Music Symposium: Keynote Speaker Laurie Anderson Introduction

Welcome to our annual Music Symposium!  Our topic of discussion today is feminism in music.  While there are plenty of artists out there who would have been an excellent choice to speak here today, there is one woman in particular whose music has been inspirational on this topic.  Our Keynote Speaker Laurie Anderson was born in 1947 in Chicago.  She is an accomplished violinist and vocalist, and she graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University.  Laurie is now a visual artist, with her work being displayed in museums such at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and a recording artist, releasing seven albums for Warner Bros.  From her album Big Science come hits such as “From the Air”, “Let X=X”, and the namesake “Big Science.”  Also from this album is her biggest mainstream hit, “O Superman”, which actually made it to number two on the British’s pop charts.  You may recognize it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7XnOnSkkA. 

A chapter in the book Feminine Endings by Susan McClary entitled “This is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laure Anderson“ talks her music as a whole in respect to feminism.  In Western culture, women’s bodies are usually viewed as the objects on display; they perform the art that is created by male artists.  Anderson combats this notion through her androgynous look.  Because she uses her body so thoroughly in her music, such as in this clip of her Drum Dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mRq1xgKykM “She walks a very thin line –foregrounding her body while trying not to make it the entire point.”  Another idea that McClary talks about is that Man is supposed to “give birth to and who tames the Machine.”  Anderson breaks this tradition wide open through her use of technology to create her music, like the vocoder and the sensors on her body.  Anderson uses technology for another aspect of feminism: female pleasure.  “For feminine pleasure has either been silenced in Western music or else has been simulated by male composers as the monstrous stuff requiring containment in Carmen or Salome.”  Her piece “Langue d’amour” is an excellent example of this.  There are strong pulses throughout the piece, although there isn’t regular metric organization.  Her voice is split through the use of the vocoder, creating a “blurred, diffused eroticism.”  Her use of repeated la, la, la’s are like tongues, “inciting feminine ecstasy.”  These are just a few ways that Anderson’s music is a staple for feminism in music, and why she is our Keynote Speaker today. Please help me welcome Laurie Anderson!