Meredith Monk - Tom Phillips

Bang on a Can All-Stars with special guest Meredith Monk
Merkin Concert Hall,
New York
March 1, 2007

by Tom Phillips
copyright ©2007, Tom Phillips

In this age of specialization, most classically-trained musicians can’t dance, and most classically-trained dancers know little about the music they’re dancing to. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to see and hear Meredith Monk — choreographer and dancer, composer and singer, film-maker etc. — an artist who embodies the inseparability of the arts.

Monk was at Merkin Concert Hall to sing with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a quintet that’s a cross between a contemporary chamber ensemble and a rock band. It’s an ideal backing for her free-form, multilingual and often wordless flights of vocal fancy, a language she has invented herself to express things that lie between the cracks of any standard vocabulary. “Double Fiesta,” for example, expresses a kind of glee in its rapid, bouncing rhythms, but it’s a glee laced with innocence, irony, satire, wonder, hysteria — a humor that changes as fast as a human stream of consciousness.

That’s for the ear. Meanwhile the eye takes in a face that follows every ripple in the stream, and a body that bounces along, supple in every joint, occasionally throwing in a serpentine wobble from the top down to punctuate the flow.

Not content to meld music and dance in her own self, for an encore she brought the band and a few other non-dancers up to the front of the stage and led them through a two-step line dance as they sang “Panda Chant II.” They could do it! And they loved it. Monk brings us back in so many ways to a pre-historic state, where music and dance are fundamental modes of expression, combining everything and everyone around in a communal, spiritual jam.

That wasn’t the only revelation on the program, which also featured a trio of world premieres by young composers, commissioned and performed by Bang on a Can. The best of the three was a dazzling piece of polymorphous perversity by Lukas Ligeti, son of the late Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who is now famous in the dance world as an inspiration for Christopher Wheeldon and other choreographers. Like his father, Lukas Ligeti ranges far and wide for source material, including Africa, and his compositions are built on complex rhythmic pulses. In “Glamour Girl,” drummer David Cossin acts as a conductor of sorts, but as he circles and weaves over the drum set he seems to be conducting several pieces at once, at different speeds. In his program note, Ligeti says that rather than a unified sound, he tried to create “…harmonies of tempo, consonances and dissonances of speed. Different parts interlock to complement each other, and there is no set beat. Select an instrument to focus your attention on, or indeed any one component of the drum set, and feel the beat wherever you want.” It’s a liberating way of listening; you can relax without the onerous feeling that you have to take in everything at once. Having listened that way, I can’t give a comprehensive account of what went on. In fact, I can hardly remember anything, except that it kept moving, sparkling and changing, and was immense fun.

I was also distracted by a dance-critic thought: What this needs is a choreographer! It needs someone who can mine the complexities of the music, and make all the rhythms, tempos and colorful clothes of this “Glamour Girl” visible. Then maybe we can look forward to another generation of listening to Ligeti, with the eye as well as the ear.

Excerpts of the concert will be broadcast on WNYC (93.9) in New York, March 22 at 11 p.m.

Photos (both by Henrik Stenberg):
Amy Watson as Odette, here with Jean Luc Massot as Siegfried, and Mogens Boesen as Von Rothbart.

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