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LAURIE ANDERSON’S
BIG SCIENCE
Oxford KEYNOTES
Series Editor Kevin Bartig
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel

Tim Carter
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring
Annegret Fauser
Arlen and Harburg’s Over the Rainbow
Walter Frisch
Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa
Kevin C. Karnes
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
Alexander Rehding
Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune
Gurminder Kaur Bhogal
Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports
John T. Lysaker
Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1
Peter J. Schmelz
Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto
Tina K. Ramnarine
George Bizet’s Carmen
Nelly Furman
Puccini’s La Bohème
Alexandra Wilson
Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony
Douglas W. Shadle
Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131
Nancy November
Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville
Hilary Poriss
Laurie Anderson’s Big Science
S. Alexander Reed
Oxford KEYNOTES
LAURIE
ANDERSON’S
BIG SCIENCE
S. ALEXANDER REED
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reed, S. Alexander, author.
Title: Laurie Anderson’s Big science / S. Alexander Reed.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2022. |
Series: Oxford keynotes series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033961 | ISBN 9780190926021 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780190926014 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190926045 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Anderson, Laurie, 1947-. Big Science. |
Anderson, Laurie, 1947—Appreciation.
Classification: LCC ML410. A5536 R44 2021 | DDC 780—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033961
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190926014.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America

Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Series Editor’s
INTRODUCTION
O xford Keynotes reimagines the canons of

Western music for the twenty-first century. With each
of its volumes dedicated to a single composition or album,
the series provides an informed, critical, and provocative
companion to music as artwork and experience. Books in
the series explore how works of music have engaged lis-
teners, performers, artists, and others through history and
in the present. They illuminate the roles of musicians and
musics in shaping Western cultures and societies, and they
seek to spark discussion of ongoing transitions in contem-
porary musical landscapes. Each approaches its key work
in a unique way, tailored to the distinct opportunities that
the work presents. Targeted at performers, curious lis-
teners, and advanced undergraduates, volumes in the series
are written by expert and engaging voices in their fields
and will therefore be of significant interest to scholars and
critics as well.
In selecting titles for the series, Oxford Keynotes bal-
ances two ways of defining the canons of Western music:
as lists of works that critics and scholars deem to have
articulated key moments in the history of the art and as lists
of works that make up the bulk of what consumers listen to,
purchase, and perform today. Often, the two lists intersect,
but the overlap is imperfect. While not neglecting the first,
Oxford Keynotes gives considerable weight to the second.
It confronts the musicological canon with the living rep-
ertoire of performance and recording in classical, popular,
jazz, and other idioms. And it seeks to expand that living
repertoire through the latest musicological research.
Kevin Bartig
vi Series Editor’s Introduction

Michigan State UniversityI always just wanted to make things
that other people could understand. That’s my only reason to
be here.
Laurie Anderson1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T hank you to Laurie Anderson for her communi-

cation and to Lysee Webb, who helped coordinate it.
I’m grateful for the discussions I had with Perry Hoberman,
Roma Baran, Bob Bielecki, B. George, Stephen Paul Miller,
Margaret Fisher, Jon Kutner, and the Oakland Symphony.
Robert Coe, Bob Hughes, and Charles Amirkhanian went
above and beyond in their assistance; this would be a lesser
book without them.
I owe a debt to the curators, archivists, museum pro-
fessionals, and librarians who helped with my research:
Edmund Cardoni, Timothy Conway Murray, Nicole
Marchesseau, Andy Leach, Shannon Erb, Gretchen Unico,
Jennie Thomas, Laura Maidens, Denise Markonish, Laura
Schieb, Carol Berg, and Nick Ferreira. My work was im-
proved by online resources by Jim Davies and Mnemosyne.
Simon Morrison, Jason Hanley, and Mandy Smith
offered wisdom and assistance with my fellowship from
the American Musicological Society and the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame in May 2019. Fond remembrance is also due
to the late Bob Judd, who guided me through that process
and who was always encouraging. Susan McClary graced
my lecture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with opening
remarks for which I am grateful. Insightful, alarming, and
entertaining, this late-1980s memory of hers was a particu-
larly clear indicator of Big Science’s power:
I was asked to come and give a talk at a country club in front

