Monk’s Stark and Stunning Folk Vocals

Meredith Monk epitomizes the contemporary hyphenate artist, a vocalist-composer-filmmaker-choreo- grapher-opera concocter. But in her appearance at the Getty Center on Tuesday, the hyphens were mostly cast aside. She mainly relied on her voice and a stage.

Part of the World Festival of Sacred Music being staged all over the city through this weekend, the concert proved to be a stark yet rich way to appreciate a compact retrospective of Monk’s provocative vocal inventiveness.

Three of the solo pieces here were also heard Monday morning, when Monk sang at the Sinai Temple before the Dalai Lama lectured. Among the songs were “Porch,” a simple, chant-like melody inspired by the New Mexican landscape and increasingly colored by shivering vibrato, pitch-shifting and finally overtone-painted throat singing.

His Holiness listened with rapt attention and, afterward, beamed beneficently, praising her artistry in “using the gift of voice, which we all have.” We all have it, yes, but few match Monk’s daring sense of theater and meditative cool, her humor or her contemplative air.

She described her “Light Songs,” from 1988, as “duets for solo voice,” weaving together separate musical threads. That’s a good description of Monk’s general MO, as she mixes degrees of vocal purity and ideas that pile up nicely on one another.

In the Getty concert’s second half, Monk accompanied herself on piano, and pianist Stephen Lockwood played simple, repetitive parts behind pieces like “Choosing Companions” and “New York Requiem,” but the simple, nattering chordal structures seemed confining to Monk’s free spirit.

At her best, Monk has a knack for blending the elemental and the experimental. She appears to be making folk music from another planet, or another plane.

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* A complete list of events remaining in the festival, which continues through Sunday, is on Page 39. Information: (310) 208-2784 or https://www.wfsm.org/americas.