Review: Meredith Monk, Still Peerless at Shocking Serenity

NEW YORK — Meredith Monk has spent over 50 years steadily churning out gracefully challenging works. It has come to feel like part of the rhythm of living in New York — one of the better parts — for Monk to announce a new stage show.

Sections of “Cellular Songs” — her latest evening-length piece, written for an entirely female version of her vocal ensemble and running through Sunday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — have appeared as works in progress since 2015. In those presentations, several of Monk’s stylistic hallmarks were in evidence: unpredictable yet ensorcelling rhythmic grooves; trebly, chattering murmurs arising from groupings of singers; solo passages requiring the deep, plaintive power of the composer’s shockingly serene voice.

A listener might have heard an excerpt or two — say, at the annual boisterous free festival hosted by the Bang On A Can organization — and decide that Monk was focusing on tidy new miniatures. She was not.

The premiere of the entire “Cellular Songs” on Wednesday evening had the cumulative force of some of her best writing. Joined with Monk’s installation-art scenarios (realized by video artist Katherine Freer) and choreography, this linked series of pieces was a coherent meditation on themes of individual flourishing and collective belonging. The microscopic unit of measurement suggested by the title hardly represents the work’s ambitions.

Concepts that engage individuality tend to be a bandleader’s dream, as they allow performers to show off singular talents — as here, with Allison Sniffin’s gifts on multiple instruments, or the lithely expressive dancing and finely controlled vibrato of Jo Stewart, the latest addition to the ensemble. Like Duke Ellington, Monk knows well how to weave solo lines tailored to specific performers, but her gifts are often clearest during passages involving multiple players.

In “Hey-nyo,” a lengthy ensemble number that was the evening’s centerpiece, Monk charted numerous routes between clashing semitones, unsettling microtonal swoops and gentler harmonies. No sonic experience was given short shrift; by the end, a sense of calm felt honestly won.

The formidable complexity of material like that helped the poetry of seemingly simpler numbers — like “Happy Woman,” in which Monk gradually offers up contradictory self-identifications (“I am an honest woman,” “I’m a lying woman”) — sneak up on a listener. That song’s unsheathing of new personalities — each different, yet connected to the ones before — seemed in tune with Yoshio Yabara’s subtly varied layers of costuming.

Over 75 minutes, Monk spun together these divergent elements so fluidly that it created an unmistakable sense of hope. It’s much easier to conceive of bridging public divides when you witness a synthesis like the one created in “Cellular Songs.” In a program note, Monk said she hoped to propose “an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence and kindness, as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now.”

That’s a lofty goal, particularly for a music drama that works through abstract, mostly wordless means. But Monk’s approach to political content is seductively clear and persuasive here. Occasionally it’s even humorous, as when video images of groups of hands dissolve between comically different arrangements (one moment solemnly posed, the next making duck-like forms and wiggling). At other times, the staging feels almost mythically profound, nowhere more so than when the core group is joined by members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

Monk has been making this sort of magic happen for a long time. But no matter how many decades she keeps creating them, works as strong as “Cellular Songs” will never feel rote.

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Event Information:

‘Cellular Songs’

Through Sunday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; 718-636-4100, bam.org.