Phaedra Ensemble brings Meredith Monk’s instrumental world to Kings Place with the launch of Realms, a new album five years in the making that traces a journey from strings to winds to the human voice.
1. What first drew Phaedra Ensemble to Meredith Monk’s instrumental music, and what made Stringsongs the starting point for this project?
We’d always been huge fans of Meredith’s work. In 2018 we produced a series of concerts exploring the human voice and some of the more radical ways it has been used, so Meredith was an obvious artist for us to explore. As it happened, there was this beautiful string quartet, Stringsongs. We performed it, I absolutely loved it, and pretty quickly felt that it was something we wanted to record. That became the starting point for the whole project.
2. What was it like developing Realms in such close collaboration with Meredith Monk, and how did her involvement shape your interpretation?
Working with Meredith on Realms was fundamental. She says that her music can’t be fully comprehended from the scores alone, and I think that’s absolutely right. Having her directly involved in Stringsongs, and then, at her suggestion, expanding the project to include two further works, was a wonderful way to work. It wasn’t always plain sailing: we were in the UK, Meredith was in the US, and production could sometimes be long-winded and a little fraught over email and Zoom. I actually only met Meredith in person shortly before recording the second half of the album, when I flew to Budapest to see her perform and we had dinner afterwards. It was lovely to make that connection in person — and she was every bit as bright and charming as she’d always been on Zoom.
3. Monk describes strings as being remarkably vocal; how did that idea influence your approach to performing and recording Stringsongs?
Meredith sees music very much through the paradigm of the voice, her primary instrument, so her exploration of strings follows a similar path. In fact, Phantom Strings, the final movement of Stringsongs, began with Meredith recording her own voice onto a four-track recorder, which was then transcribed for string quartet. So you often feel that the material itself has a vocal origin. There’s also a wonderful hocketing passage at the end of Tendrils — the ancient technique of passing a melody between musicians note by note — which is a hallmark of Meredith’s vocal music. Even the bow can feel like an in-breath and out-breath, although, as Meredith points out, string players have the advantage of being able to sustain a note almost indefinitely.
4. How did you and the ensemble approach the very different musical worlds of Stringsongs, Backlight and Realm Variations while still creating a cohesive album?
This was a challenge, because we’re usually a group focused around string players, and two of these pieces really aren’t. Luckily, we have this wonderful pool of friends and colleagues to draw from, so finding the right players was never an issue. And actually, despite how different the pieces are, Meredith’s voice is very strongly heard throughout. She has a way with melody and rhythm that I think is uniquely hers. Jamie Hamilton, my co-director at Phaedra, produced the album as a whole, and Backlight and Realm Variations specifically, which was a big part of bringing those different worlds together. Alex Bonney mixed the album, with Meredith involved throughout, so I think there’s a real continuity of sound across the three pieces.
5. What does bringing voices and instruments together in Realm Variations reveal about the way Monk thinks about the boundaries between the two?
Realm Variations really feels like the culmination of the album’s journey: we begin with strings, then add wind instruments, moving closer to the voice, and finally arrive at voices themselves. Meredith talks beautifully about “instruments as voices and voices as instruments”, and often the idea is that a voice and an instrument together create a third sound. In Realm Variations, voices and instruments are paired from high to low, deliberately blurring those boundaries. Meredith’s decision not to use words adds to this: you begin to hear the voice less as a vehicle for language and more as the first, and most fundamental, human instrument.
6. After more than five years of work on Realms, what are you most excited for audiences to discover at the Kings Place launch concert?
That we actually managed to make it! Joking aside, after five years of living with this music, I’m really excited to hear all three works together in one concert. It’s a side of Meredith’s music that I think is still relatively little known — music where her extraordinary musical personality is carried by instruments and other voices rather than her own or members of her Vocal Ensemble. There are wonderful musicians and singers involved, and the three pieces are incredibly varied, but they share this directness and emotional honesty. I think hearing them together makes the journey of the album really clear. More than anything, I’m excited for people simply to come and be immersed in the atmosphere of this extraordinary music.