Wrapping Up

            I continue to be especially struck by the work of Laurie Anderson. Apart from representing a clear connection between avant garde art, classical music, and modern popular music, Anderson routinely uses her craft to convey specific and fascinating messages about the human experience, especially as a woman. The implications her music has for issues like feminism and body positivity are captivating and not really something I had ever considered before taking this course.

            Anderson comes from a long tradition of avant garde schools of art that tended for most of their history to be outwardly and specifically misogynist. The Futurist movement, for example, made it a point to include an explicit rejection of feminism and women’s rights in its manifesto (as well as a call to glorify war and destruction). Anderson is one of a handful of artists who helped – and continue to help – redefine avant garde art as a means of expression and artistic exploration for all people, maybe even one that is more suitable for women than for men. She takes a markedly different approach to music theory than do most of her (predominantly male) predecessors, thereby undermining and redefining the basic structure of her craft to fit her needs. Where older composers favor driving, momentous charges from high point to low point to finale, Anderson prefers a more stagnant, atmospheric treatment of sonority. There is little in the way of melody, but she proves that the nature of chords themselves can give us as much analytical ammunition as an eight-measure Mozart theme. This idea of a “feminine” theory not only serves to strengthen the artistic impulses of her music, but also establishes a new creative space, more accessible to first time listeners than the traditional principles of music theory, and perhaps less aggressive overall, but no less sophisticated or intellectual.

            One of the most prominent examples of this new approach to theory shows up in the harmonic structure Anderson’s most famous work, O Superman. Clocking it at more than eight minutes long, O Superman contains only two chords – making it that much more impressive that it rose to number two on the UK charts. The positioning of these to chords (Ab major in first inversion and C minor in root position, both over a middle c pedal) is purposefully ambiguous and lends to the piece a constant sense of both unease and two-mindedness. In the chapter “This Is Not a Story My People Tell” from her book Feminine Endings, musicologist Susan McClary describes the binary cognitive dissonance: “Even though we are given only two closely related triads, it is difficult to ascertain which is structural and which is ornamental” (McClary 142). In Western music, we tend to expect the major chord to be more important, especially since Ab major is the first of the two chords we hear. However, the nature of the first inversion position is inherently less strong than that of root position, so C minor often feels more at the tonal center. The analytical implications of this are significant: the minor mode is traditionally associated with sadness and depression and the major mode is traditionally associated with joy and excitement, so the idea that the minor mode might be more structurally important suggests that sadness is a valuable part of life, even a valuable part of happiness. Even disregarding this stab at analysis, the treatment of that emotional dichotomy as less important than we generally imagine it is related to other aspects of Anderson’s work.

            One of the core tenets of the contemporary feminist movement is that equality is more related to diversity than to conformity. The idea that feminists expect women to essentially “act like men” in order to achieve equality is outdated and incorrect. The real desire is for women to be granted the same freedom of diversity that men have; i.e. for “female” to not be the sole descriptive factor of a woman’s personality. In the same way that Anderson rejects the major-minor binary of music, she rejects the male-female binary of gender. In her solo performance art work United States, she presents herself as androgynous, drawing attention away from the troubling social restrictions associated with femininity while at the same time asserting power and agency over those restrictions – affirming that she has every right not to accept culturally-dictated norms and limitations and to refuse the male gaze.

            The most interesting aspect of Anderson’s work for me is her treatment of the complete human body as an instrument and canvas. McClary explains, “a very strong tradition of Western musical thought has been devoted to defining music as the sound itself, to erasing the physicality involved in both the making and the reception of music” (McClary 136). This attitude is indicative of larger, more insidious problems with Western culture relating to body shaming and sex shaming. Recordings erase the last possible trace of the body from music, and electronic music can delete it all together. Performance art seeks to reclaim the body as the most beautiful component of artistic creation, and Anderson especially seems to latch on to this notion in her music, using electronics in spite of their anti-human nature and denying Western listeners the opportunity to remove her humanness from the music.

            Laurie Anderson is a gifted composer and artist with several frankly catchy works in her arsenal. What sticks with me most about her, though, is her genuine curiosity about humanity, and the exploration of its deeper meanings she takes us on. I’d like to have coffee with her someday and ask how she feels about Beyonce.

