Taking Spirituality to the Cutting Edge

The aliens have landed. There are three of them. They are observing the earthlings’ rituals. The earthlings are bringing plates, glasses, silverware to a table, chattering to one another in an intricate duet. This ritual is called “dinner,” but the aliens may not know this; to them, it seems foreign and senseless. Occasionally they freeze the earthlings in mid-motion, copy them, sample their food and sometimes join in their singing, intertwining their voices in a single, complex melodic line.

Whether two voices or five, the melody is not one earthlings might recognize as such. It’s about emotion, expression, effect, not merely of the relation of one note to another within a five-line staff.

“The question,” says Meredith Monk, “was, can you make a science-fiction opera? But a low-tech science fiction. More ‘Twilight Zone’ than ‘Star Wars.’ ”

Comparisons from a more recent era might be “3rd Rock From the Sun” or “Galaxy Quest,” both of which feature aliens with a similar lovable, bumbling quality. But Monk’s so-called science-fiction chamber opera, “Magic Frequencies,” which comes to Glendale’s Alex Theatre on Sunday, is, of course, something completely different.

“Of course” because anyone who’s heard of Monk knows that her pieces don’t tell stories through the conventional media of plot, script, words. Rather, the artist, “a composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer and director,” creates unique worlds using a range of vocal sounds no classical singer would recognize, layered over one another in intricate patterns with a spare instrumental accompaniment. While her vocabulary is immediately recognizable, each piece establishes its own individual atmosphere, conveying a story that has to do more with sound and feeling and association and dream than with any kind of conventional storytelling. So don’t look for the aliens to return after the first scene of “Magic Frequencies.”

Look instead for a later, poignant scene with a deathbed, which Monk herself rides through slowly, on an invisible horse, embodying a journey to a new plane of freedom. “Magic Frequencies” is as much about death as science fiction. In fact, some of the funding for the project came from the Project on Death of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Says Monk, speaking by phone from a Texas stop on the piece’s ongoing seven-week American tour, “We’ve been doing some question-and-answer sessions at performances, sometimes with a person from a hospice.”

*

In a career spanning more than 30 years, Monk has journeyed freely between disciplines and planes, staking out her own terrain and becoming something of an American institution. She may not have made a splash in the sense of popular hits or huge record sales, but she has, like a river, continued gently and inexorably in the same direction, wearing a path through the country’s cultural landscape, carving and deepening a Grand Canyon of her own. Rather than a Grammy for any of her 14 recordings (most recently, 1997’s “Volcano Songs” on ECM), her awards are on the order of the MacArthur Foundation’s no-strings-attached bequests to exceptional artists, informally known as “genius grants,” one of which she received in 1995.

She has done some large-scale work, notably the opera “Atlas,” commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera and premiered there in 1991 (recorded on ECM), which involved 29 performers. But scale is the least of Monk’s concerns: “Volcano Songs” is a kind of chamber album studded with vocal duets and solos. There is a “New York Requiem” for voice and piano, and an almost Satie-esque piano solo called “St. Petersburg Waltz.”

And while she may like science fiction, she’s not particularly interested in today’s new technologies. “If I was going to really go for it,” she says, “I would just go out in a room with one candle and sing.”

Her most recent appearance in Los Angeles was pretty much just that. Monk had hoped to bring her “Celebration Service” (1996) to the World Sacred Music Festival here last fall, a work that was inspired by the presence of the Dalai Lama, but the production costs for the 17-performer piece proved too high.

“So I just went alone and performed three pieces for His Holiness, which was really great,” Monk says, infusing the “really great” with a kind of expressive warmth that doesn’t translate onto paper (and incidentally demonstrates her own point about how difficult it is to notate her music, since “in my music there’s so much going on that’s not on the page”).

According to Los Angeles Times contributor Josef Woodard, the Dalai Lama “praised her artistry in ‘using the gift of voice.’ ” Monk repeated this vocal offering at the Getty Center the next day, pairing it with other chamber works.

