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Grammy Award nomination – Producer Of The Year, Classical, 2017 "Most of all, Monk's music inspires a state of wonder ideal for divining nature. Starting with easily grasped elementary melodic figures, she adds layer upon layer of expression by colouring tones with strange vocal sounds and creating strange interactions through quirky counterpoint ... some of the finest music Monk has yet written." - Los Angeles Times "... a work that beguiles and baffles, existing in a liminal zone between genius and its opposite ... as ever, Ms. Monk is magnetic. Her vocal music is cast in a virtuosic, tight counterpoint of coos and chitters, emulating bird calls at one moment, yelping atop a purely musical glissando the next. The instrumental writing for percussion, winds, keyboards, violin and horn feels more familiar, a mingling of Feldmanesque stasis and Reichian pulses. Yet the piece demands to be (heard), if not, like nature itself, fully understood." - The New York Times New York composer, singer, director, choreographer and multimedia creator Meredith Monk is a pioneer in what is now called interdisciplinary performance, typified by her music theatre piece On Behalf of Nature. Live productions of this poetic meditation on the environment were greeted with lavish praise on both US coasts in 2013 and 2014 by The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Using her acclaimed composition Realm Variations for vocalists and instrumentalists as a point of departure, Monk employs contrasts in range from high to low to create an expansive sound world. Within this world, she evokes the Buddhist notion of the existence of different realm categories, the idea of joining heaven and earth by way of human beings.