War and After

Ladies and gentlemen,

Welcome! Today we will start a conversation about World War II and the Holocaust by listening to excerpts from twentieth century minimalist composer Steve Reich’s most famous work, Different Trains. The chamber work involves a live string quartet layered in with audio recordings of real interviews with Holocaust survivors as well as of real trains from Europe and North America, recalling the horrors and atrocities of World War II juxtaposed with the general American emotional impulse about train travel both before and after the war, a reflection of Steve Reich’s own experiences with train travel throughout his life.

The work is split into three movements. In the first movement, “America – Before the War,” rapid and repetitive strings in their upper register suggest light-hearted motion over long distances. We will listen to a few minutes from the opening of this movement (1:00 – 2:30). You will hear Reich’s governess Virginia saying “from Chicago to New York” and “one of the fastest trains.” The low, loud train whistles are almost nostalgic; they are nonthreatening and create an image of uninhibited locomotion and progress.

The second movement is entitled “Europe – During the War.” From the first moment, it is markedly and disturbingly different from the first movement. We hear sirens along with the much higher, shriller train whistles this time, and the rhythmic and musical material of the string quartet is lower and slower, though still pulsating and forward moving, creating a sense of agitated fear and anticipation. We will listen to the very beginning of this movement (0:00 – 1:30). You will hear Holocaust survivor Rachella describing where she was in her life when the war began: “1940 … on my birthday … the Germans walked in … walked into Holland.” The stark, harsh landscape of this movement is an extreme contrast from the upbeat nature of the first, and the inherently exposed sound of the string quartet enhances the feelings of unease and even terror that pervade the movement.

The final movement, “America – After the War,” is less upbeat than the first movement and generally far less tense than the second. It is variously slower and more subdued or quick and reflective. We will listen to the very end of this movement (7:45 – 10:30). You will hear the same Holocaust survivor, Rachella, saying “There was one girl who had a beautiful voice … and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans … and when she stopped singing they said, ‘More, more’ and they applauded.” There is a distinctly mournful, almost regretful atmosphere in this movement.

Different Trains represents the immense worldwide impact of World War Two and the Holocaust. In the third movement, we feel the global uncertainty and grief of a broken postwar world. Reich shows us the far-reaching effect that such large-scale violence, destruction, and terror can have, and asks us to consider how the basic components of our lives (like trains) might tie into the context of global tragedy and fear.

LINKS

Mvt I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEwsIW-zsQ

Mvt II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPjTkT0766M

Mvt III: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhgr4HUykDI

Sail Norse Rail?

This is a triptych detailing the process I used to create an imaginary transit map for the Luther College campus, similar to John Coltrane's sketch of A Love Supreme, some of Pat Steir's visual work, and the musical idea of building from a riff.. The first panel is a custom map in Google Maps - a rough sketch of my idea (my "riff," if you will). The second panel is my first stab at stylizing the shapes I created in my sketch. The third panel is the finished product.

Music is Magic

            John Cage’s musical and aesthetic philosophies hinge on his fight against the separation of sound from music. In his 1937 manifesto, he expressed his desire for modern music to be about sound rather than structure and melody. His famous 4’33” explores this idea to the extreme, sacrificing pitch and rhythm all together and using silence itself as the prevailing sound, forcing the listener to pay close attention to the surprisingly dynamic nature of silence for the duration of the piece. In many ways, Cage’s music is a response to the rapid urbanization of America in the early 20^th Century. He wants to call to mind factories, streets, machinery, and other quintessentially urban sounds as music for a more and more city-dwelling Western world. This emphasis on noise is defined more clearly by a separate emphasis on chance, randomness, and even whimsy throughout Cage’s music. He uses the mechanics of the arbitrary to separate traditional structured music from the noise and sounds he is more interested in. Rather than keeping time with a metronome and choosing rhythmic and pitch value based on standards of traditional music theory, Cage uses a star chart to guide his composition in Atlas Eclipticalis. The locations and brightnesses of the stars create a new rhythmic and musical structure based on natural, extra-musical, and virtually arbitrary forces.

