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.