Archaeology of Language in Meredith Monk’s Works. Musicality, Substantiality, Decreation

Abstract

Meredith Monk’s vocal music is defined by the presence of a disintegrated language —a language which has abandoned its normative nature— The voice, accompanied by a thorough gestural language, falls into a precultural, protolinguistic stratum. With his work, Monk —from a wide variety of aesthetics proposals: music, poetry, dramaturgy, audiovisual— gets into the area of Cultural Anthropology. In her compositions, the voice emerges always as music, but this music, first and foremost, seeks refuge in different human expressions as sighs, moans, screams or laughs. Throughout the following pages a synthetic view of Monk’s aesthetics from an epistemological basis will be shown, a basis where notions like game or mimesis play an axial role, as well as some others notions related to those, especially the dialectics between creation and decreation, or the concept musilanguage (as proposed by Robert N. Bellah, Steven Brown and Steven Mithen). This last term refers to music as basis of language.