            Laurie Anderson’s music, by contrast, is much less revolutionary in terms of the mechanical workings of music. Rather, she uses fairly simple and essentially traditional means of music-making as tool for artistic commentary. While it is often worthwhile to discuss her manipulation of musical norms, such as the ambiguous sonority she creates by alternating between a first-inversion Ab major and a root position C minor in O Superman, her main focus is clearly on the implications of those manipulations and of her work as a whole. Anderson comes from the artistic traditions of Fluxus and performance art, and draws on many fundamentally feminist ideas throughout her repertoire. Fluxus is an avant-garde “anti-art” movement, pointing out the (European) artificiality of imitative traditional art and, conversely, the beauty and meaning of “non-art.” That same chordal dichotomy in O Superman is an example of this idea – the respective sonorities of Ab major first inversion and C minor root position are what create the beauty and meaning, not their endless manipulation. Performance art involves the effort to reintegrate the body into art in the Western world, a society with an enormous amount of discomfort with the human body and a troubling amount of normalized body shaming. Anderson uses her body as a core component of her music. Much of it could not really be performed by anyone else. She uses body percussion and dance elements to aggressively humanize her work.

            Osvaldo Golijov’s music is a celebration and exploration of the Latin American experience. Like Anderson, he is less concerned with changing the theoretical landscape of music and more concerned with using music as a tool to commentate, give voice, and raise cultural awareness and understanding. His La Pasión según de San Marcos specifically involves the Latin American experience of Christianity as well as his own interpretation of the story of Jesus as a non-Christian composer. It is indirectly a response to the Western European liturgical and sacred music traditions that have been (and mostly still are) the face of Christian church music and of concert music as a whole for hundreds of years. The arrest scene in La Pasión, for example, is set to a Latin American dance beat and uses a Brazilian capoeiran dancer – a stark contrast to the Passions of Bach.

            My musical and aesthetic philosophies are as follows:

·         Music is communication inherently and exists to be shared. Music cannot exist without a performer and a listener (even if these two parties are sometimes the same person).

·         Music is performed primarily for the good of the audience, not for the good of the performer. Music may be an expression of the performer and may draw specific physical and/or cognitive attention to the performer, but it must nonetheless be considered first from the perspective of the listener’s benefit, not of the performer’s benefit.

·         The musical benefit for the performer is nevertheless exceedingly important. Without active performer involvement, there is nothing to draw the listener’s attention, and therefore only one party is involved and the performance is unsuccessful.

·         Music can give voice to every culture, gender identity, sexuality, belief system, ethnicity, social and economic class, and ability. Music is a tool to prevent and counteract oppressive silencing.

·         Since music serves as a cultural voice, the cultural diversity inherent to music must be upheld and respected in all cases, and musical communication from oppressed groups must be given credence and authority.

·         Music and musical involvement are potentially therapeutic and healing for listener, performer, and composer alike, and this power is a fundamental reason for its existence.

Structural Disintegrity

            We are so excited this evening to welcome our keynote speaker, experimental composer and visual and performance artist Laurie Anderson. A native of Chicago, Anderson is an alumna of Barnard College and Columbia University. She found her artistic voice in the cultural stew of downtown New York City’s arts scene in the early 1970s and has grown to become one of the most persistent, emphatic, and creative female voices in music. In 1979, Anderson premiered her work United States at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an eight-hour stage exploration of transportation, politics, money, and love in the United States. She became NASA’s first ever (and last ever) artist in residence in 2003. Her most well-known work by far is O Superman from 1981, which reached number two on the UK pop charts. The eight-minute work tackles the ubiquity of dichotomy and conflict – the difference between stability and instability, direction and atmosphere, hope and dread, fear and joking, and the reality that these differences are often inescapable.

