Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble (programme from the performance)
Meredith Monk (Pavel Klusák)
All good hosts and artist Meredith Monk (MF Dnes)

Photos from the performance





Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble

Thomas Bogdan, Allison Easter, Dina Emerson, Katie Geissinger
Special guest: Harry Huff


October 3, 1994
Meredith Monk - solo concert

Songs from the Hill (1977, Music for unaccompanied voice)
Music For Voice And Piano (1971 - 1991, including excerpts from the opera ATLAS)


October 4 and 5, 1994
Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Vocal Ensemble: Thomas Bogdan, Allison Easter, Dina Emerson, Katie Geissinner
Special guest: Hurry Huff
Sound Design: David Meschter

Vessel; an Opera Epic (1971, originally written for 75 voices, an electric organ, a dulcimer and an accordion)
Custom Made (1993, solo piano, for two voices or two voices and piano)
Three Heavens And Hells (1992, for four voices acapella)


October 6, 1994
Book of Days (1988)
Music and direction: Meredith Monk
Director of Photography: Jerry Pantzer
Costumes and set design: Yoshio Yabara
Editor: Girish Bhargava
Production: Tatge/Lasseur Productions, The House Foundation for the Arts, La Sept in collaboration with Alive From Off Center.

The film is about time, drawing parallels between the Middle Ages, a war of time, the plague and the fear of the Apocalypse, with our modern times of racial and religious conflict, AIDS, and the fear of nuclear annihilation.

Ellis Island (1981)
Music and direction: Meredith Monk
Director of Photography: Jerry Pantzer
Producer and Co-Director: Bob Rosen

A film about the experiences of immigrants entering America at the turn of the century, recipient of several awards.


The performance of Meredith Monk was organised by the Archa Theatre and The House Foundation for the Arts. Participation of Meredith Monk has been made possible in part through the support from the following organisations: The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, The National Endowment for the Arts, The United States Information Agency, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Arts International.





Meredith Monk

Creating way of American composer and singer Meredith Monk shows that already from her first works in the sixties, she did not care about genre, style, or even which category of art. This way can also explain the displacement choreographer and dancer from the happenings to stage projects, where the movement communicates with the original musical expedients. The composer gradually created quite a new individual dictionary of expression - perhaps always thinking of ways of using the human voice. How she would comment on her first and last rock single from 1967?
          For Europe, Meredith Monk appeared in earnest with the dramaturgy of Munich ECM (Publishing House of Contemporary Music) Manfred Eicher in 1981. On her debut Dolmen Music (1981), Monk pushed down her fourteen years of experience with her uses of laughter, screaming, breathing, but always with a trained song: she has never disappeared from many-international group Vocal Ensemble. She has never separated from Eicher's Publishing House, which have produced the albums Turtle Dreams (1983) and Do You Be (1987), as well as the music for her only feature film and from her thirteen films, Book Of Days (1990. Meanwhile, her latest albums are a chamber sound honour to "the north as a condition of mind" - Facing North (1992, a mere duo with singer Rober Eeno) and then doing opus magnum of Meredith Monk: the opera "Atlas" (1993).
          In the frame of her work, she has collaborated with many valuable personalities - among others with singer Bobby McFerrin and Colin Walcott (prior to his death), whose play for glasses was only an accompaniment of the voice of Monk in the project "Our Lady Of Late" (1974). She contributed to film David Byrne "True Stories" with her music.

Pavel Klusak





All good hosts and artist Meredith Monk

A man can listen to his favourite music a thousand times from his records: then, when he is standing face to face with its live composers, everything suddenly says more, that the real size of things are more evident and that it is clearly known. For the music that Meredith Monk brings to Prague, this is evident in two cases - above all this, that the human factor is there alpha and omega.
          The not-very-tall woman, with her hair in pig tails began this most exciting: the entire evening solo. The first encounter with her multi-faceted vocalisations is a shock. Her concentration, and amazing lightness is fascinating as well - how Monk changes registers, sometimes adds subtle nuances, and carefully trails off and gently changes expressions. The mouth suddenly becomes a magical tool shaping the acoustic space, where each of the vocal sounds connects itself to the evocation of ideas. From several economical gestures, Monk inconspicuously unfolded an equivalent contrapuntal line. The Czech names of the composition, she pronounced with the interests of an individual who is used to thinking about the bonds between forming sounds, as well as continuing the direction of the language. (Away from the stage, according to her understanding of the Czech to accentuate the longer syllables in the word "The voices of birds -ptáá-kůů, ptáá-kůů-" - she repeated this, sincerely charmingly…)
          The members of the Vocal Ensemble (each of them colleagues on the recently risen opera "Atlas", still the key work of the composer) proved without an exception to be the humility and congeniality toward the musical ideas of Meredith Monk. Two young singers, angelic, gentle Diana Emerson and more energetic black Allison Easter, they excelled together with Monk and Katie Geissinger in "Three Heavens and Hells"- the composition a supremely poetic, mild spirit. Thomas Bogdan, with whom the composer met just prior to her work on "Atlas", is home in opera and pop genres: specially composed for him "Requiem for New York, a comprehensive ascent rather than just a composition. It is a graceful study of a singer as a type of personality, an attempt at the visibility of the inner condition and movement of mind. The perfection of the whole almost invisibly made an perfect piece with the use of the light and sound (the effect somewhere between the microphones and reproductions changed the sound space), not to mention the professionalism of the performers.
          Meredith Monk is at most a genius. Her work is absolutely over timing, a gift of a method of disengaging, natural communications must be understanding to perhaps everybody. If there exists any particular point of intersection of magic and humility, invoking good guests and their celebration at the same time, ...
          The audience left from her concert filled with great happiness: "none of us is more pure than she". None of us can gather the forces, explore the possibilities of his own body and go to deliminate against the world as original way as Meredith Monk.

Pavel Klusak, MF DNES
Author is a musical publicist