“And I thought to myself,
‘how beautiful,
how magical,
how…
catastrophic.'” *
Thus ends the last monologue of Laurie Anderson’s new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, “Landfall,” which I went to see at BAM’s Harvey Theater last Saturday evening. According to the program notes, the piece was greatly influenced by Hurricane Sandy, which swept through New York City – where the multimedia performance artist is based – and the surrounding area in the fall of 2012. Poetic descriptions of the hurricane are interspersed throughout the work, alongside verbal and visual meditations on mass extinction, dreams, and the failures of language. After the dimming of the Harvey’s lights and the now all-too-familiar reminder to shut off cell phones and other electronic devices, the musicians filed onto the stage.
An arc of stools was set up just stage right of center, and the members of the quartet dutifully found their places, silently performing a few quick checks of their bow tension and tuning. For much of the performance, each quartet musician was isolated within his or her own square of light, made geometrically interesting by the rectangular shadows of the music stands. Anderson, slightly apart and to the quartet’s left, was confined within her own circle of light. Her array of instruments included three keyboards, one of which was operated by foot pedals, an electric violin, and a microphone that she spoke into at intervals. She controlled the various synthesizers, effects, and background tracks using an iPad on her music stand while her laptop labored away on the floor. Though the musicians made eye contact and gave visual cues throughout the piece, the effect of the lighting was to create tension regarding the attempts to communicate in contrast to the isolation of each individual.
Without a flourish, the strings began to play. Throughout the piece, narrative content with musical accompaniment was interspersed with pure musical development. Words were projected across the screen at the back of the stage through much of the performance, but unfortunately my obstructed view seat made making sense of some of those words and phrases quite challenging (and sometimes impossible).
Landfall
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The Andromeda Galaxy
Environmental Concerns
“The satellite image of the storm from above looked like all those galaxies whose names I don’t know.”** As she spoke, those names flashed across the screen at the back of the stage: The Milky Way, Andromeda, Sombrero. Sunflower. The storm was approaching and waters were rising. The eery sounds of the strings and electronics filled the auditorium, and I found myself reflecting on my own Sandy experience, safe and dry in an elevated Morningside Heights apartment, following along as my downtown friends Facebook live-blogged their observations and, in some cases, evacuations. All of the subways were closed and it was the first time in my (then) two and a half years of residence that Manhattan truly felt like the island it is.
Later, Anderson described the experience of going into her basement after the storm and seeing “everything I had saved floating in a pool of water. Props… over there a crutch… a sheet of plexiglass… and I thought to myself, ‘how beautiful, how magical, how… catastrophic.'”** Anderson’s voice has a hypnotic and seductively sinister rise and fall, and those last words sent shivers up my spine.
“I have always loved the stars
because we can’t hurt them…
we can’t blow them up.”* **
It was no accident that Sandy – likely caused or at least worsened by changes in sea temperatures and currents – was included in the same piece as other environmental concerns. Using the low-pitched voice of an alter-ego that has had an appearance in previous works, Anderson’s character announced s/he was working on the definitive book about species that have gone extinct. It would include the species’ name as well as where and when they were last seen. Tongue in cheek, she remarked that a whole five chapters were dedicated to sloths. The audience laughed, though the list of disappearing life scrolling up the screen in the background – occasionally faltering and skipping upward tensely – was a somber reminder that the hyperbole was barely one at all. Firmly settled into the Anthropocene, scientists believe the sixth mass extinction the planet has ever seen is currently underway. According to National Geographic, “The blame for this one, perhaps the fastest in Earth’s history, falls firmly on the shoulders of humans. By the year 2100, human activities such as pollution, land clearing, and overfishing may have driven more than half of the world’s marine and land species to extinction.”
Anderson is not the first musician or artist to use a work to communicate fears about climate change. Last February, I went to see the Crossroads Project with the Fry Street Quartet at Symphony Space. This project is a collaboration between musicians, artists, and scientists to try to get people to take action to protect the environment. I believe it was Dr. Robert Davies at the talkback after the show who mentioned that the idea had come from a desire to use music and art to engage people so that they could place the scientific facts as they were presented within an emotional contextualization. As another example, the artist I work for, Betty Beaumont, has a long history of environmental art. Most famously, her sculpture piece Ocean Landmark involved neutralizing coal waste and installing it as an artificial reef on the continental shelf. Exploring either of these in greater depth would be beyond the scope of this post, and these are only the two examples I am most familiar with. Please share your favorites in the comments!
The Crossroads Project
Text, Speech, and Communication
The wall blocking my view of the upstage left quadrant of the stage was not the only obstacle in my ability to comprehend the text as it scrolled across the screen. Through many segments of the work, the words themselves were distorted in various ways. This distortion began after Anderson spoke a monologue in which her character described the experience of singing karaoke in a language she didn’t speak. In the story, something strange happened, and the characters she was supposed to be reading as they continued to pass by had lost all semblance of discernible meaning.
