"I somehow sensed when I was a teenager that I wanted to do my own work. I was quite clear that I didn't want to be an interpretative kind of artist. I had an intuition about wanting to create my own form, in one way or another, whatever that would be"
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There is a quiet defiance in Monk's phrasing: "somehow sensed" and "intuition" make her ambition sound less like a career plan than an internal compass she trusted before she could rationalize it. That matters because it positions authorship, not virtuosity, as the core of her artistic identity. Plenty of teenagers want to perform; far fewer feel, with this kind of clarity, that interpretation is a trap.
Her line about not being "an interpretative kind of artist" isn’t a dismissal of performers so much as a refusal of the traditional pipeline in classical music, where excellence often means embodying someone else's score with ever-greater fidelity. Monk is naming the cultural hierarchy that elevates the canon and its gatekeepers, then stepping sideways out of it. The subtext: if the existing forms don’t fit the kind of sound and movement your body wants to make, you either shrink yourself to fit them or you invent a container.
The phrase "create my own form" is the tell. Monk emerged in a downtown New York ecosystem that prized hybridity and process, where the boundaries between composition, voice, theater, and ritual were porous. Her work would later treat the voice as raw material rather than a delivery system for text, and the stage as an instrument rather than a backdrop. "Whatever that would be" captures the risk: she’s not declaring a genre, she’s declaring permission - to build a practice first and let categories scramble to catch up.
Her line about not being "an interpretative kind of artist" isn’t a dismissal of performers so much as a refusal of the traditional pipeline in classical music, where excellence often means embodying someone else's score with ever-greater fidelity. Monk is naming the cultural hierarchy that elevates the canon and its gatekeepers, then stepping sideways out of it. The subtext: if the existing forms don’t fit the kind of sound and movement your body wants to make, you either shrink yourself to fit them or you invent a container.
The phrase "create my own form" is the tell. Monk emerged in a downtown New York ecosystem that prized hybridity and process, where the boundaries between composition, voice, theater, and ritual were porous. Her work would later treat the voice as raw material rather than a delivery system for text, and the stage as an instrument rather than a backdrop. "Whatever that would be" captures the risk: she’s not declaring a genre, she’s declaring permission - to build a practice first and let categories scramble to catch up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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