Panda Chant II from The Games

"Panda Chant II" is a piece for voices alone, built almost entirely from short, rhythmic syllables rather than words. Voices enter one after another, layering the same handful of sung and spoken sounds into an interlocking pattern, the way a round like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" layers voices, but with a more percussive, chant-like feel. Once all the voices are in, the piece settles into a steady pulse, with small variations in accent and register giving it a shifting, almost hypnotic surface. There is no melody to hum afterward and no traditional harmony to follow. Instead, listen for the interlocking rhythms, the way accents fall in different places for different singers, and the sense of a tightly built vocal machine running at a steady tempo. The piece stays close to its opening idea throughout, growing mainly through the addition of voices and small shifts in texture rather than through development in the classical sense. It ends about as simply as it begins, the pattern dropping away rather than building to a climax. For a first-time listener, the pleasure is in tracking how many independent lines the ear can hold at once, and in noticing how a purely sound-based vocal texture can feel both playful and ritualistic.

Meredith Monk wrote "Panda Chant II" as part of "The Games," a large-scale music theater work she created in 1983 with Ping Chong, imagining a distant future society reconstructing games and rituals from a lost past. Monk is known for extended vocal techniques and pieces built from invented syllables rather than conventional song texts, and "Panda Chant II" grew out of that vocabulary. Since its premiere, the chant has taken on a life apart from the larger theatrical work, frequently performed and recorded as a standalone vocal piece, including by choirs and vocal ensembles outside Monk's own company. Its inclusion on an orchestral program alongside pianists and vocalists reflects a broader interest among orchestras in presenting Monk's music, and vocal music generally, as part of eclectic, mixed programs rather than in isolation.