A legend in American experimental music. Performer, composer, director, violinist (educated sculptor). She was associated with the legendary artist Lou Reed. In the artistic field the couple has collaborated repeatedly. Laurie Anderson began performing in New York in the early 1970s. She won the alternative stage with her performance entitled “Duets on Ice”, where she was playing the violin with ice skates frozen into a block of ice.
She filled her violin with water to make them cry during the performance of Tchaikovsky's ardent phrases. The show ended with the ice melting. Her legendary position in the world of American experimental music is testified by the long list of world-renowned artists she has collaborated with. These include Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg. Some of her projects, such as "O Supermen," made her more recognizable beyond experimental music circles, i.e. in pop culture (then she was accused of having betrayed the avant-garde). In 2003, she began collaborating with NASA, which resulted in the performance entitled "The End of the Moon". She took a Polish audience on a journey to the moon in 2006. Recently her art is treated as a prophetic commentary on the latest American history. On one hand there are carefree tones inspired by the artist's happy childhood in a small town of the Midwestern United States, while on the other, in the experiments and the verbal layer of her works, bitter tones are heard. Bitterness paid New Yorkers a visit after the September 11th catastrophe.
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Mikołaj Rykowski PhD
Musicologist and clarinetist, doctorate, and associate at the Department Music Theory at the Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań. Author of a book and numerous articles devoted to the phenomenon of Harmoniemusik – the 18th-century practice of brass bands. Co-author of the scripts "Speaking concerts" and author of the spoken introductions to philharmonic concerts in Szczecin, Poznań, Bydgoszcz and Łódź.
