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.