Back in the Harvey, as the performance progressed, what had been legible English characters on the screen began successively to be replaced by other recognizable symbols. First, icons like the radiation icon and stick figures (if I remember correctly) began to take the place selected letters in the words and phrases as they scrolled by. The icons had the appearance of being visually similar to certain letters and were distributed in such a way as to make me think that there might be a one-to-one mapping between certain letters and symbols. However, either because of my obstructed view or the true nature of the piece, I was never quite able to decipher or make much sense of the text that followed. This replacement of letters with images both drew attention to the highly symbolic nature of the written characters that we take for granted and emphasized the limitations of abstraction in its ability to communicate (which is, when you think about it, rather amusing considering the nature of the performance piece itself).
“The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
alef,
has no sound.
So, when you go to say it…”* **
References to computer technology as a medium of communication also made an appearance. Toward the later part of the piece, the letters, instead of being replaced by icons, began to disintegrate into pixelated deformations of themselves in the character of Pong. The images seemed to ask, how is technology changing communication? For all that we’ve gained, are we losing anything in the process?
Strings and Synthesis
Enough of all this symbolic and conceptual stuff. What did the ensemble sound like?
The timbre of the Kronos quartet was mostly unaltered, other than basic amplification. There may have occasionally been an additional effect like reverb, but if there was any significant distortion going on, I did not cognitively map it to the strings. The most memorable musical moment was when violinist John Sherba had the spotlight. Literally, he left his square of light and gave a spasmodic solo in the center of the stage. It was spasmodic both in the combined virtuosity and roughness of the bow strokes and in how the physicality of the moment overtook his body. As he convulsed, each stroke of his bow sent a new word or phrase flashing on the screen, as though he was disjointedly attempting to speak through his instrument.
In terms of the composition itself, the musical ideas sounded like something from a film score, which is not surprising considering Anderson’s oeuvre and the theatricality of the piece itself. The transitions between musical ideas were often dramatic, like the change of scene in a play, rather than what might be expected or continuous musically. However, unlike some soundtracks, this music could not have stood on its own – though necessary and complementary to the work, it served as a riveting accompaniment to a more substantial idealogical framework. The harmonies were fairly straightforward, which, while maybe less interesting, also served to make the piece accessible to a wider audience (and left spare brain processing power available for dealing with the work’s conceptual content).
Critiques aside, the soundscape was eerily powerful, and I don’t think experimenting at the boundary between chromatic harmony and atonality (or something of the sort) would really have added anything. Anderson’s voice was potentially the most entrancing instrument of all. It slithers up and down the contours of her phrases like a magician’s legerdemain. If you have never heard her performance speaking voice, the video clip below gives a good example (and I would recommend watching the whole film if you have a chance; it is very ’80s, but in a good, though strange, way).
Excerpt from “Home of the Brave” (1986)
– – –
Activist art, despite serving goals of aesthetics and entertainment, is part of an important effort to link what we know to what we feel. The hope is that somehow, with both mind and heart engaged, people might change their behaviors and therefore the world. Though Anderson’s piece is not a call to action, it is a reminder of the environmental precipice at whose brink we quiver, as well as a serious attempt to come to terms with the impossibilities of symbolic communication.
To see if “Landfall” is coming to a performance venue near you, check out the calendar on Anderson’s website.
Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson graduated from my own alma mater, Barnard College, back in 1969, with a degree in art history. Just over a decade after finishing her undergraduate (she also got an MFA from Columbia in those intervening years), she had her big break with the release of “O Superman” (below). In it, she establishes her signature sound, which involves harmonizing her own voice with a vocoder synth. (Though her later work – including “Landfall” – uses other techniques to transpose and harmonize her voice, even using that technique to create a deep-voiced alter-ego.) For those readers more familiar with the artists of the past five years, a personal favorite of mine – Imogen Heap – uses a similar vocoder technique in her song “Hide and Seek” (also below).
O Superman
Hide and Seek
“Landfall” is not Anderson’s first piece to encourage the audience to think critically about social and political issues. At another of her appearances for the Next Wave Festival at BAM, in 1989, her “Empty Places” addressed issues of global leadership and of feminist activism. For more on Anderson, check out her website or her wikipedia page.
The Kronos Quartet
David Harrington, John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)
The Kronos Quartet is ambitious in their collaborations with various composers. Based in San Francisco, the ensemble has done work across genres and disciplines. According to their website, “Kronos has performed live with the likes of Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, Zakir Hussain, Modern Jazz Quartet, Noam Chomsky, Rokia Traoré, Tom Waits, David Barsamian, Howard Zinn, Betty Carter, and David Bowie, and has appeared on recordings by such diverse talents as Nine Inch Nails, Dan Zanes, DJ Spooky, Dave Matthews, Nelly Furtado, Joan Armatrading and Don Walser.” They have recorded extensively and have lead various workshops through institutions such as the San Francisco Conservatory and the Carnegie Hall Weill Institute.