of a big interdisciplinary audience. At the time I was working
on Laurie Anderson, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll talk about ‘Big
Science.’ ” And so I talked a little bit and then I started playing
the recording. Now, there were a lot of scientists in the room,
and they got so agitated that they rushed the stage, and the po-
lice had to be called in. My husband actually thought he was
going to have to take a bullet that night. It was one of the scariest
things he ever saw.2
Thanks are also due to those who hosted my Big Science

lectures: Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Theo Cateforis
(Syracuse), Judith Peraino and Roger Moseley (Cornell),
Doug McLaren (Cornell Cinema), and Peter Burkholder,
Halina Goldberg, Phil Ford, and Giovanni Zanovello
(Indiana University). Beyond these engagements, I delivered
related research at the Conference on Interdisciplinary
Musicology (2005), the FSU Music Theory Forum (2008),
the Audio Engineering Society National Meeting (2013),
the MoPop Pop Con (2018), the Art of Record Production
(2019), and the Ithaca Music Forum (2019).
I received institutional, professional, social, and moral
support from friends at Ithaca College including Karl
Paulnack, Tim Johnson, Debbie Rifkin, Peter Silberman,
Craig Cummings, David Pacun, Crystal Peebles, Elizabeth
xii Acknowledgments
Medina-Gray, Kris Shanton, and Sarah Shank. I had tre-
mendous help and inspiration from Sara Haefeli. Certainly
many more here have helped me too.
I’m grateful for deep conversations with my students
and with Sasha Geffen, Alex Blue V, Des Harmon, Jim
Anderson, Trevor Pinch, Benjamin Piekut, Chris O’Leary,
Evelyn McDonnell, Maria Buszek, Sasha Frere-Jones, Chloe
McLaren, Sydney Kovar, Ellen Jackson, Sarah Hennies,
Jess Zimmerman, Aaron Fuleki, Janet Hanseth, Woody
Chichester, Jacek Kozlowski, Erika Moore Bertelsen, Bob
Proehl, Tiffany Naiman, Sarah Noe, Stephan Pennington,
K. E. Goldschmitt, Albin Zak, Lori Burns, Eric Weisbard,
Matthew Baumer, Lindsey O’Brien, and Maria Murphy.
My sisters Karen and Robyn, along with Tico Wolff, Chris
Boone, Ian Struckhoff, and Charles Dodge, deepened my
early love of this album.
Tremendous thanks go to those who read and provided
feedback on this work, including several anonymous re-
viewers, Elizabeth Sandifer, and Vic Szabo. In this capacity,
Robin James and (again) Phil Ford offered profound in-
sight. My early scholarship on Laurie Anderson was guided
by Mathew Rosenblum, Eric Moe, Andrew Weintraub,
and Peter Havholm. Mary Lewis, you are missed. Kevin
Karnes and Suzanne Ryan believed in this book enough
to make me write it. Norm Hirschy, Mary Horn, Kevin
Bartig, Sean Decker, and Victoria Dixon were also a great
help. Sindhuja Vijayabaskaran, project manager at Newgen
KnowledgeWorks Private Limited, ably assisted with copy
editing and layout.
Acknowledgments xiii
Across several intermittent years of typing, my lap was
warmed by Amelia, Pie May, Cabot, Princess Peppercorn,
Braeburn, and Thistle. Above all, thank you to Meredith
Collins, for her insight, inspiration, style, magic, and love.
The cover design for this book was her idea too.
xiv Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
FINDING THE NOW IN

BIG SCIENCE
THE TIME
Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut LP, Big Science, opens as if her

