![]() This became a very important work of hers called Turtle Dreams (Waltz). In the 80s Monk found musical concerts to be “boring,” so she began to incorporate simplified movements into her work without introducing an entire theatrical element. In Turtle Dreams (Waltz), Monk incorporated movement into musical performance. The New York Times wrote that Paris “serves to identify the two as charmingly antic travelers who move like stars, together and apart, along appointed paths through a constellation like the dimly glittering one above them.”ĥ. Here’s an excerpt from Paris, performed in the late 80s, a collaboration with theater director Ping Chong. Monk made theatrical pieces too (and experimented with fake mustaches). It does, however, try to suggest something of the atmosphere and mystery of a ghost story, the ghosts in this case being our ancestors.”Ĥ. Though it uses professional actors, it has no dialogue and no storyline in the ordinary sense. “Though it is inspired by historical fact,” Monk said in 1982, “the work is not a documentary. The result was a kind of ghost story that used documentary, fiction and dance. Monk worked with Bob Rosen on a film called Ellis Islandto activate the tragic incidents that occurred there. ![]() Monk made a haunting film at Ellis Island. “Monk, typically, saw and heard only reasons to celebrate, and laugh.”ģ. So how did Monk react to the Brothers using her song? “I was laughing my head off,” she told Tom Service. In the background Meredith Monk’s “ Walking Song” can be heard playing throughout Maude’s studio. Undoubtedly, the Coen Brothers posit Maude as an archetypal pseudo-intellectual in order to critique the character type. When the Dude first encounters Maude Lebowski, she is being hurtled through space, flinging paint in every direction. ![]() Maude was listening to Meredith Monk when she makes her debut in The Big Lebowski. Monk is also a filmmaker…” One of her films, Book of Days, was a visceral flirtation with a television audience in the early 90s.Ģ. It is a method, inscribed in music, of linking the old with the new.As the New York Times wrote in 1990: Monk has created “dances that were operas, operas that were dances and mythic theater pieces that were operas and dances. It is like a hidden passageway, ending in a door that mysteriously opens to a secret room. In a just world, Dolmen Music would be as big as Led Zeppelin IV, but it is a great gift for those in the know. But the added instrumentation never eclipses the power of the voice on Dolmen Music, which sounds ancient and modern at the same time. Of particular note, the late and legendary composer Julius Eastman supplies his deep baritone on one of the tracks, and some additional percussion. Monk also plays piano, and others provide additional voices, along with subtle percussion and violin. Dolmen Music is a timeless use of the voice, in all its power and enduring mystery. We have all heard a woman’s voice, and women’s voices are as old as time. With her voice, in its infinite permutations - gorgeous slides, ululations, breaths, cries, howls, drones - she navigated a landscape that seemed both familiar and strangely unfamiliar. In the early 1980s, when so much in the ‘new music’ realm sounded jarring and almost self-consciously difficult, Meredith Monk took a different tack with Dolmen Music. NPR ranked the record as the #148 greatest album made by a female artist, saying:
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