Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet

 Laurie Anderson is a gifted composer and should be content with that. Her performance with the Kronos Quartet at Bing this weekend was a testament to her skill in this area and her belief that she has skills in others like poetry and performance art.

The show consisted of music from Kronos with Anderson accompanying on electric fiddle, synthesizer and spoken word as projections appeared above house left and house right. These projections and the spoken word covered varying subjects, such as an alphabetical list of galaxies, a denouncing of Lincoln as a liar, a complaint about people who share their dreams, a story of a trip to a Dutch karaoke bar, and meditations on extinction and the Hebrew alphabet, among other things. The poetry that this sought to be was unfortunately lost in cliches and heavy-handedness. This wasn't helped by the cheesy Arial font over a gradient background used for most of the projections, especially when Wingdings was used liberally to hammer in her theme, viz. language is just a series of inscrutable symbols, or something equally coffeehouse-slam-poetry-night-esque. Ironically, her greatest lyrical work came when the poetry felt most slam, as in a moment where each note of a viola solo triggered the switch to the next word. Dictating the time for the audience to read each note gave the work an immediacy that was gripping. This sense of importance was lacking in the rest of the piece, however.

The projections had the effect of showcasing the beauty of Bing's interior. The lighting designer's contributions gave the impression of total immersion, and the soft lights and curved panels inside Bing wrapped up the audience. The idea of the projections is cool in its own right. The subject matter just left something to be desired.

The music itself was unique in that it used fairly gimmicky elements without sounding gimmicky, which is why the gimmicky nature of the vocals was even more disheartening. The music was a subtle blend of acoustic and electric music, the synthesizers filling in for the natural holes of a string quartet. Anderson's score helped Kronos do what they do best, which is to make Western sonorities feel like more than their constituent parts, causing the listener to feel free of their musical preconceptions and simply experience the movement through time of the music without the detritus of expectations. At its worst, the piece felt like a movie soundtrack done in a simultaneously Asian and Celtic medium. At its best, it felt like that, but in a good way. There were many interesting moments: the aforementioned viola solo, which was a passionate spiccato atonal attack with lovely changes in timefeel; a vamp consisting of a simple arpeggiating melody as the harmony shifted nebulously between B major and G major; and an unusual and sudden break with a Nine Inch Nails-like drum machine beat under a Eurythmics-like dance ostinato and what sounded like Tibetan lyrics.

All of these were wonderful and original but lost their mood with the entrance of Anderson's voice. Her lyrics brought back self-consciousness, an obstacle to the appreciation of the music qua music. It was as if she was not content to let her music speak for itself. Her poems didn't add anything that was lacking from the music. The words just came out more like gratuitous dalliances with synthesizer technology instead of a positive contribution to the mood of the piece.