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MEREDITH MONK: |
Well, I guess I always have a hard time with any kind of categorization at all, and I feel like anything that becomes a kind of movement, I'm very skeptical about, because basically, each of those people are unique composers in their own right, and really have found different things. So it happened, I think, that there was a certain period of time when people were getting sick of the Western European, what I call "from the chin up" kind of music. [laughs] And there was an impulse to go back to the body, and I think, to go past forms that had climax and denouement, linear, narrative kind of forms to a more… again, I don't like to put people together at all, but generally, the idea was to find more circular, textural or more sculptural sorts of forms, you could say. But I think, for me it was very different. First of all, I didn't know about their music at that time, and I think I was quite lonely. How I got to my music was much more from the song tradition, coming from a folk singing background. When I was in high school and college, my classical music heroes were Stravinsky, Bartók, Satie and Gershwin. I sang a lot of 20th century music in school but something of the honesty and directness of folk music touched me. When I began exploring my voice, I became interested in composing non-verbal, abstract song forms. So when I was using repetition (and I still do, to this day), I was thinking more about the way that folk music has a verse and chorus and the underlying instruments, which play repeating patterns are accompaniment. You know, I don't think of myself that much as an instrumental kind of composer, I really feel I'm a vocal composer…
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