Meredith Monk
Dolmen Music

The human voice is at the center of Meredith Monk's attention, especially when it comes from the most hidden folds of the soul, becoming an instrument of a remote time to be brought back to light with patient wisdom.

"Dolmen Music" from 1979 is a piece for six voices (three female and three male) with sporadic interventions of cello and percussion. In it, the American artist (composer, performer, singer, choreographer, director) presents in brief episodes a series of vocal techniques that strip the six voices of any linguistic or communicative connotation, giving them back the value of pure sound, laden at every moment with a dense emotional depth.

There are no sung texts in the 23 minutes of "Dolmen Music," but a few vowels, at most some syllables of a pagan language, intertwined sometimes placidly, sometimes frenetically, in the sound fabric woven by the six performers. The image of the dolmen, the prehistoric monument made of vertically arranged stones on which a horizontal stone slab rests, is significant: it suggests the simple (primitive, one might say) architecture of the music, based on the repetition of concise melodic cells and thus not difficult to follow. But it also suggests the idea of a prehistoric ceremony, a gathering in the forest by moonlight, in which the listener is about to take part.

In this album released in 1981 by ECM, "Dolmen Music" is preceded by four shorter pieces composed in the first half of the '70s, in which Monk’s acrobatic voice accompanies the piano: the latter executing simple figurations reminiscent of the minimalist style, albeit much simpler and more essential compared to the frontrunners Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Among these, "Gotham Lullaby" has been reinterpreted by Björk, while the other three pieces ("Travelling", "The Tale", and "Biography") are excerpts from a musical theater work by Monk, "Education of the Girlchild."

Yet another four examples of a daring and admirable vocality, freed from the constraints of a text to be intoned and thus free to express all its explosive strength on its own.