Meredith Monk, Royal Festival Hall — sweet and sharp sounds from a downtown grandee

Meredith Monk is a grandee of downtown Manhattan’s experimental arts scene, back before the real estate developers and super-rich moved in. Garlanded with fellowships and awards, including Barack Obama’s presentation of a National Medal of Arts in 2015, she has undergone her own version of gentrification. But neither baubles or munificent grants — nor the kind of veneration that translated into several standing ovations at the Royal Festival Hall — have blunted her desire to present her work in new and invigorating ways.

Staged for the Southbank Centre’s SoundState contemporary music festival, her show was a collaboration with the New York group Bang on a Can All-Stars. The set drew on the album she made with them in 2020, Memory Game, which featured rearranged versions of her compositions. The first was “Spaceship”, a free-flowing but tightly scored minimalist piece with affinities to fellow downtown panjandrums Philip Glass and Steve Reich. It was played fluently by the Bang on a Can sextet as a prelude to Monk’s arrival on stage, like an art-music version of The JB’s warming up the joint for James Brown.

The comparison isn’t entirely facetious. Monk, 79, is known for her stage moves — not Brown-style splits and spins, admittedly, but choreographed gestures and mimes. She has an acute ear for the interplay between vocal and instrumental music, making musicians sound like singers and voices sound like instruments. Words turn into musically logical but lexically nonsensical phonemes, a type of scatting. Hissing, ullulations, hiccoughs, buzzing and chirrups feature in her repertoire of vocalisms. What she calls her “composite theatre” is an act of performance based on disassembly and synthesis, breaking forms down in order to combine and rebuild them. 

She made her entrance resplendent in an eye-catching red outfit with knickerbockers and a geometrically complicated jacket with a passing resemblance to the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral staircase. Three members of her singing troupe the Vocal Ensemble joined her. Theo Bleckmann uttered playful whoops and capered across the stage to an itchy synthesiser melody in “Gamemaster’s Song”, like “Spaceship” originally written by Monk for her 1983 sci-fi opera The Games. Katie Geissinger sang a soprano oratorio in “The Politics of Quiet: Waltz in 5s”, which sounded like the eerie soundtrack to a supernatural chiller. Allison Sniffin punctuated the calming chimes of The Games’s “Memory Song” with animalistic outbreaks of jabbering.

Bang on a Can All-Stars applied themselves skilfully to the rearranged pieces, which were more richly textured than the originals. Meanwhile, Monk gave an evergreen performance, singing with a head microphone so as to free her body for stylised movements. Not at all grandee-like in manner, she treated the event as a collective endeavour involving players and audience. An engaging spirit of playfulness ran through her synchronised motions and surreal vocal mannerisms, from donkey-like hee-haws in “Memory Song” to a trilled mantra about sunrise in “Turtle Dreams Cabaret: Tokyo Cha Cha”.

“Oooh,” she said brightly when a sharp squeal of feedback rang out from a singer’s microphone at one point. The product of a more optimistic era, she has the gift of finding value in even the ugliest sounds. 

★★★★★

southbankcentre.co.uk