The Role of Screen Images in Meredith Monk’s Musical Performances

Abstract

The article provides characterization of the musical performances of Meredith Monk, –
a contemporary American composer, one of the founders and ideologues of performative motion,
– in which a conceptual role is played by screen images. The author examines the specific features
of theatrical performance as a form of artistic presentation, unlike an academic performance of
a completed musical text, an open artistic event. In it the listener becomes a direct participant of
an artistic action, interacts with the performance and carries out the mental construction of the
composition’s content. It is important for the present research that in her performances Meredith
Monk subjects the listener to a liminal state of crisis, which is aided by the composer’s aspiration
towards the destruction of the correlation between the aesthetical and the social sphere. With the
help of juxtaposition of facts from real life, as well as due to the suggestive traits of music and video
images, the composer discloses for the listener the possibility to look at familiar circumstances
of reality from a particular perspective, to bring in parallels independently between dispersed
situation, to feel keenly acute social problems within the framework of an aesthetic experience,
or to live through particular life situations. The article accentuates the attention to the fact that in
Monk’s musical performances the screen images not only form an additional reality, but also by
means of associations refer the listener’s consciousness to the events taking place in real life and
thereby create the semantic field of the musical composition.

Keywords: contemporary musical culture, musical performance, screen images, Meredith
Monk.