Meredith Monk is generally described as an avant-garde artist of many
talents. Of her many talents there is no question, but what exactly
makes her “avant-garde”? The Random House Dictionary defines the term as
meaning “of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic,
musical, or literary material.” This raises another question: What does
it mean to be experimental? The same dictionary gives us: “founded on…an
act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of
testing a principle.” At the risk of reading too much into semantics, I
would venture to say that Monk is anything but avant-garde,
for she is interested neither in discovering the unknown nor in proving
suppositions. Rather, she reveals that which has been obscured by, as
well as changed by, history. She interrogates the subjective over the
empirical and its effect on the flow of intercontinental relations. Thus
do we get Book of Days (1988), a marriage of music and moving
images that covers such broad yet related topics as nuclear holocaust,
AIDS, eschatological wonder and trepidation, and the cyclical nature of
time. The idea for Book of Days came to Monk one afternoon in
the summer of 1984, when she was overcome by a black-and-white vision of
a young Jewish girl in a medieval street. This same figure would become
the locus for much of the film’s traumatic crossfire, amid which the
girl has visions of her own, only for her they are of a grave and
violent future. She soon encounters a madwoman (played by Monk herself)
and discovers in her that one kindred spirit in a world headed for
annihilation.
The film’s soundtrack was later reworked into the studio version
recorded here and scored for 12 voices, synthesizer, cello, bagpipe,
hurdy-gurdy, piano, and hammered dulcimer. The music of Book of Days
also wavers between past and future, rendering the present all but
graspable. These temporal concepts are accordingly reflected in the
arrangements of each itinerant section. A triptych of monodies (“Early
Morning Melody,” “Afternoon Melodies,” and “Eva’s Song”) mark the
passage of the sun in the sky, the contrast of dark and light. This
diurnal atmosphere is further underscored with the hurdy-gurdy-infused
“Dusk” and the smooth braid of vocal beauty that is “Evening.” This
chronology culminates with the delicate “Dream,” an all-too-brief
reprieve from the threat of Armageddon, before opening into “Dawn.” The
five scattered pieces that make up “Travellers” constitute time as
diaspora, each its own lilting pseudo-canon of both hummed and
open-mouthed syllables. The fourth section, subtitled “Churchyard Entertainment,” fleshes out the thematic core of the entire work in its
most fully realized form. In a similar vein, “Fields/Clouds” unfurls an
ethereal carpet of synthesized organ for a procession of contrapuntal
voices, with Monk soaring above all like a predatory bird riding a
thermal. Time’s fragility is expressed in “Plague,” a rhythmic chant of
whispers, hisses, tisks, and heavy breathing: the universe in a pair of
lungs. Encompassing all of this is “Madwoman’s Vision,” a masterpiece of
composition and performance that flits nimbly from creaking aphasia to
elegiac commentary. The album fades to black with “Cave Song,” alluding
perhaps to Plato’s shadows and the illusory nature of our attachments.
The markedly instrumental approach to the human voice embodied by
this ensemble lends itself beautifully to the subject matter at hand. In
choosing to eschew words entirely, Monk peers more deeply into the
oracular interior of her music. Relying on nascent phonemes such as “na”
and “la” in lieu of recognizable vocabularies, she complicates the
linearity of her effected nostalgia. Book of Days is all the
more haunting for reducing that nostalgia to a liquid state and scooping
up as much of it as possible before it seeps out of sight through those
very cracks where her music is born. (ECM Reviews)
