Monika Weiss

Lethe – Medusa

2026

Duration: 18:55

Sound/music installation: piano chair, headphones, looped

Composer: Monika Weiss
Voice 1: Kelly Beekman, Mezzo Soprano
Voice 2: Mary Zhou
Voice 3:: Monika Weiss
Piano: Monika Weiss
Percussion: Monika Weiss

Passages from "The Exaltation of Inana by Enheduanna" (r. c. 2334 – c. 2279 BCE)

Lethe-Medusa includes a song without words which Monika Weiss wrote for soprano Kelly Beekman. She recorded her singing solo, later merging her voice in a polyphonic dialogue with passages from "The Exaltation of Inana" by Enheduanna, the first known author, priestess and poet, who worked in the ancient city of Ur.

Spoken words and phrases from Enheduanna (read for this project by the poet Mary Zhou) appear scattered throughout the sonic composition, in English, Polish, and Sumerian, the latter an extinct language, whose pronunciation I can only approximate. Electronically transformed sounds of wind, trees my percussion interact with the voices. Eventually in the last part of the piece my piano improvisation responds to the earlier sonic passages.

A listener is seated on a piano chair, wearing a single pair of headphones, facing away from the rest of the room. The listener experiences the work in solitude, in a state of “deep listening,” a term first coined by composer Pauline Oliveros. The installation includes my written guidelines for how to achieve a deeper level of the listening experience.