CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Laurie Anderson

Zankel Hall
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:30 PM

Laurie Anderson

With Homeland, multi-talented performer-composer Laurie Anderson offers a meditation on 21st-century America and its relationship to freedom and fear in a time of war.

Nonesuch at Carnegie

Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson is one of today’s premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist.

O Superman launched Anderson’s recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on Big Science, the first of her seven albums on the Warner Brothers label. Other record releases include Mister Heartbreak, United States Live, Strange Angels, Bright Red, and the soundtrack to her feature film Home of the Brave. A deluxe box set of her Warner Brothers output, Talk Normal, was released in the fall of 2000 on Rhino/Warner Archives. In 2001, Anderson released her first record for Nonesuch Records, entitled Life on a String, which was followed by Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall in New York City in September 2001, and released in May 2002.

Anderson has toured the US and around the world with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multimedia events. Major works include United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick, a multimedia stage performance based on the novel by Herman Melville. Songs and Stories for Moby Dick toured internationally throughout 1999 and 2000. In the fall of 2001, Anderson toured the US and Europe with a band, performing music from Life on a String. She has also presented many solo works, including Happiness, which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through spring of 2003.

Anderson has published six books, and text from her solo performances appears in the book Extreme Exposure, edited by Jo Bonney. Anderson has also written the entry for New York for the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Laurie Anderson’s visual work has been presented in major museums throughout the US and Europe. In 2003, the Musée d’Art Contemporain of Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. This retrospective included installation, audio, instruments, video and art objects, and spans Anderson’s career from the 1970s to her most current works. It continued to tour internationally from 2003 to 2005. As a visual artist, Anderson is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York where her exhibition, The Waters Reglitterized, opened in September 2005.

As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and a score for Robert Lepage’s theater production, Far Side of the Moon. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, The BBC, and Expo ’ 92 in Seville. In 1997, Anderson curated the two-week Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London. Her most recent orchestra work, Songs for A.E., premiered at Carnegie Hall in February 2000 with the American Composers Orchestra, and later toured Europe with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson collaborated with Interval Research Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools, including the Talking Stick. She created the introduction sequence for the first segment of the PBS special Art 21, a series about Art in the 21st century. Her awards include the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life on a String, as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA; from this, she developed her solo performance “The End of the Moon,” which premiered in 2004 and toured internationally through 2006. Other recent projects include a commission to create a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film, Hidden Inside Mountains, for the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan and a series of programs for French radio called “Rien dans les Poches (Nothing in my Pockets).”

Anderson’s score for Trisha Brown’s acclaimed piece “O Composite” premiered at the Opera Garnier in Paris in December 2004. She was also part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. In addition to touring with Homeland, Anderson is currently working on a series of very long walks and a new album for Nonesuch. She lives in New York City.