Exploring the wild and wonderful mind of WNMF17's featured composer, Meredith Monk.

Her work feels at once primal and intellectual. At once familiar and foreign, formal and abstract, Meredith Monk is constantly testing the limits of reality and representation in sound and image. Her conceptual vignettes to evoke – to trigger.

She is a composer. She is a choreographer. She is a filmmaker. An active participant in all methods and modes. Interdisciplinary creative fusion is her game.

The human is her subject. Her anthropological journey into the most ancient of our dramatic instincts extends so far beyond any sort of soundmaking one might hear in the traditional western art music world.

Meredith Monk's creative output is one of the most variegated of our time. She's been commissioned by globally-renowned orchestras, chamber ensembles, choirs – even Carnegie Hall and the Guggenheim Museum. She's also collaborated with the who's who of the contemporary popular art music world (and she's performed for the Dalai Lama... I mean, who gets to do that?!).

Her demiurgic language developed out of what she felt were her practical limitations and deficiencies. When life gives you lemons . . .

In September 1982, British director Peter Greenaway spent some a few days with Meredith Monk and the vocal ensemble she had founded four years before as they prepare fore and perform at the Almeida Festival. This is his portrait of those moments.

Three and a half decades later, Philip Bither, curator of performance art at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, invited Meredith to share deeper layers of a now 50-year career. In this interview, she talks about her youth, her growth, and her creative ideology. So many nuggets of wisdom.

And she's coming to Winnipeg. Go see and hear her at WNMF17 Sunday and Monday, January 29 and 30.

Tune in next Wednesday for another fresh episode of Mid-week Musicology on Classic107.com!