Ascending, transcending

When artist Ann Hamilton completed building what she called an acoustic tower in Sonoma County last year, Meredith Monk was on hand for the inauguration. She sent up the tower's central spiral staircase vocalists, a string quartet, a woodwind player and a percussionist, singing and playing as they slowly ascended, their sounds reverberating in the eight-story silo and producing what one imagines to have been a magical, site-specific "Climb Every Mountain" of modern art.

That Hamilton tower is the DNA of "Songs of Ascension." The work is billed as a collaboration between a composer/choreographer/theater artist and a visual artist. But at REDCAT on Wednesday night, the only physical evidence of Hamilton's involvement was a video projection of murky images revolving around the theater. Essentially this is a major Monk work. Music is its center. The tower is left to the imagination, even though the use of space is still a significant aspect of the piece.

Workshopped at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, premiered at Stanford University earlier this month and intended for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in fall 2009, "Songs of Ascension" felt particularly well suited Wednesday for the intimate, flexible REDCAT. The performance began with a lamp swaying back and forth over the stage while a chorus -- drawn from CalArts, one of the work's sponsors -- droned in surround sound, the singers placed in nooks between the acoustical tiles that line the walls of the black box. An electronic squeal here, some clattery percussion there, dissuaded the ear from an impression of anything New Age-y.

What happened for the next 70 minutes proved just the other side of understandable. Neither music nor movement was exactly ascensional. Instead, the feeling was more preparation for ascent at, say, an Everest base camp. No one seemed quite acclimated to the altitude, so things got a little strange.

Monk's music and movement are one process. Her use of extended vocal techniques is not so much the invention of new sounds as a means of extending the voice into the rest of the body. All those breathy ha-ha-has and hee-hee-hees are as much physical gestures as they are musical ones.