Meredith Monk

“I want to make work that is timeless, that is not fashionable.”

“I think that abstraction is a way of getting to the essence of things.”

“Vocal music is an unoccluded medium, an instrument that is part of our body.”

“Art is a healing force.”

“I've always worked with a sense of trying to make a world, a complete world, so that the audience is completely transported.”

“I think of the voice as a tool for discovering, in a sense, the states of being.”

“The voice is a language that is pre-language and post-language. It’s a direct conduit of the soul.”

“I'm interested in the poetic, not the narrative.”

“My work is about finding a language for that which has no language.”

“What I’m trying to do is make music that is ancient and futuristic at the same time.”

“My work has always been about offering another way of seeing, or another way of hearing.”

“For me, the voice is the most flexible and eloquent instrument.”

“Silence is my partner. It is the canvas on which I paint.”

“I was trying to make a vocabulary for the voice that was not based on a text.”

“I work in between the cracks, where the voice is not just the classical voice, where the voice is not just a pop voice, where the voice is not just the folk voice.”

“I believe in the spiritual and healing qualities of music.”

“My feeling is that the human voice is the most primal and direct of all instruments.”

“I have always tried to create a world that you can enter and be in for a while.”

“You can go to the country and listen to the birds, and you can go to the city and listen to the sirens. And they’re both beautiful.”

“It is a landscape of the voice.”