Bang on a Can & The Noguchi Museum Present Meredith Monk & John Hollenbeck – Duet Behavior 2020
Free (Free)
Meredith Monk, voice
John Hollenbeck, percussion
Celebrating their tenth year of collaboration, Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum present excerpts from Duet Behavior 2020 by Meredith Monk and John Hollenbeck, a first-time performance of Monk’s music as it has never been experienced.
Through a conversational approach, long-time friends and colleagues Monk and Hollenbeck will expand and improvise on pieces from across Monk’s 50+ year catalogue, combining her pioneering vocal magic with his inventive and masterful percussion to generate new arrangements of Monk’s iconic compositions.
The duets were performed together but from separate locations – Hollenbeck in Montreal and Monk in upstate New York – using Zoom for the visuals and Jamulus, a tool which enables musicians to perform in real-time over the internet, for the sound. The resulting video presentation was produced by The House Foundation for the Arts.
The Noguchi Museum's director Brett Littman will join Monk and Hollenbeck for a Q & A via Zoom after the performance.
The broadcast will take place at 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific.
About Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk (composition, voice) is a composer, singer, and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called "extended vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance". Her groundbreaking 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 there are no words. Over the last six decades, Ms. Monk has been hailed as one of NPR's 50 Great Voices and "one of America's coolest composers". She is the recipient of numerous honors including a MacArthur Fellowship and an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Celebrated internationally, her work has been presented at major venues throughout the world.
Monk has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label, including the 2008 GRAMMY® nominated impermanence. Selected scores are available through Boosey & Hawkes. Monk is also the subject of two books of interviews, Conversations with Meredith Monk (now in a new expanded edition), by arts critic and Performing Arts Journal editor Bonnie Marranca, and Une voix mystique, by French author Jean-Louis Tallon, released in a new edition in January. In conjunction with her 50th Season of creating and performing, Monk was appointed the 2014-15 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall. Recently she received three of the highest honors bestowed on a living artist in the United States: induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2019), the 2017 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. Monk is currently developing Indra's Net, the third part of a trilogy of music-theater works exploring our interdependent relationship with nature, following the highly acclaimed On Behalf of Nature (2013) and Cellular Songs (2018).
https://www.meredithmonk.org/