Education Quote by Meredith Monk

Emptiness, in Meredith Monk's telling, isn't a void to be feared but an engine for change. The scare quotes around "empty" do sly work: she knows the word is a provocation in a culture that treats blankness as failure and silence as dead air. For a composer whose work often elevates breath, pause, and the grain of the human voice, space isn't the absence of art; it's one of its materials.

The intent here is quietly corrective. Monk is talking back to the modern mandate of constant output, the artist as a content factory with an always-on brain and a feed to satisfy. She frames productivity as a "trap" not because making is bad, but because compulsive making can become a way to avoid listening. "Natural way" signals her deeper allegiance: not to the market's tempo, not to the ego's panic, but to processes that need gestation. Evolution requires slack. Without it, you get repetition dressed up as invention.

The subtext is hard-won authority. "I've had to learn that over the years" reads like a confession from someone who knows the seduction of relentless craft and the anxiety underneath it: if you're not producing, are you still an artist? Monk answers by redefining the job. The artist isn't merely a generator of objects; she's a custodian of conditions. By protecting emptiness, she protects the possibility of surprise - the moment when a work arrives not as a forced product, but as something that had room to become.