Anderson’s art represents a radical departure from, as well as a feminist answer to the misogynist undertones of previous experimental art movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Fluxus. As the fight for women’s suffrage gain steam at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Futurist movement published its manifesto, promising to “glorify … scorn for women” and to “fight moralism [and] feminism” (Le Figaro 1909). Anderson helps to steer experimental art away from its misogynist history by rejecting the fundamental notions of the gender binary and prohibitive gender roles, questioning and undermining the very structure of the historically male-dominated world of traditional analysis and composition, and challenging the Western discomfort with the human body. In United States, Anderson portrays herself as androgynous, denying the historical and problematic tendency of the female body being subverted and delegitimized by the male gaze. Her extensive use of technology and electronics in her performances is indicative of her overall departure from societal expectations about women’s relationships with machines and, more importantly, power. Anderson’s music is also less goal-oriented and more atmospheric, as well as harmonically less complicated than traditional music, encouraging more creative and interpretive analyses and reactions than traditional music theory dictates. She is unashamedly within her body during performance, refusing to give credence to what musicologist Susan McCrary defines as Western culture’s “puritanical, idealist suspicion of the body” (McCrary 136). Hers is art that needs to be seen to be appreciated. Bodyless recordings and virtuosic symphony orchestras hiding themselves in black clothes cannot convey the whole story of Anderson’s work, which often includes elements of body percussion, vocal modification, and dance. Anderson is a prolific feminist figure and a major force in modern music. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Laurie Anderson.

Taking Chance

            This exhibit will focus on the relationship between chance and artwork in the twentieth century, especially as it applies to our perceptions of what art is intended to represent. The exhibit will feature works by Cage, Calder, Vasarely, Frankenthaler, and Rodchenko.

Played on a continuous loop will be a recording of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961). Cage composed this work by placing star charts from astronomer Antonin Becvár’s 1950 star atlas Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0 into the context of musical organization. The cosmic element of apparent randomness that determines star sizes, brightnesses, and locations can manifest itself in the music as pitch, volume, and even instrumentation.

CALDER: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ashleaebeling/files/2012/05/Calder-Snow-Flurry-1948.jpg

At the center of the room will hang Alexander Calder’s mobile Snow Flurry (1948). Like Cage, Calder uses elements of randomness to depict an unpredictable event; i.e. snowfall. Since so little of it stays still, the mobile form of sculpture is inherently driven by chance, and it needs to be seen in person in its kinetic environment to be fully experienced. Cage uses the natural randomness of outer space to help create structure, whereas Calder creates a fairly rigid (though still freely moveable) structure and allows the randomness of environment to change how it is perceived.

VASARELY: http://www.rogallery.com/Vasarely_Victor/w-1083/vasarely-print-zebras.html

On one wall will hang Victor Vasarely’s optical art Zebras (1989). Optical art plays with perspective, color, and the arrangement of negative space to trick the eye into seeing lines, shapes, and even occasionally movement that is not actually there. This work depicts two intertwined zebras using only white lines on black background. Like Atlas Eclipticalis, this work creates a representative structure (Atlas of the stars and Zebras of two zebras) without explicitly demarcating any part of that structure.

FRANKENTHALER: http://uploads3.wikipaintings.org/images/helen-frankenthaler/mountains-and-sea-1962.jpg

On another wall will hang Helen Frankenthaler’s oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952). This is another example of the suggestion of a given structure or concrete real-world item without the explicit depiction or demarcation of that item. Where Vasarely uses optical illusion to convey that intention, Frankenthaler uses color and shape – similar to Cage, who uses characteristic aspects of the stars to help define the characteristic aspects of the music.

RODCHENKO: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/1915_Dance_by_Rodchenko.jpg/367px-1915_Dance_by_Rodchenko.jpg

            Finally, on a third wall will hang Alexander Rodchenko’s Dance, An Objectless Composition (1915). Rodchenko creates the atmosphere of chaotic motion with color, shape, and the interactivity of lines, similar to Frankenthaler, though with a bit more defined structure. This work serves as another example of a specific idea conveyed with nonspecific information, the same way that Cage conveys the idea of space and awareness of space by calling attention to silence as punctuated by sound.

