godard and The Big Lebowski by Joel and Ethan Coen.
In 1968 Monk founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. In 1978 she formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble to expand her musical textures and forms. She has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label. Her music has been performed by numerous soloists and groups, including The Chorus of the San Francisco Symphony, Musica Sacra, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Double Edge, Björk, and Bang on A Can All-Stars, among others.
Monk is a pioneer in site-specific performance, creating works such as Juice: A Theater Cantata in 3 Installments (1969) and American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994). She is also an accomplished filmmaker who has made a series of award-winning films, including Ellis Island (1981) and her first feature, Book Of Days (1988), which was aired on PBS, shown at the New York Film Festival, and selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Both films were released on DVD in February 2007. A retrospective art exhibition, Meredith Monk: Archeology of an Artist, opened at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in 1996. In addition, her work has been featured in the exhibitions Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones at the Walker Art Center, Shrines at the Frederieke Taylor/TZ’ Art Gallery, the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum, ev+a 2002 Exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Show People at Exit Art, and Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music at The Kitchen. A monograph, Meredith Monk, edited by Deborah Jowitt, was released by Johns Hopkins Press in 1997. In addition to featuring Monk’s work in Art Performs Life, the Walker has commissioned six works, hosted six residencies, and presented 10 engagements of her work.
In October 1999 Monk performed a Vocal Offering for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. In July 2000 her music was honored by a three-concert retrospective entitled Voice Travel as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Her most recent CD, mercy, was released on the ECM New Series label in November 2002. Monk’s first orchestra piece, Possible Sky (commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas for the New World Symphony), premiered in April 2003 in Miami, and was performed by the Hamburg Symphony in 2006. Stringsongs, her first composition for string quartet (commissioned by the Kronos Quartet), had its world premiere at the Barbican Center in January 2005. Recent projects include a new work for the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, and recording the music from her latest music theater work, impermanence, slated for release in 2008. Monk is also publishing a piano album of her scores.
Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multimedia installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of lost collective voices, of communities past, and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, Hamilton’s site-responsive environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason, and imagination.
In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances for greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world? These concerns have animated the site-responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton’s practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton’s work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking, and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted the forms of making—the movement of the viewer in time and space now becomes a central figure of the work.
Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Ann Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, OH. Since 2001 she has been a professor of art at The Ohio State University.
In 1993, Hamilton was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and in 1999 was chosen to represent the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale. Among her many honors, she has been recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship (2007), Environmental Design Research Association Place Design Award (2002), American Society of Landscape Architects Design Award (2002), Progressive Architecture Citation Award (1997), NEA Visual Arts Fellowship (1993), Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992), and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989).
Hamilton’s work has been widely exhibited in America and abroad. Her major museum installations include La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988). She has been in residence at the Walker Art Center, where the commissioned installation Ann Hamilton/David Ireland was presented in 1992.
Her public sculpture projects include permanent commissions in collaboration with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and artist Michael Mercil for Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, PA, and Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, New York. Her public commissions also include permanent works for the Seattle Central Library and the San Francisco Public Library, among many others.
In 2002, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. published Ann Hamilton, a comprehensive monograph of Hamilton’s work to date, authored by Joan Simon. Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects, also by Joan Simon, was released in 2006 by Greg R. Miller & Co. publishers.
Tickets to Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton’s Songs of Ascension are $29 ($24 Walker members) and are available at walkerart.org/tickets or by calling 612.375.7600.
