Meredith Monk's multi-modal work incorporates theatre, dance, film and music. Her claim is that music and specifically the voice lie at the heart of all her work. At this core, she uses auditory gesture in wordless vocal lines to express her meaning, usually the hidden narrative of emotion, to enable universal intelligibility. This thesis uses the concept of gestus in the sense of Brecht and Weill as an instrument to examine vocal gesture in three scenes in Monk's opera ATLAS, and then relates it to her compositional process. It also studies gestus in connection with Monk's biography and the influences on her especially Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Antonin Artaud.

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