voice has been waiting for us to show up: “Good evening.
This is your Captain.” In welcoming listeners to board the
plane, to hear the album, and indeed to behold her career,
she offers coolheaded assurance. This space is well pre-
pared. You are in good hands. On the album’s cover, she
wears a suit and tie; everything is professional. And that’s
when she announces the plane is about to crash.
Anderson’s iconic productions are hi-tech and seemingly
dispassionate in their delivery. Vignettes are phrased op-
timally, their timing and inflection calculated. But deeper
still, across hundreds of interviews, whole paragraphs recur
verbatim. It can seem as if her stories were always already
Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. S. Alexander Reed, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press
2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190926014.003.0001
there, the opening of Big Science being just one example.
Even when they concern the future, their creation is in
past tense.
In fairness, I think we all do this. Our stories and catch-
phrases become word-for-word routines. Gradually drift-
ing from the real moments they memorialize, our stories
settle. We perfect and package them like products to be
circulated through our social and sentimental economies,
where content seems to matter less than flow.
Anderson herself takes up this concern in her 2015 film
Heart of a Dog. Having told a nonchalant anecdote all her
life about being hospitalized at age twelve with a broken
back, she one day “remembered the missing part”: the other
children in the hospital, mostly with severe burns. “It was
the way the ward sounded at night. It was the sounds of all
the children crying and screaming. It was the sounds that
children make when they’re dying.”1 She reflects, “I had for-
gotten what it was really like. And I had gotten caught up
into the story about it. And so I realized that repetition does
that with stories. And your identity does that with your
own story too. The more you tell it, the more you forget it.”2
(Place a bookmark in the notion that stories outsource or
externalize identity. This idea will come back at the book’s
end in useful ways.)
“This is the time, and this is the record of the time,”
Anderson repeats on the album’s opening track. A twenty-
first-century description of Big Science can shine light on
the individual and cultural ways that we experience mo-
ments, remember them, and overwrite our experience
with memory. For her part, Anderson authorized RoseLee
Goldberg’s 2000 biography, wrote a career retrospective in
2 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

1993 (Stories from the Nerve Bible), wrote another in 2018
(All the Things I Lost in the Flood), and assembled multiple
anniversary editions of Big Science. She quips, “I don’t miss
the 80’s. I don’t miss anything right now. I have zero time
for nostalgia.”3 Because Anderson has said about her early
career most of what she is going to, this book is a third-
party remaking of memory, imperfect and sometimes arbi-
trary, in which the record of the time offers up a reimagining
of the time: the time of New York and America at the turn
of the 1980s, the time of Anderson’s artistic self-making,
the time you first heard her music, all those times it reson-
ated later.
This book makes room for a now in songs that can seem
always to have already arrived. Doing this means revealing
moments that collectively triangulate a present-tense ex-
perience of memory making. Foremost, I’m interested in
the circa 1980 creation of these songs: “now” in the sense
of chronos, or historical sequence. How did their concept,
text, and music develop, and in dialogue with what real-
world artifacts and events? These works’ histories will in-
dicate and exemplify the genesis of Anderson’s remarkable
artistic and musical voice. (Accordingly, I’ll sometimes dis-
cuss her art from before and beyond Big Science; readers
wanting texts and timelines of her career can find them in
the sources I mentioned in the last paragraph.) Second,
I also describe what it’s like to inhabit a private listening
encounter, marking time not by dates and eras but from
second to second: “now” in the sense of kairos, or experi-
ential action. Third, I ask without nostalgia how Big Science
resonates now in the twenty-first century, acknowledging
in the book’s final chapter what some have heard as an
FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 3

eerie prescience in the record. I write this in the midst of
the COVID-19 shutdowns, when we rely on masks, when
even intimate communication is mediated by technology,
presaged by the phone calls and epistles in “O Superman,”
“Example #22,” and “Let X = X” just as surely as “Here come
the planes” portended 9/11. Vaccination stickers issued in
2021 by the Centers for Disease Control likewise recall Big
Science in their nod to Rosie the Riveter (see figure 1.1).
Collectively, these approaches play the album in the pre-
sent tense. This matters because mindful presence is both a
topic and a strategy in Anderson’s music; its meanings lie in
its doing. When we walk beside these songs and not against
their grain, describing more than intercepting them, we
hear how parts make up wholes. This book advances a
hearing of Big Science invested in such experience (“just-
thisness”), yet situated within the national and the global.
Fig ure 1. 1 Cover art for the “O Superman” single and a 2021 Centers for
Disease Control COVID-19 vaccination sticker

