Meditations on Meredith Monk

Abstract It’s difficult to write about the music of Meredith Monk because it, as Adam Shatz writes, “dissolves the usual markers of time, asking us to inhabit two temporal zones at once.” This essay-poem takes up the challenge by revisiting two performances of Monk’s recent work Indra’s Net (2023): at the Park Avenue Armory on October 6, 2024 and at Mills College on November 12, 2021. The piece moves fluidly between these two performances, with occasional flights into other times, spaces, texts, and contexts.