What made Meredith Monk’s 2017 Cellular Songs staged cycle so exciting was that the songs seemed such a part of our shared world. What was exciting about Indra’s Net in its North American premiere on 24th September at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory was that we were back in her familiar, inexplicable realm.
There are things Monk is quite good at: being evocative and engaging, calm and inviting, yet mysterious. She can be linked, aesthetically and generationally, to the New York minimalists, but her theatricality and focus on the voice set her apart, as does an implicit worldview. To enter one of her constructed “Monkispheres” is to witness a ritual that’s alien but never alienating; an egalitarian, utopian, otherworldly gathering. Indra’s Net is the third part of a trilogy that started in 2013 with On Behalf of Nature and carried on with Cellular Songs. Thematically, the works address our intertwined relationship with the natural world. Concept, however, doesn’t need to dictate the way Monk’s work is received.
The Armory floor was set with a large circle, like a skating rink. A smaller, but still quite large, circular screen hovered at the rear. Singers were seated at the perimeter, nearer the audience, as the evening began. At the far side of the circle, opposite the audience, was a chamber orchestra, divided in halves.
A repeating, simple phrase grew from the electric piano with variations in the strings, harp and percussion, all at audience left. They played another theme, then a third, suggesting an overture. The primary singers – Monk among them, a couple of months before her 82nd birthday, her voice was still strong, recognizable in tone, vibrato, ululation – entered, sat and executed unison hand gestures while picking up on the overture themes. The rules for the music and for the movement were neither complex nor apparent, and this might be the magic of Monk. We trust her without understanding her. The beauty she creates is no simpler than the architecture of a spider web or the charting of the night sky. It’s easy to take the grand design for granted.
It’s not until about midpoint that the other side of the orchestra, the brass and winds, is heard. The sound field fills, the singing stops, and an inverse of a six-note theme from the overture is played on the vibraphone through a high string drone. Then silence and a sudden, shattered abstraction in light (eventually revealed as tree branches) strikes the floor and screen. It could have been a culmination, it was, but now we were somewhere else entirely.
The first half was dramatic, imbibing. The second half brought some of the most overtly beautiful music Monk has written. A pair of short, wordless duets featured two of her strongest longtime singers, first Theo Bleckmann (trumpet) then Allison Sniffin (viola), in demanding intervallic sequences that seemed somehow Baroque. A trio and quartet suggested something madrigal. Then the full ensemble executed a comedic song with the chattering of teeth, clucking of tongues and other mouth sounds. I scribbled furiously, making notes for each brief section, but it struck me that this was the worst thing to be doing. Monk’s work is experiential. My notebook anchored me when I should have been untethered. By the time the singers were walking the perimeter of the circle in a dark, yellow light, I realized description misses the essence. They filled the circle, the orchestra stood and joined them in a thick layering of canons. After 80 minutes, another epoch of Monk’s timelessness came to an end.
