Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs
ECM New Series

Calling Meredith Monk a national treasure and true original barely captures just how singular an artist she is. An ECM recording artist since 1981, Monk has been a major figure in new music and performance circles for five decades and is veritably a genre unto herself. Hugely influential, her vocal-based music has infiltrated countless corners of the cultural landscape—the title sequence for the series Pluribus a recent example. Recognizing her impact and stature, ECM celebrated her eightieth birthday with the 2022 box set Meredith Monk: The Recordings, which gathered seminal albums such as Do You Be and Atlas into an imposing collection.

The box set was also something of a stop-gap between recordings of new material, with Cellular Songs the first release of new work since 2016's On Behalf of Nature. If the new set isn't groundbreaking in the way the opera Atlas was, it's classic Monk nonetheless and a wonderfully intimate window into her world; in her own view, it distills what she's doing to its essence. With Monk augmented by those of her fellow vocal ensemble members Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, and Allison Sniffin and percussionist John Hollenbeck (Sniffin's also credited with piano and violin), Cellular Songs offers an excellent portal into Monk's universe for neophytes and another rewarding statement for those who've long appreciated her.

Cellular Songs, in fact, forms the central part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works initiated by On Behalf of Nature. While it meditated on the fragile state of global ecology, the new chapter focuses on the building blocks of life itself and the notion of the cell as functioning cooperatively as opposed to competitively and destructively. True to her community-oriented sensibility, Monk naturally gravitated to cooperation as the value to be embraced and propagated as opposed to tendencies more divisive in nature.

Emblematic of her music, Cellular Songs ranges tonally from pieces that are playful and radiant to others forlorn and contemplative. Monk's own way of seeing her music is illuminating: whereas her earlier music, she says, had more to do with layering, now it's taken on the form of a three-dimensional sculpture, such that “you can almost see or hear the piece rotating as if it were a sculpture in space, though it's a musical form.”

Fifteen pieces appear, all instantly identifiable as Monk creations. Most are vocal-based, the opening “Click Song #3 Prologue” an exception in coupling Hollenbeck's crotales with the singers' body percussion and “Dive” also anomalous in being a duet for piano and vibraphone. Representative of Monk's sculptural design concept are three “Cell Trio” pieces featuring her, Geissinger, and Sniffin, the pieces less songs and more haunting incantations. Whereas Monk's tender side comes to the fore in “Lullaby for Lise” when Geissinger wordlessly emotes alongside Sniffin's poignant piano phrases, bowed vibraphone adds to the ethereal eeriness of the contracting and expanding vocal chants in “Melt.”

All but one eschew traditional lyrics, the exception “Happy Woman,” which, with the singers accompanied by violin, piano, and vibraphone, advances from the phrase “I'm a happy woman, I'm a happy woman” to variations that replace “happy” with “angry,” “sassy,” “grieving,” “shaky,” “quiet,” and so one, the character of the delivery repeatedly amended to reflect the change in wording. As only she can, Monk uses her indelible style to accentuate the boundless facets of womanhood. She closes the release with a piece that registers as a nine-minute encapsulation of her vocal artistry, “Nyems.”

December 2025