1905 and Now

            Having received numerous complaints and queries from members of our community regarding the Driftless Philharmonic’s upcoming performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11: The Year 1905, I have decided to write and address these concerns as fully as I can in hopes of emphasizing the relevance and importance of the music in question. Public discourse is a welcome and necessary aspect of the musical process and it is my pleasure to see the community so excited and involved, even if much of the discussion antagonizes the Driftless Phil and our programmatic choices. I would like to make clear that we will not be altering our concert program in any way and that we will still be performing Symphony no. 11 as planned next month, but I am happy to acknowledge criticisms of its appropriateness and do my best to explain its value.

            We have received complaints regarding three broad aspects of the work and its historical context. First of these is the subject matter of the musical plot – this symphony’s subtitle, The Year 1905 refers to the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, Russia in January of 1905, an event that helped fuel the Bolshevik uprising that dismantled the old Tsarist system and created what we remember as Soviet Russia. There is no text or visual accompaniment to Symphony no. 11, but the musical scenes of the second and third movements clearly depict the violent killing and wounding of upwards of four thousand working-class Russians. Some members of our community object to the frankness of this depiction, especially with regard to its perceived inappropriateness for younger concert-goers. I have no desire to dictate parenting methods, but pain and suffering are integral facts of artistry that are as deeply rooted in music as are joy and love. Symphony no. 11 is unambiguous, but it is far from alone in its genre. This aspect of the work is also historically significant in that the symphony premiered in 1957, a year after a violent and costly uprising in Budapest that solidified the Soviet government’s powerful grip on its constituent regions. This uprising and the violence surrounding it were so fresh in the minds of the symphony’s first listeners that connections were inevitably drawn and the music served as a new way to understand and even cope with that suffering. Today, music about pain still has an important place in culture to facilitate the comprehension of atrocity and horror, and to shield the public from that opportunity may even be considered irresponsible.

            Other objections from our community relate to Shostakovich’s public identity as a Soviet puppet. Certainly most of his large works are examples of Soviet nationalism and socialist realism, but it is unclear how Shostakovich personally felt about the regime. One of Shostakovich’s earlier works, the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk Distsrict, premiered in 1932, was publicly denounced after Stalin attended a performance in 1936 (the review in question may even have been written by Stalin himself). The following year, Shostakovich premiered his fifth symphony, with the written inscription “A Soviet artist’s creative response to justify criticism.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Schostakovich began insert variations on the musical idea D-Eb-C-B, or, in the German musical system, D-es-C-H – in other words, “D. SCH” (for D. Schostakovich). Musicologist David Fanning asserts that “through the dictator’s death [Shostakovich] could begin to assert his own identity in his work.” This specific motive happens to appear in various forms all over Symphony no. 11, and while it is far from proof of Schostakovich’s political alignment, it is at least evidence that he thought and worked as his own person, not only as a puppet for the Soviet regime.

            The most complaints we have received come from community members who find the Soviet socialist realist aspects of Symphony no. 11 distasteful, un-American, and even propagandistic. After Stalin gained power, it was mandated that Russian art satisfy the idea of “socialist realism,” i.e. Russian art should use the glorified Common Man as subject matter, should be large and grand, should make an effort to include traditional folk material, and above all depict a socialist utopia that glorifies the Russian Motherland. It is difficult to deny that, at least on the surface, Symphony no. 11 satisfies every requirement. It tells the story of the beaten, massacred working class as they became inspired to rise up against tsarist tyranny. It clocks in at about an hour long and uses the full dynamic, musical, and emotional range of the orchestra, and each movement contains substantial melodic material adapted from Russian revolutionary songs. However, the fact that the work could have been used as propaganda does not make it inherently worthless, especially since we will never know Shostakovich’s true motivations. If in fact Shostakovich was conveying some secret anti-state message with his music, then performing it creates fascinating opportunities to explore the rebellious nature of art and composer motivation, and serves as a reminder of the subversive power of music. On the other hand, if the work is purely propagandistic, it still opens up important opportunities for discussion of art and music’s place in politics and power structures.

            Regardless of Shostakovich’s intentions or of the subject matter itself, Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 is regarded as one of the most important (and often most beautiful) works of the twentieth century. It is enjoyable even without its controversial historical context, but even concert-goers who are aware of its place in world history have the opportunity to use this performance as a chance to open up dialogue, not stop it before it begins.