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one of two things: (1) nothing, or rather they sat on one calm, hypnotizing phrase with slight variations: or (2) hipped from idea to idea with happily unpredictable intuition. Because both strategies were noncumulative, they didn’t commit her to inducing any particular effects, and her performers were free to explore playing in every sense of the word. Monk's dring is greater, her ambitions more modest than those of her fellow minimalists, and as a result she is maintaining the freshness they have already lost. Monk succeeds because her vocalsound assemblages don't merely babble, but rather capture the specificity of the childlike imagination. For instance, in Tokyo Cha-Cha Monk's singers enthused Let's cha-cha/Me happy/Let's cha-cha/You happy. It vas silly. But the music acknowledged its silliness. Monk acknowledged it. the audience acknowledged it, and everyone in the room grinned. It pointed to Monk’s freedom that McFerrin had a fabulous time in Duet Behavior - unlike Pat Metheny. who glumly reproduced what Steve Reich had written for him in Electric

Counterpoint. Monk and McFerrin chirruped vocal sounds in tandem, and the game seemed to be to see how far they could get from the original pattern without being thrown off. Some of the earlier songs included similar private games, and the energy that bounced from performer to performer was communicated vividly to the audience, who couldn't be restrained from clapping even by McFcrrin’s bemused plea for silence. The relation of Monk’s airy music to the avant-garde is itself amusing, and undercuts a world of assumptions. The Ringing Place involved nine singers passing sounds to each other in circles and other arrangements. Their drones were reminiscent of Stockhausen’s Stimmung , their whoops and yodels recalled Berio’s Laborinlus 11. yet Monk purged both influences of their intellectual pretensions. If Stockhausen and Berio proved that all sounds can be music. Monk proved that proving that was a childish game, one she’s willing to play if stripped of its macho fervor. For pulling the rug out from under the avant-garde, and charming the audience in the cprocess, I have to

add her to my brief list of postmodern composers, maybe at the top. Like Reich, Monk isn't really next wave , but first wave, part of the group who brought new music into popular consciousness: but both set standards of communicativeness that the alleged next wave seems unwilling to duplicate. Nietzsche presaged the self-consciousness of modern art in an axiom that deserves to hang in every artist’s study: Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity: whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom... The composers in America to whom that criticism does not apply can be counted on one’s fingers. Meredith Monk is one of them. UThe Village Voyce , Kyle Gann

Awards and Fellowships 1989 Doctor of Fine Arts. University of the Arts, Philadelphia (Hon) 1988 MacDowell Colony Fellow Doctor of Arts, Bard College (Hon) 1987 Rockefeller Foundation Distinguished Choreographer Award Sigma lota Fellowship, Mac Dowel Colony 1986 National Music Theater Award German Critics Prize for Best Record of the Year; Our Lady of Late: The Vanguard Tapes 1985 Bessie Award for Sustained Creative