Meredith Monk Remix Contest
A Note from the Sponsor:
On behalf of Meredith Monk and the board of trustees of The House Foundation for the Arts, we sincerely thank you for your genreous sponsorship of the ACIDplanet.com mercy remix competition. Meredith was delighted to have the opportunity to share her work with a new, dynamic audience, and to have so many young artists and DJs reinterpret her music.
Winners (a tie)
Runners Up
Prizes
The Grand Prize winner will receive a copy of ACID PRO 4.0, five loop libraries and the Meredith Monk CD library from ECM.About the Contest
Ms. Monk's innovations in extended vocal technique have been enormously influential. When she began her vocal pioneering, in 1965, this area was largely unexplored. Since then echoes of Monk's work can be heard across genres, influencing artists as diverse as Joan La Barbara and Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson and Björk (whose current live set includes Meredith's "Gotham Lullaby").Her work touches on many areas, but at the heart of it is singing, exploring the human voice in all its possibilities. Your remix of "urban march (light)" will provide you the opportunity to explore musical boundaries with Ms. Monk's voice. Whereas in past remixes the vocal line was often just another component in a song, here it is front and center, the reason for the work. It can't be buried in the mix. Luckily, however, Ms. Monk uses her voice like an instrument, so the loops cut from her performance can be used almost like an instrumental sample.
Get your best New Music face on, because both Meredith Monk and DJ Spooky are judging this contest! And start soon—this contest closes November 18, 2002. Sonic Foundry and ACIDplanet are thrilled to bring you this opportunity: create, remix, and communicate with two of today's leading musical innovators.
About the Artist
Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, choreographer and creator of new opera, musical theater works, films and installations. A pioneer in what is now called "extended vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance," Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Her ground-breaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which we have no words. During a career that spans more than 35 years she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts.In 1968 Ms. Monk founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. In 1978 she formed Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble to expand her musical textures and forms. She has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label. Her music has been performed by numerous soloists and groups including The Chorus of the San Francisco Symphony, Musica Sacra, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Double Edge, and Bang On A Can All-Stars, among others.
We're honored to present "urban march (light)" from Ms. Monk's latest release, "mercy", for remixing at ACIDplanet. "mercy" premiered in America as a multi-media stage work which Monk realized together with noted installation artist Ann Hamilton. The album features premiere recordings made with the original Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble. The album, though, is far more than a 'soundtrack'. Not only did some of the music predate the stage work—incorporating several pieces that Meredith had written before joining forces with Hamilton—the stage material has been rigorously rearranged with "many changes, compressions, expansions of forms." These include the exceptional writing for Bohdan Hilash's clarinets and other new material. The work also marks the first time Monk has written for mallet instruments, drawing inspired performances by John Hollenbeck on vibes and marimba.
A meditation on the quality of mercy throughout history, and a humanistic demand for mercy in troubled times, "mercy" took its impetus from widely scattered sources, ranging from contemporary world literature to historical documents and the daily news, all of them poetically transformed. As the New York Times wrote, "mercy isn't just about the transfiguration of ideas and thoughts into action; it performs transfigurations of its own." The Times also said, "What the piece's creators seemed to be thinking about was the mystery, beauty and sadness of life. The sense of being lost in thought was reinforced by Ms. Monk's quietly lyrical and often eloquent vocal music which made use of sighs and wordless chants. The melodies ranged from the plaintive and haunting to the stately and noble."
