Meredith Monk
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"Meredith Jane Monk" is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.

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That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

I think I still have some confusion about the critical mind. But it seems that there's a difference between the critical mind, which is a kind of judgment, and has a harshness built in, cutting off impulses before they can develop, and discriminating intelligence, which can differentiate between what is authentic or genuine and what is contrived or forced.

It's a continual excavation process, you could say. It's like being an archeologist of your own instrument as a kind of microcosm of the human voice, of human utterance, of sound itself. By digging into my own voice I'm uncovering feelings and energies for which we don't have words - it's like shades of feeling, early human utterance, and essential human nature.

I somehow sensed when I was a teenager that I wanted to do my own work. I was quite clear that I didn't want to be an interpretative kind of artist. I had an intuition about wanting to create my own form, in one way or another, whatever that would be.

A group called Rosetta Life, that sends artists out to hospices in England, came to talk to me in February 2003. I lost my partner of 22 years in November 2002, so I was really in my grieving process - I still am - but I was thinking of nothing but impermanence then.

I had a number of interests that were all strands of my childhood. I come from a musical family - I'm a fourth generation singer. My mother was a commercial singer and my grandfather had been a bass baritone who came from Russia to the United States, so music was very strong in my family. I loved to sing; even before I spoke words I was singing melodies.

I'm sure that some of the hospice participants will be in the audience. One of them has already died. And, you know, all of us have impermanence in common.

I think about that "empty" space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I've had to learn that over the years - because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.

Yes, the more I go through life I realize that there's really no separation between practice and art at all. The two things more and more become one rather than two different aspects of my life.