IMAGINARY FOLKLORE

Chapter:

CHAPTER 10 Millennium's End

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

In this sense, Partch's most direct conceptual descendant is Meredith Monk (b. 1942), a composer whose career was only beginning at the time of his death, and who has never mentioned him among her influences. Like Partch, she began as a lonely outsider, creating an eccentric music “corporeally,” by training her own voice to do things no one (at least within the traditions of her schooling) had thought of doing before. At a time when no one could duplicate (or was interested in duplicating) her effects, she became her own performance medium. She told an interviewer, who asked whether her pieces were autobiographical, that her relationship to her work went deeper than that. “I was using,” she said,

myself as material. I was very objective about it, though, so it wasn't really autobiographical. It was more that my hair was material, and my singing with a guitar was material. It was personal in a way that I let myself use myself—anything that I had—as material. But then it was made into a piece of poetry, because it was extremely objectified.³⁵

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 10 Millennium's End." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2023. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010007.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 10 Millennium's End. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 30 Nov. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010007.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 10 Millennium's End." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 30 Nov. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010007.xml