Collectibles

Item Description

You are bidding on a Meredith Monk LP Radio Songs and Ellis Island Book of Days DVD both signed by the artist herself!

About Radio Songs

Radio Songs – a vinyl pressing of seminal selections culled from Meredith Monk’s Quarry opera.

Radio Songs is released by White Columns Gallery as a strictly limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, housed in a letterpress sleeve designed by Will Work for Good. The photos on the jacket were taken by Johan Elbers and Jerry Vessuso. The package includes a 16 page booklet with text by Meredith Monk and images by Steve Clorfeine, Lauretta Harris, Philip Hipwell, Giuseppe Pino and Nathaniel Tileston.

About Ellis Island Book of Days

Black and White and Color, Sound(Stereo/Dolby), 74:21 Minutes (35mm-1:33/video), 1" 3/4" and 1/2"videotape. 55:36 minutes (Video/Television version), 1" 3/4" and 1/2" videotape.

"Book of Days opens, in color, with 20th-century workmen blasting a brick wall, leaving a hole that opens into a black-and-white small town in the Middle Ages. Men, women and children glide about their daily tasks, stopping to answer sometimes tellingly anachronistic questions from 20th-century interviewers...

The medieval Christians are dressed in white; the Jews are in black robes, each marked with a yellow circle. Both are stricken by the plague, for which the Jews are blamed. A Jewish girl has visionary dreams that prompt her to draw crude objects identifiable as a car, an airplane, a gun. At the end of ''Book of Days'' the workmen enter the town and come across the drawings traced into a wall.

But there is no belaboring of those visions - or of the stylized plague. ''Book of Days'' is a very beautiful visual play of surfaces and textures, from brick to rough-plastered wall and from the luminous innocence that lights the girl's face to the canny innocence illuminating the face of the crone, played by Ms. Monk, who teaches her to embrace her visions.

Filmed in Cordes, France, Book of Days was exquisitely photographed by Jerry Pantzer. It is knowingly acted by a cast that includes Toby Newman as the girl, Lucas Hoving as the old physician, Greger Hansen as a young monk and Wayne Hankin as the traveling storyteller. The screenplay was written by Ms. Monk and Tone Blevins." - Review by Jennifer Dunning for New York Times, January 22, 1990.

Directed by Meredith Monk. Director of Photography Jerry Pantzer; Art Direction and Costume Design by Yoshio Yabara; Music by Meredith Monk; Edited by Girish Bhargava. Book of Days is a production of Tatge/Lasseur Productions, Inc., The House Foundation for the Arts, Inc., La Sept, in Association with Alive From Off Center.

Meredith Monk (b. November 20, 1942, New York, NY) is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words. Over the last five decades, she has been hailed as “a magician of the voice” and “one of America’s coolest composers”. Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work has been presented by BAM, Lincoln Center Festival, Houston Grand Opera, London’s Barbican Centre, and at major venues in countries from Brazil to Syria. Among her many accolades, she was named 2012 Composer of the Year by Musical America and one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices, and received New Music USA’s 2013 Founders Award, a 2011 Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.

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