Composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker and choreographer, Meredith Monk has united music, theater and dance to forge a new creative idiom exploring the human voice as instrument that has proved enormously influential for musicians and artists from Bruce Nauman and Terry Riley to Björk and John Zorn. Since the 1960s, she has created performances at the Guggenheim Museum rotunda (the first artist to do so), performed in public car parks and on opera stages, and recorded numerous acclaimed albums with ECM. Her music has been used in films by Jean-Luc Godard (Nouvelle Vague), the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski) and David Byrne (True Stories), and she has directed two films (Ellis Island and Book of Days).
This catalog is the first overview of her work, featuring previously unpublished archival material, scores, notations, drawings and photographs, as well as an insightful conversation with Monk and essays by acclaimed writers and curators such as Andrea Lissoni, Rick Moody, Timothy Morton, Teresa Retzer, Beatrix Ruf, Anna Schneider, Adam Shatz and Louise Steinman.
Meredith Monk (born 1942) was born in New York City, where she still lives. She began to explore the spectrum of the human voice through abstract vocal expression in the early 1960s, and developed what became known as "extended vocal technique" in numerous solo performances, using a three-octave range. In 1968 she founded The House to promote interdisciplinary performance, and 10 years later founded the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble. In 2015, Monk was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama.