0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 22/37)

Mingus drew on many styles, ranging from blues, gospel, and big-band swing to bebop and modern jazz that featured dissonant, collective improvisation. Among his best know compositions are the bluesy Haitian Fight Song (1957), the extended jazz suite Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) that chronicles the rise and decline of modern civilization with a finale of cacophonous improvisation, and the classical sounding Half-mast Inhibition (1960). Mingus objected to categories like “classical” and “jazz,” choosing rather to construct extended works that combined compositional forms, themes, and complex harmonic changes associated with classical music with techniques of individual and group improvisation, complex rhythms, and tonal elements of blues and gospel common to jazz.

Perhaps the most important jazz composer of the mid 20th century, Mingus summed up his creative philosophy on liner notes to the 1956 Pithecanthropus Erectus LP:

I “write” compositions—but only on mental score paper—then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the “framework” on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man’s own particular style is taken into consideration, both in ensembles and in solos….In this way, I find it possible to keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet to allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos.

Monk, meredith (b. 1942)

One of America’s foremost experimental composers, Meredith Monk grew up in New York City in an artistic household. Her mother was a professional singer, working primarily in radio through the nineteen-thirties and forties. Although Monk identifies herself as a composer, she does not separate music from the other performing arts. While a student at Sarah Lawrence College she studied singing, composition, and dance and performed in theater as a student in their combined performing arts program. Her earliest works, such as 16 Millimeter Earrings, included film along with music, theater and dance, establishing Monk as a significant multidisciplinary artist and eluding classification of her work by critics until the term performance artist came into usage.

Monk is less interested in telling a narrative story through her performance art than she is in creating an experience where all of the faculties are employed. The music, words, movement, and staging all have equal importance. She is an attentive listener to the sounds in her environment and she often develops extended performance techniques in order to replicate some of those that are more interesting. The influences on her extended vocal techniques, in particular, include the music of non-European cultures (harmonic singing and ululation), city sounds (the glissando of a car alarm), and the sounds of nature (bird song and animal cries).

In Dolmen Music, Monk allows us to peak into an archaic community inspired by her reaction to seeing the dolmen in Brittany (La Roche aux Fées). Her initial response to The Fairy Rocks inspired her to infuse the work with the sense of being ancient and futuristic at the same time. A Meredith Monk piece usually has no specific interpretation yet many works, like Memory Song and Gotham Lullaby, are so intimate that they often engender an explicit meaning in the listener based on their life experiences.