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.
