Monk - Songs of Ascension - Divine music?
Laura S. Wöllner

Many people like how music sounds in a spacious room. The sounds appear differently according to the space they appear and if the room is really spacious it can give the impression of the sounds never leaving.

Why? Because space impacts duration, amplitude and timbre. 

This is exantly what meredith Monk proves with "Songs of Ascension", a "song" performed in 4 zones of a tower. This performance is made up of not only voice, but also instruments and to me the most remarking ones are the strings. This is probably based on my personal preference as I love the sound of violins. To me, they can express emotions very clearly and while they themselves can present a whole song solely through their string sounds they can also support other instruments and serve as a background instrument.

In this song the combination of the instruments and the voice creates the feeling of listening to something unusual and in that unusualness is a very clear beauty. The voice also contributes to this because Monk and her co-singers follow the natural pitch of the sounds produced by the instruments in that wide space. Instead of using actual words while singing Monk only sings sounds and combinations of letters that do not form a phrase or a word which differentiates the song from todays music. It appears that the singers sing their feelings but words are simply not enough to express these feelings so they do not use them. This is alienating but also enchanting at the same time.

I personally really like the song by itself (without the video/performance) although it is still weird to me that the singers do not sing words and I think that besides this fact the song is an actual song that one might listen to. Although I usually do not listen to this type of music, I still see the beauty in it and understand the art behind this performance. The performance is what makes this song an artpiece, though. Only through seeing how each tone was produced and how the space influenced the duration, frequency and quality does it make sense. Monk also included breaks where only one performer performed sounds or movements and at one point she had a perdormer make waves in the water at the bottom of the tower which also again vizualized sound quality. The water waves were in corrolation with the sound quality and one had to be really quiet to hear the water sounds. The waves mimiked the sound waves and the wider the space is, the bigger the waves get. This is what happens to tones/sounds being played in bigger rooms. Because the room in the tower is big, the sound waves get bigger and thus their duration is longer. However, they also get less clear the bigger the room is because the sound quality also changes with duration. The bigger the room, the onger the duration and the less quality of the sound.