Meredith Monk will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s ⁩ Venice Biennale Musica. 

The composer and performer will be given the prize on Oct. 20 at a ceremony.

La Biennale noted, “Meredith Monk has revolutionised music and the performing arts with an approach that has expanded the potential of the human voice, transforming it into a vehicle for unprecedented sonic exploration. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music acknowledges her remarkable and enduring impact on the contemporary music scene, her unique artistic vision and constant commitment to research into sound. Through her compositions and performances, Meredith Monk has demonstrated an unwavering capacity for innovation, transforming music into an immersive ritual experience. Her music exists in the same space that The Star Within proposes to explore: a sonic cosmogony, a vibration that runs through us connecting us with the other, a deep echo in which listening becomes transformation. Her wordless incantations and ability to build entire sonic worlds from the simplest gestures give rise to a dialogue between matter and spirit, between presence and transcendence. Her work cannot be confined within historical categories, but opens up a living universe of sound, in constant evolution, which appears both archaic and radically innovative at the same time.”

Monk is an interdisciplinary artist who has worked with experimental music to contemporary classical, electronics, Jazz and pop. She is the founder of The House and of the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble.

Her work “Atlas” was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, and “Vessel: an opera epic”was for for an ensemble of 75 voices, electronic organ, dulcimer and accordion. Monk was invited to the Biennale Teatro and Musica in 1975 and 1976, the famous editions directed by Luca Ronconi, with “Education of the Girlchild: an opera” and “Quarry: an opera” in three movements.

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