Assembling Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, 1975–1991

Throughout Meredith Monk’s wide-ranging career as a composer, director, performer, choreographer, and videographer, voice has remained at the core of her artistic identity. Her decision to compose primarily for the voice—a uniquely flesh-bound instrument—highlights the centrality of the body in her compositions. But before Monk began identifying predominantly as a composer, theatricality and movement linked her eclectic oeuvre together more so than did music. With the formation of her vocal ensemble in the late 1970s, music came to the fore. This paper outlines the early history of Monk’s ensemble. Drawing on archival materials, contemporaneous reviews, previously unexamined rehearsal audio tapes, and new interviews with ensemble members, I examine her music’s relationship to her larger theatrical works and the ensemble’s function within Monk’s own House Foundation for the Arts. Focusing on her most successful ensemble piece—the sextet Dolmen Music—I argue that the vocal ensemble facilitated Monk’s shift toward music composition by allowing her to continue her practice of improvisational (co-)authorship, whereby Monk largely composed on bodies rather than on paper. This practice led to creations that challenged late twentieth-century musical orthodoxies, a challenge that I situate within the broader discourse of postwar vocality.