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‘You’re the snake charmer, baby. And you’re also the snake.’ So sings Laurie Anderson in “Closed Circuits” (1984). Music is often considered incorporeal – described in terms like “transcendent” and “ethereal” – yet it is produced by bodies and received by them. In this session, we will discuss the gendered associations of composition and performance, the performing bodies of artists such as Laurie Anderson and Yoko Ono, and the (im)possibilities of being both snake charmer and snake.
Readings:
Susan McClary’s sixth chapter ‘This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson’ from Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (2002)
Vera Mackie’s chapter ‘Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono’ from Rethinking Japanese Modernism (2012).
