Duets by Monk and Hollenbeck in Cyberspace

Meredith Monk and John Hollenbeck performing Duet Behavior 2020 (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Last night the Noguchi Museum began streaming a video entitled Duet Behavior 2020, which was produced jointly with Bang on a Can. The composition was a duo performance by vocalist Meredith Monk and percussionist John Hollenbeck. The first time I encountered Monk’s vocal work was at the American Dance Festival, back when it was still being held during the summer at Connecticut College for Women. It was an outdoor concert, and she provided her own accompaniment on a modest electronic keyboard. Since then, to the best of my knowledge, she has always been in charge of all performance details.

Duet Behavior 2020 was thus a significant departure from her usual approach to presenting her work. She selected pieces from the full extent of her catalog, which covers over 50 years; and she and Hollenbeck performed duo improvisations on those selections, thus throwing “standards” into an entirely new light. Since this was a “socially distant” presentation, with Monk in upstate New York and Hollenbeck in Montreal, coordination was particularly critical for those improvisations. It was enabled primarily by Jamulus, software designed to facilitate real-time coordination of music performed over the Internet. As was the case for Monk’s previous cyberspace-based performance of “Anthem,” the visuals were created through Zoom technology.

I first became aware of Monk through her dance company. I was therefore struck by the physical richness of her performance of Duet Behavior 2020, all executed while standing in front of a microphone. Just as her songs tend to involve a playfully-conceived bridge between phonetics and semantics, her performance of this particular piece seemed to explore a similar bridge between stasis and motion. This provided an excellent complement to Hollenbeck’s percussion work, which, of necessity, was all about the movements required to evoke the sounds he was improvising.

As a result, this “pioneering” venture into improvisation fared extremely well, a tribute to the ways in which Monk’s music can serve as a foundation for different “structures of performance” and an opportunity to experience her performances in a context of inventive percussion work.