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Meredith Monk makes music and theater that feel edgy and ancient at the very same time.

She creates sweeping productions, joining music and movement, light, and sound on stages around the world.

At the same time as one New Yorker writer put it, she conveys a fundamental humanity and humility that are rare in new music circles.

Meredith Monk is a kind of archaeologist of the human voice and body.

And the woman we meet is also an archaeologist of the mind and spirit with a long time Buddhist practice.

Through music, as through meditation, she pushes the boundaries of what we can do without words,

reaching to places in human experience where words can get in the way.

And the human voice is the original instrument, so you're going back to the very beginnings of utterance,

in a way it's like the memory of being a human being.

I'm Krista Tippett, this is on being from APM American Public Media.

Meredith Monk has received innumerable honors across her career, from Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships to an honorary doctorate at Juilliard.

I interviewed her in 2012. Early on, she had some classical training, but she often speaks of a moment of revelation she had after first moving to New York City in the 1960s.

A revelation that the voice could be like the body, it could have a kind of articulation and flexibility and fluidity that the body the spine have,

and that she could find her own vocabulary as a singer with choreography, movement as her way in.

This was in fact a connection Meredith Monk had known intimately in her childhood.

To correct early difficulties with bodily coordination, she learned Dalkrose Eurythmics, a music education method using movement and all the senses to create physical awareness.

Her great grandfather was a canter in Russia, her mother was best known as a singer of Jingles and At for Radio.

So you are, I read a fourth generation singer.

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