From titles like “Celebration Service” and “New York Requiem,” it’s easy to see that Monk’s concern in her recent work has been “the relationship between art and spirituality. Is it possible,” she asks, “to make pieces that have to do with sacred space in the world we live in? How do you, in a nontraditional way”--that is, apart from a conventional religious service--”make work that gives something back to the community?”

In “Celebration Service,” one answer was to break down the barriers between “congregation” and performers, teaching the audience some of the music and leading them out at the end in a procession to music from “American Archeology” (1994).

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the artist in our society,” Monk says. In practice, this also means looking back over her own work, her own role. Or so one can infer from the synthesizing tendencies in her recent pieces. In “Celebration Service,” eight religious texts from various traditions alternate with music excerpted from her own pieces of the last 25 years, from 1971’s “Vessel: An Opera Epic” to 1996’s “The Politics of Quiet.”

“Magic Frequencies” unites performers from Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, founded in 1978 and today mainly composed of performers Monk met during auditions for “Atlas” in 1991, and two members of her original 1970 troupe: Lanny Harrison, who plays one of the aliens, and Coco Pekelis in the role of the Astronomer, a figure who remains at the side of the stage throughout the piece, busying herself with her machinery in a rather bored way, monitoring rather than observing any of the things her telescope could reveal to her.

Monk’s own inner telescope is trained firmly on herself. Just as the boundaries between artistic genres are fluid in Monk’s work, so are those between Monk the private person and Monk the onstage performer. This is intensely personal work that’s all about opening up, revealing yourself.

“If you’re manipulating something just for effect,” Monk said in a 1996 interview, “a listener can hear that, because emotionally it won’t be honest.”

In Monk’s case, she isn’t only producing musical notes; her very technique is her own creation and a part of her emotional expression. “I sometimes think of myself as a vocal archeologist,” she said in the same interview, “trying to create music that expresses emotional shades that we don’t have words for.”

Digging down, finding a place of emotional honesty, results in work that can be intensely revealing. The deathbed scene in “Magic Frequencies” has strong autobiographical overtones. While the piece was in preparation, “my father passed away,” Monk says. “I was with him, my sister and I. I’d never seen anyone die. I’d never even seen a dead person. I count myself very fortunate to have experienced that. I had to leave rehearsal and go back out to California, where he was living, and then came back to rehearsal afterward.” In the resulting scene, you may not be able to explain exactly what’s happening in standard narrative terms, but the emotion and events come through loud and clear.

*

The indefinable, or interdisciplinary, nature of Monk’s work has always kept her balanced on the cutting edge of contemporary performing art. But it’s curious that whereas in the 1970s she was part of an emerging avant-garde scene, today she seems almost more a maverick than she did then. The trend in music theater seems to be leading back toward past conventions like plots and arias and tonality in pieces like Broadway’s newest musical experiment, “Marie Christine.” Opera houses are commissioning not an “Atlas,” but “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Monk doesn’t blame the audience; in fact, she finds American audiences generally more open to her work today. It’s “the people in between the artists and the audience--I call them the gatekeepers--who are moving backwards,” she says. “You have to explain yourself. More and more I have to start from ground zero and explain what I’m doing: ‘I’m trying to find a way to weave together different themes, different cultures. It reflects the complexity of the world we live in.’

“I feel like I’ve been saying this since 1964. I thought we’d fought this battle, and people understood.”

Again, it’s difficult to notate Monk’s speech on paper. She says all this without a trace of bitterness: rather, with mild, humorous exasperation, like a fond parent throwing up her hands about a recalcitrant child. After all, following the call of her work has effectively meant making a choice not to follow the cultural herd. And while the cultural tendencies of the day may elicit a shrug from her, one senses that she’s a lot more concerned with her excavations into simplicity, directness, expression.

“I’m a folk artist,” she says. “Not in the sense of crudeness; it’s not that the work is not technically complex. It’s that I’m consciously not going in the direction of sleekness.

“There is some dimension of elegance,” she concedes. “But also an openheartedness and a sense of wonder. The wonder will always be there.”

*

“MAGIC FREQUENCIES,” Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Ave., Glendale. Dates: Tonight, 7 p.m. Prices: $15 to $43. Phone: (800) 233-3123.