“What I love about Ireland is that there is still a belief in magic.” – Irish Times

To hear Meredith Monk sing is to experience the human voice at its most shocking and horizon-expanding. Throughout his illustrious 60-year career, the New York-born performer and composer has reinvented the art of vocalization from the ground up and from the inside out. Her repertoire of howls, chirps, whispers, and spells is as terrifying as it is hypnotic. Although she exists at the outermost extremes of art, her work is nevertheless characterized by a fierce desire to connect with an old-fashioned American wholesomeness.

“I try to make music that feeds people. Nourishes their minds, minds, and hearts. I try to make music that reflects the richness that we each have as human beings.” ,” Monk, 81, said from his loft apartment in Tribeca, lower Manhattan. “We have an intellectual center, an emotional center, a spiritual center, and a physical center. I try to make music that acknowledges the richness of the listener.”

Her fans include some of music’s greatest innovators. Björk and Talking Heads’ David Byrne are among those who have spoken of the power of her music – as the New Yorker put it, “a precisely calibrated guttural scream that resonates. Clicks, breathing, sighs.”

Although she has performed all over the world, she rarely performs in Ireland. Next week’s long-awaited performance at Dublin’s National Concert Hall will take place in October 2001, when he appeared at Dublin’s long-closed SFX (a sort of parish hall intersecting the Stygian Flea Pit). This will be her first time here since then. But without frequent visitors, she flares up at the thought of returning to Ireland.

“What I love about Ireland is that there is still a belief in magic,” she says. “I believe in magic too. It’s true. She tears up when I talk about it. Your traditions – I listen. [the late poet, philosopher and author] John O’Donoghue. [He] There are many things that affirm the way I feel about things. Your heritage is so powerful because you know there is magic hidden beneath everything. That is something that should always be affirmed. ”

Monk’s music is not for the faint of heart. In the 1970s, she was lumped in with crowd-pleasing minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. However, her work is much more experimental.

Her 1983 album Turtle Dreams, for example, is about the imaginary inner life of her pet kittiwake box turtle, Neutron. In the accompanying stage adaptation, Monk and her trio of collaborators performed interpretive dances while gazing at the audience with unblinking enthusiasm. You can watch it on YouTube. It’s mind-expanding and terrifying.

The concert hall is the monk’s natural habitat. She received commissions from Carnegie Hall and Minimalist Her Ensemble Kronos, her quartet, and Houston Opera commissioned her to write Atlas: A Three-Part Opera.

But the classical world isn’t entirely sure what to make of Monk. Many of her biggest fans come from alternative music. Indie musician Damon Krukowski of the Galaxy 500 and Damon and Naomi compared listening to Monk to reading Kafka. Björk co-produced a documentary about Monk and covered her 1981 composition Gotham Lullaby in concert. In a 2005 conversation with Monk, the Icelandic artist arrived with a notepad filled with questions for her composer, explaining that she discovered Monk’s music when she was 16 and that she was a singer. He explained that he started to want to become a.

Love flows both ways. “I love Radiohead. I love those guys. Thom Yorke, I feel very close to his work. David [Byrne], I’ve always loved it. Björk is a great musician with a great spirit. ”

She also admired from afar the technique and fortitude of Sinead O’Connor, an artist who sings in a way that makes actors relish difficult dramatic roles, and who throws herself into the role without question. Was. She is “a beautiful singer,” Monk said, adding that O’Connor’s voice was a “beautiful instrument.”

Monk was born in New York in 1942. Her father was a businessman. Her mother comes from a long musical family. Monk’s maternal grandfather was a Russian-Jewish bass-baritone, and her maternal grandmother was a German-Jewish concert pianist.

Artistically, Monk’s early experience was in dance. She was diagnosed with strabismus at the age of three, a visual impairment previously known as strabismus. Her parents encouraged her to sign up for Dalcroze Method classes, which teach blind people to interact with the world around them through dance.

Those early experiences remained with her. In 1961 she appeared off-Broadway as a solo dancer. By the time she graduated from Lawrence University in 1964 and immersed herself in the downtown New York scene, she had come to believe that her sound and movement were intertwined. That philosophy remains at the heart of her music, which will be on display at NCH, where she will be joined by her vocal ensemble, singers and dancers Katie Geissinger and Alison Sniffin.

Western Europe had a masculine way of making music, but I wasn’t that interested in it.

When Turtle Dreams premiered, Monk had already established himself as an eternal outsider in contemporary music. She was an eternal voice in the wilderness, a shining free spirit bound by no rules but her own. It is a situation in which she is completely at ease. Although she is a composer who primarily works with the human voice, she specializes in nonverbal communication. Her mainstream was never going to accept her. Far from feeling rejected, she was willing to distance herself.

“I was proposing a different way of making music,” she says, explaining that she had little patience for old, patriarchal ways of composing. “At the time there was a Western European, masculine way of making music, but I wasn’t really interested in that. I was always interested in integrating the body and the voice. I was trying to reveal a world with a full palette of emotions.”

Monk has always ventured into places some musicians would be afraid to venture. “Others were trying to sever that relationship.” [lyric-free singing] – for a very good reason.that [conventional] There’s nothing wrong with the way you think about things. However, some people did not understand the rigor of my job. And that it was strict. The way I think about music has also changed. Jazz people gave me a lot of encouragement at the beginning of my musical exploration. They were like, “Girl, you have time, you have pitch, you have instruments.” Just do it. ”

In Dublin, she and the ensemble will perform works from her entire career. Despite its abstractness, this repertoire has often tackled the big themes of the day. In 1991, when many of her gay friends died of AIDS, she channeled her grief and her anger into New York Requiem. Ten years ago, she fought the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation with her sci-fi opera The Games.

This world is simply overwhelming. Ignorance of this world. How do you handle that?My approach is to continue to believe in the healing power of art.

Yet, despite its idiosyncrasies, her music never gets old. That’s because the underlying emotions she explores are immutable and universal. Fear, wonder, fear, we live them all in our lives every day. Monk is similarly watching Donald Trump’s resurgence with horror.

“This world is just overwhelming. The ignorance of this world,” she says. “How do you deal with that? My approach is to continue to believe in the healing power of art.”

Her life could have easily taken a different path. “At some point in the 1960s, I was in a band called Inner Ear, but I was making my own stuff. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a replacement for someone who wants to be a rock singer.’ I was there. I know I’m not going to dedicate my life to something like that. ” I was more interested in creating my own form. ”

She says the showmanship of rock music isn’t for her. There will be endless magic when she performs in Dublin. But it is entirely her creation, not something evoked by flashing lights or video screens. For her, art comes from a fundamental place that goes beyond mere spectacle.

“When you see Björk in concert, she demands a high degree of production, because that’s what people expect. I said to her, ‘I’d like to see you and five musicians, but there’s no production.’ Told. I realize that people expect higher production values. It’s really difficult. I just wanted to create my own world. ”

Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble will perform at the National Concert Hall in Dublin 2 on Tuesday 13th February.