Brief concert of Monk works still a delight
In her own quietly assertive way, composer and performer Meredith Monk has spent the last 40 or 50 years pointing the way toward an alternative path for contemporary music. Her work — a varied but distinctive melange of vocal and instrumental work, dance, film, theater and more — celebrates the human body and voice in all its numinous wonder.
The audience for the engaging concert presented by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players on Friday, Jan. 19,
at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music got only the briefest glimpse of Monk’s extraordinary artistry. But even those samples — a short vocal duet drawn from her 1988 film “Book of Days,” and the piano duet “Ellis Island” — were enough to fill the hall with delight.
The tools Monk uses are so apparently simple at first glance that the effects she achieves with them defy expectations. The vocal writing in “Cave Song,” which got a lovely rendition from soprano Courtney McPhail and mezzo-soprano Marina Davis accompanied by harpist Karen Gottlieb, consists of delicate, wordless melodic motifs, which are repeated like some kind of prerational incantation. And “Ellis Island,” delivered with crisp, sinuous clarity by pianists Kate Campbell and Taylor Chan, trades rhythms back and forth in a close-drawn textural weave.
There’s apparently no more to it than that, but Monk’s alchemical creative formula includes a secret extra ingredient that transforms those elements into expressive magic. Time shifts and shimmers; intellectual boundaries briefly dissolve and realign. Something always feels subtly different in the aftermath.
On this occasion, Monk herself was on hand for an onstage discussion with Eric Dudley, the Players’ new artistic director. Monk is always a charming and eloquent presence, and she spoke winningly about her history writing for voices as if they were instruments, and vice versa. She also had some unexpected words of adulation for such old-school operatic singers as Rosa Ponselle and Lily Pons.
Still, one couldn’t help feeling that this was a dialogue more suited to a full-on celebration of Monk and her work, rather than being shoehorned into an event with many other things on the burner. At the very least, a little more of Monk’s music would not have been unwelcome.
But it would be ungracious to grumble about a program that also included, after intermission, a pair of improvisational landmarks from the new music tradition. “Les Moutons de Panurge,” Frederic Rzewski’s 1969 masterpiece of process-based ensemble performance, stood out, as ever, for its wit and formal inventiveness.
The piece consists of a single melodic line that is to be played in unison — loud, fast, and with utmost assurance — in a series of shifting permutations. It’s basically impossible to execute flawlessly, which becomes part of the piece’s point — the performers are instructed not to correct their mistakes, but to soldier on, each in their own similar direction.
What results is an exuberant cacophony of blurring imagery, as well as a telling political allegory about crowds and individualism.
Some of the same ideas came into play in “Cobra,” John Zorn’s 1984 work of controlled group improvisation. The piece, famously, includes no score as such, but consists of an elaborate protocol for shifting the flow of a creation formed on the spot.
It’s both opaque and invigorating, and depends a lot on the participants themselves. On Friday, a dozen performers led by William Winant turned it into a vivacious and fantastical foofaraw.
The evening led off with a series of short, comparatively traditional works, each one accomplished in its way but all feeling a little like appetizers for the main courses to follow. Guitarist David Tanenbaum and violinist Roy Malan collaborated on Vivian Fung’s stylistically diverse triptych “Twist,” Campbell gave a virtuosic account of several excerpts from Don Byron’s “Etudes for Vocalizing Pianist,” and Ryan Brown’s Björk homage “Under the Rug” cast a winning spell.