Towards the end of last month, composer and vocalist Meredith Monk collaborated with three members of her Vocal Ensemble and the chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound for the premiere of her recently completed “Anthem.” Inspired by the Buddhist concepts of interdependence and cause-effect relationships, the music was conceived for performance through the video-chat medium. All of the twenty performers were “isolated” from each other, presumably in their own homes. Each had his/her own microphone and a set of headphones.
Superposition of “Anthem” motifs at its fullest (screen shot from the YouTube video being discussed)
The score itself has what can best be called a “layered architecture,” an approach that I have encountered in some of Monk’s other compositions. My guess is that the performance itself was based entirely (or perhaps just almost entirely) on audio cues. Through those cues (and, perhaps, a “shared clock”) each performer had his/her own motif that (s)he would contribute to the layers. All of the performances were captured on video, and Director Gavin Chuck used the “windowing tool” that manages on-line meetings to display different visual arrays of the performers.
From a listening point of view, the result was impressive for the logic behind its construction. Each motif was rather like a Lego brick that could interconnect with just about every other Lego brick. Chuck’s direction thus amounted to a journey, during which the viewer would “visit” both specific bricks and their interconnections. As a result, the logic behind the listening experience was reflected in (and probably enhanced by) those visual experiences. Since the entire performance was only about ten minutes in duration, first adding motifs to the mix and then withdrawing them, the resulting video, now available on YouTube, makes for an accessible and absorbing presentation, a rather serene study in the interplay of physical isolation and musical synthesis.
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