CHAPTER 20 | FILM MUSIC GOES POSTMODERN 499
involved a Cage-inspired reversal of roles. In the small town of Roch-
ester, Vermont, where local tradition demanded that listeners at out-
door concerts in the village park applaud by honking the horns of the
cars and trucks in which they sat, Anderson presented a piece in 1972 in
which the horns were the musical instruments, which she conducted
from the park’s gazebo. In the 1970s she invented the “tape-bow vio-
lin,” a stringless violin with a tape recorder’s playback head where the
bridge would be and a bow that replaced the horsehair with magnetic
tape on which she had previously recorded sounds such as her own
voice. A downbow plays the tape forward, an upbow backward; chang-
ing the speed of the bow changes the speed and pitch of the recorded
sounds. In performance she could thus create electronically altered
music while simultaneously singing, speaking, and dancing.
In 1981 a record of A nderson’s song “O Superman” became an unex-
pected crossover hit, rising to number 2 on British pop charts. A mini-
malist composition in which tape loops and electronic instruments accompanied
Anderson’s voice, processed to sound both masculine and robotlike, “O Superman”
featured enigmatic poetry that didn’t faze listeners raised on Bob Dylan and his fol-
lowers. On the contrary, the rhythmic electronic sound and impassive, ironic text
brought “O Superman” closer to New Wave pop than to academic postmodernism.
The success of “O Superman,” which was written as a small part of an ambitious live
performance work called United States, brought Anderson a record deal with War-
ner Brothers and the chance to make a concert fi lm, Home of the Brave (1986). Despite
that period of notoriety and her long-term partnership with singer Lou Reed,
whose band the Velvet Underground inspired the punk rock movement, Anderson
has never really fi t into the popular music scene. Rather, she is best viewed as a per-
formance artist whose work has affi nities with both popular and classical spheres.FILM MUSIC GOES POSTMODERN
In the decades after World War II, Holly wood fi lm scores came increasingly to
refl ect the aesthetic stance established by Aaron Copland. The lush romanticism
of the “golden age” gave way to a leaner, more astringent modernism, sometimes
using small instrumental ensembles instead of full orchestras. Long stretches of
more or less continuous underscoring, along with the use of leitmotifs associ-
ated with the main characters, became less common as fi lms made greater use
of silence and diegetic music.
One of the leading postwar fi lm composers, Bernard Herrmann, devel-
oped a personal style that combined qualities of the golden age with the new
Coplandesque aesthetic. Herrmann’s colorful scores for action, fantasy, and
science fi ction fi lms such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Jason and
the Argonauts (1963) call for large orchestras used in highly imaginative ways,
emphasizing percussion, unusual instrumental groupings (such as ten harps),
and unconventional instruments, such as the theremin, an electronic instru-
ment featured in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). But Herrmann is best remem-
bered for his decade-long collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock; his
tense, modernist music for Psycho (1960), using only string instruments, alteredBernard HerrmannK Laurie Anderson in concert
in 1987.172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 499 23/01/13 11:15 AM