This interview is excerpted from one that originally appear on the American Music Center's April 2000 issue of NewMusicBox, and is reproduced here by permission of AMC. The full interview, complete with audio clips, can be found at In the 1st Person: Meredith Monk.

Meredith Monk has received two NYFA Fellowships: in 1996 for choreography and in 1985 for music composition.

Music With Multiple Branches

FRANK J. OTERI: ... Do you consider yourself a composer first?

MEREDITH MONK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Why?

MEREDITH MONK: Because the heart of my work is the singing. I think of my work as a big tree with two main branches. One main branch is the singing and it started from my solo work, exploring the human voice and all its possibilities. That's been a very strong discipline for over 30 years, working with my own instrument and discovering all the different possibilities. And then that goes also into making CDs, and, compositions with the Ensemble, and other groups singing this music. One branch is made up of all the different aspects of the music. And then the other branch is the composite forms, which could be operas or musical theater pieces, or installations, or films. And that's where different elements are woven together into one big composition. But I always feel that those forms are put together, in a sense, musically. Even with images, it's really thinking of rhythm as the basic underlying ground of everything. And not necessarily just metric rhythm, but rhythm, I would say, is the underlying ground of these weavings together of different perceptual modes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, has that been the case from the very beginning of your work, or was it other things first and then music...

MEREDITH MONK: Well, you know, I came from a music background. I'm a fourth generation singer in my family. My mother was the original Muriel Cigar voice on radio and she was singing soap commercials. She was singing Blue Bonnet Margarine, all these jingles... So I grew up in radio. My mother was on CBS, ABC, NBC in the '40's, and singing commercials for soap operas every day. I had a lot of singing in my background. My grandfather was a singer, bass-baritone; and my great-grandfather was a cantor. Singing was a tradition in my family. So that was, in a sense, my first language. I was comfortable singing. It was my personal language. And then because I have an eye challenge, where I can't fuse two images together, I was uncoordinated physically, and so my mother heard about Dalcroze Eurythmics, and took me to these wonderful Polish sisters Mita and Lola Rohm at Steinway Hall. Dalcroze Eurythmics is a way of learning music through movement; a lot of conductors study it to get coordinated physically. But for me it was really learning physical movement through the music, because as a young child, I already had a strong rhythmic proclivity.

FRANK J. OTERI: What sort of music were they using?

MEREDITH MONK: Dalcroze Eurythmics has a lot in common with the Carl Orff method; as I remember, there was a lot of work with rhythm sticks. I don't remember the music itself but I remember improvising to music, and throwing balls in precise time, and exercises dealing with music in relation to parts of the body. For me, it was a revelation. It integrated sound, space and movement. I loved it so much, and so my whole body thing opened up. Having that background, experiencing the voice or music and the body as one was something that has influenced me without me even knowing it all these years. Because, also the way they teach solfege, for example... It's done physically, so the low do is down here and high do is up here...

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

MEREDITH MONK: You move your arms incrementally from down to up as you are singing the scale and at the same time you can read the notes on the blackboard. So you are getting sound, space and sensation simultaneously.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it's a lot more than even the Kodaly hand signals...

MEREDITH MONK: It's more an overall body sense. You know, as I think back on it (...I only did it from the time I was 3 to 7, so I don't remember it too well...), what I sense is that intuitive physical connection to sound and space, which I think is something I've always been interested in: the voice and space, and the architecture of the voice.

FRANK J. OTERI: So when did you decide, 'Okay, I'm a composer'? When did composing become the focus, the creating of work, the disseminating of that work that you've created, both in terms of you yourself doing it and then other people doing it, with you or without you?

MEREDITH MONK: That's a hard question, because it's been such a gradual process. And I'm still struggling with it, even now, because I'm trying to figure out how much music I really want other people to sing of mine and how much I don't.

Compositional Process

FRANK J. OTERI: Are [the choral] pieces worked out before you even work with the singers? How much of it evolves through the process of the workshopping?

MEREDITH MONK: There are different gradations. Usually I come in with my material, I work alone for quite a while, and then I come in to the rehearsal and I try the material. So in that way I'm really lucky, I've got these people, and I can hear it right away. Then I go back and work alone again, and then I'll work again with a group and then I'll finally put it together. That's the standard format. From time to time, I have come in with the forms totally complete, but I prefer to teach them orally than to have them on paper. But I have come in from time to time with something on paper. That happens more when we don't have a lot of rehearsal time. The way I usually work is labor-intensive. It really is.

FRANK J. OTERI: That's interesting.

MEREDITH MONK: These performers are so patient. They're like midwives, it's like giving birth to this thing and I'm working right on those voices, you know, right there, "Okay, Theo, try singing that note. Katie, you sing that." And then I remember that, when Nurit Tilles, that wonderful pianist who came in to work with us, around the beginning of the 1980s, I guess around 1983, she was amazed at how Robert Een and Andrea Goodman could learn material in one rehearsal and come back the next day with it imprinted in their minds. Then if I wanted to change something, they could re-learn it in the new way.

FRANK J. OTERI: How do you choose the people you work with?

MEREDITH MONK: It's a very intuitive kind of process. For example, I was teaching at Oberlin in 1974, and making a new piece there. And Andrea was a student. She wasn't even in the Conservatory but she was a very good musician. The first day I walked into Oberlin, I met my next door neighbor - this guy Michael who was a keyboard player - in the dorm, and somehow got to singing Sacred Harp with him. Andrea heard us and she knocked on the door and came in and started reading through these Sacred Harps pieces. I heard that she had a wonderful voice and was very musical so I asked her to be in my piece. So then, after she graduated from Oberlin, she came to New York, and I said, "do you want to be in Quarry?" So that was that.