Meredith Monk - Turtle Dreams, for 4 voices & 2 electronic organs | Текст песни

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• Meredith Monk
• Turtle Dreams, for 4 voices & 2 electronic organs

When Meredith Monk was young she studied the Dalcroze Method of Eurhythmics. Jacques Dalcroze was a Swiss musician and music educator who developed a method of learning and ex- periencing music through movement. When I was at Yale in the Fifties I remember that harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick would make his students walk the tempos and rhythms of the pieces they were studying to better get the feel of the music. He also made them sing one of the contrapuntal lines of a Bach two-part in- vention while playing the second one. This helped keyboard play- ers become more musical, to connect their physical bodies to the music they were playing. Meredith, however, says that she was uncoordinated as a child and used singing to help her move bet- ter. In Turtle Dreams (1982) four performers move in shifting pat- terns while singing repetitive phrases. They don’t move to the music, they move with the music.

I first heard Meredith sing at a Merce Cunningham event in the early Seventies. I thought I was listening to all the women in the world singing with one voice. There were no words, only syllables and phonemes that sounded as if they came from real or imaginary cultures. Since the beginning Meredith’s output has been almost entirely vocal. In certain songs she overdubs her voice but confesses that she would rather use two human sing- ers. In a couple of duets from Volcano Songs (1993) she makes two voices—her own and Katie Geissinger’s—sound like one. These two singers are so rhythmically in sync and have such similar in- tonation that they sound like one person singing. It’s uncanny. On the other hand, in such pieces as Click Song No. 1 from Light Songs (1988) she turns one voice into two by making simultaneous clicking noises that sound as if they are being made by a second performer. They remind me of the click languages of the Bush- men of southern Africa. There is a lovely irony in these songs: two voices sound like one; one sounds like two. In 1976 Meredith took some time off from New York, went out west to Santa Fe where she spent a couple of months all by herself. She sat on a hill and composed Songs from the Hill.

Meredith Monk is a true intermedia artist. We might define in- termedia as a mixture of two or more art forms that interpenetrate each other, superimposing principles from one art form upon an- other. For example, I remember in Education of the Girlchild (1972) there is one scene in which a woman sets a teacup down upon a table. She repeats this action several times. That would never happen in a play or in a movie. Repetition does happen in music, however, and in some writing, particularly that of Gertrude Stein. Meredith is superimposing a musical structure onto a theatrical action. As you watch the same physical action over and over again you discover small differences, things about it you would have missed if you only saw it once. You get a more complete picture of the action. Mixed media or multimedia simply means mixing two or more art forms in one composition. The surrealist ballet Pa- rade (1917), a collaboration between Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, with choreography by Leonide Massine, is a good example of a mixed media work. Satie imagined an orchestra of noisemakers. (There was a typewriter in the percussion section.) Picasso designed cubist sculptures out of cardboard, making it dif- ficult for the dancers to move. It was similar to most stage works in which you have music and action, each supporting the other. The adventurous and radical spirit of Parade must have inspired
Merce Cunningham and John Cage, except that in their collabo- rations the composers and artists worked wholly independently without having seen the dance. In fact, in many instances the dancers hadn’t heard the music until opening night.