Unquestionably a maverick, this composer, vocalist, director, dancer, and choreographer has been breaking new ground for four decades, exploring the capability of the human voice-as-instrument to paint aural panoramas that unearth emotional gems we didn't even know we possessed. 

The accomplishments of this "voice of the future," as she is sometimes called, are legion, and her impressive resumé would take a month of Sundays to fully digest. To name a few feats: Her awards include a MacArthur "genius" grant, two Guggenheim fellowships, three Obies, two Villager Awards, a Bessie, a National Music Theatre Award, and sixteen American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers awards. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Julliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Boston Conservatory. In 1968, Monk founded The House, an organization devoted to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. In 1978, she created Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, having made more than a dozen recordings; her critically acclaimed masterpiece Mercy (ECM New Series, 2002) is haunting, meditative, and breathtakingly beautiful. Her compositions have been performed by various ensembles, most recently the Kronos Quartet. Her award-winning film, Book of Days, was shown on PBS, at the New York Film Festival, and at the Whitney Museum. Monk even presented a vocal offering for the Dalai Lama as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. No matter what this postmodern personality is channeling, it's guaranteed to be complex and salient.

Despite all her artistic achievements, Monk seems a humble, lovely, contemplative soul. Currently living in New York City, she longs to be at her house in the foothills of the Catskills in (appropriately enough) the Delaware County town of East Meredith, where she's spent time since 1978. "I love it," she says softly, earnestly. "Very much. I don't get to go up there very much, but I usually try to get there for the whole summer."

Monk will certainly spend part of this summer upstate, as she's performing a benefit concert at Sky Lake Lodge in Rosendale on June 10, followed by a workshop there on June 11. Located on the northern crest of the Shawangunk Mountains, the Shambhala contemplative center at Sky Lake is a haven for meditation and the arts, with hiking trails on 18 acres and a spring-fed pond.

The workshop combines voice and movement, Monk says. "I've spent a lot of time at Gampo Abbey in [Nova Scotia], and I taught at the Zen Mountain Monastery [in Mount Tremper], so I've been thinking a lot about voice as spiritual practice.  It's very much about integrating the voice and the body. We do a lot of different exercises to get the voice and the energy going, working with range and resonances but also energizing the space. I always think of music, sound, and space, and how sound really influences space and space influences sound. I start with very simple physical exercises and then a vocal warm-up. We work on the playfulness of singing and creativity in relation to singing. "

Monk has been a part of the Shambhala community since the mid-1970s. A Tibetan Buddhist, she taught at Naropa Institute in Boulder for much of the 1970s. She started practicing Shambala very seriously in the mid–'80s, taking the full Shambhala training at that time, and finally taking her refuge in 1998 and her Bodhisattva vows in 2003. "I'm very, very happy there's a place for people who are practitioners here in the city to come, or for everybody in the area," she says. "That's why we are doing the benefit. I think it's very, very worthwhile that the center is there."

Joining Monk at the Sky Lake concert is otherworldly composer and performer Theo Bleckmann, who's been a member of Monk's ensemble since 1994. His own background in installation, theater, cabaret, and performance art led to his being crowned "local cult favorite" by the New Yorker.

"For the first half of the performance," Monk says, "I'm going to sing 'Our Lady of Late,' a solo piece I made in the early '70s. I really like coming back to it from time to time. It's a piece with voice and wineglass, the wineglass being a drone instrument. During the piece, I drink out of it, and so the pitch actually goes up. There are certain numbers of pieces that are built on that particular pitch, and then it goes up. That would be the first half [of the concert]. Then, in the second half, Theo and I will sing 'Facing North,' a piece I wrote in the early '90s. There might be one or two other pieces we do. I'm not sure yet."

Monk is currently working on quite a few exciting projects. She's just finished writing her first string quartet for the Kronos Quartet. "It's called 'Stringsongs,'" says Monk, joyfully. "They're going to be performing it in Paris next week." She's also working on a piece that she did as a work in progress last July, called The Impermanence Project, which enjoyed its world premiere at Riverside Studios in London and included eight voices, piano, keyboard, marimba, vibraphone, percussion, violin, clarinets, and bicycle wheel. "I lost my partner—it will be three years in November—so I've been contending with grief, loss, and death." She explains how the project took root.

"There's an organization, Rosetta Life, that works with people who are dying, from hospices all over England. They send artists out to different hospices and have them help the people who are dying, and, if they want to, they can make artwork about that process. [Rosetta] came to me not long after my partner had died, and I was just thinking of nothing else, so I told them I would make a piece for them. They were doing a festival about the process of dying, in London. So, I worked with people who were dying. We came together, they told me their stories, and I sang for them. I knew I couldn't really use their stories as part of the piece, because it's not the way I work. I work much more poetically, not so much in a linear kind of way. But it was very inspiring to be with them. We did this piece as a work in progress and a lot of them were in the audience. I had their faces as part of the piece in a film. So, now we're working on it again, to finish it, and we're going to be going on tour with it next season."

This year, like most others, has been a flurry of activities for Monk. She's also in the conceptual stage of creating a very large piece with Kronos and visual artist Ann Hamilton. Songs of Ascension, as she's currently calling it, will open at a tower that Hamilton is building in San Francisco. "Oh my goodness! It's been nonstop," chimes Monk.

As she celebrates the 40th anniversary of her work this year, Meredith Monk is reflecting on her life as an artist, as well as looking ahead. "My mother was a singer, my grandfather was a singer, and my great grandfather was a singer, so I sang very, very young. I sang, really, before I talked. I knew that I wanted to not be an interpretive artist, but a creative artist. That's quite a different path, it's a lonelier path. You really have to find your own way through, step by step. But that's, of course, what makes it very exciting, because you don't have a precedent. You have to just find your own way." She laughs. "You just stumble along yourself."