THE RECORD OF THE TIME
Born to an affluent and large Chicago family, Laurie

Anderson came to Manhattan for college in 1966, and
throughout the 1970s, she established herself in the New
York art scene as a sculptor, illustrator, photographer, story-
teller, and critic. Some of her earliest work was intimate and
self-effacing, inspired by her mentor Vito Acconci’s public
auto-flagellation. Within a few years, though, she was seek-
ing different self-presentation. In 1977, she told Fluxus artist
Dick Higgins:
I used to use myself as subject matter pretty much—personal

anecdotes, things that had happened to me.
Then I found that I ran out of them, and the second thing was
I found I had two pasts, one was what happened and the second
was what I had said about what happened.
I’m sure you’ve had that experience, of not being able to tell
the difference.4
To this effect, some critics (all of them men) have, with

apparent spite, singled out Anderson for blurring the line
between history and narrative. Avant- garde chronicler
Richard Kostelanetz dismisses her as “briefly popular in the
early ’80s” and digs in: “Anderson’s work fails to meet the
claims made for it, whether as visual art, music, writing, or
performance. . . . It follows that Anderson herself fakes.”5
He then spends six lines excoriating her for such sins as
misspelling Oskar Schlemmer’s name. Whatever.
In the second half of the 1970s, Anderson began focusing
on language, sound, and technology—spurred by a few im-
portant meetings with musicians, writers, and engineers

including Perry Hoberman, Bob Bielecki, John Giorno,
Philip Glass, and beat author William S. Burroughs. Across
a variety of media, small new works came fast, and so her
project became one of organizing, juxtaposing, and opti-
mizing them. Her audience was mostly fellow SoHo art-
ists, but factual talk of her eventual stardom was in the air.
Reviewing a 1970s concert, composer Tom Johnson writes,
“Some were speculating that, with the help of a good record
producer, she would emerge as the ’80s’ answer to Patti
Smith.”6
In Anderson’s work, meanings pile up and commingle; it
constitutes an “epic of concatenation,” writes media scholar
Bart Testa.7 Concatenation applies to her early creative
method, too. Particularly in the late 1970s, she was keen
never to repeat a program in full, but the phrases, stories,
and melodies of one dismantled cycle were fair game for
the next. Across a dizzying number of commissions, grant
projects, and exhibits, she regularly presented in-progress
pieces and not-quite-sequels, hashing out variations on
themes. “All of the pieces, in some way or another,” she said
in 1979, “have a diagrammatic connection to each other.”8
Her goal wasn’t exactly the creation of a fugue-like
corpus. In those pre-stardom days, she couldn’t rely on
audiences’ knowing her catalog (and in fact she may have
presupposed their unfamiliarity). Larger agglomerations
overlapped, such as her For Instants series, the Jukebox ex-
hibit at the Holly Solomon Gallery, and Americans on the
Move. But the 1982 publication of Big Science, the 1983 per-
formance of United States I–IV, and the 1984 release of
United States Live effectively finalized this decade-long ac-
cumulation. “I’ve never done anything that I’ve considered

finished. So to have this on a record, not continually chan-
ging disturbs me,” she confessed.9
Here’s how she became a star. In April 1981, Anderson
pressed a single of one the many songs from United States Part
II as a proof of concept. With producer Roma Baran, she’d re-
corded it in her apartment hallway. Anderson and her former
production manager B. George had gotten a small NEA grant
to help manufacture the record; George released it on his
microlabel One Ten Records. Anderson threw a release party
for “O Superman” at the Kitchen (59 Wooster Street) on April
28, where she DJed a set that juxtaposed Dolly Parton, the Ba-
Benzélé Pygmies, Vito Acconci, csárdás polka, Freddy Fender’s
“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” in Spanish,
African drumming, and the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.”
Outside of Manhattan, the single was no hit, ini-
tially selling few of its five thousand first-run copies, but
American success was pretty much secondary to the plan.
George recalls, “I had suggested that we needed to do a
recording because I had the ability to play it on the radio
in Britain, and that was really important.”10 In 1980, he’d
published Volume, a wide- angled discography of punk,
avant-garde, and new wave music, which had become a
transatlantic Bible among collectors, DJs, and A&R staff.
This earned him quick friendships with punk distributor
Rough Trade and BBC1 tastemaker John Peel.
On or around August 25, 1981, George appeared on Peel’s
late-night show in a guest role that allowed him (unlike Peel
himself) to spin songs that hadn’t been greenlit by higher-
ups. “I started doing an occasional show of bringing over
six or so things that I thought [Peel’s] audience would like,”
George recounts. “I think he heard it the first time live that

evening.”11 Fellow jockeys Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis,
and Richard Skinner immediately picked up on the record,
giving it daytime airplay. “It went to breakfast radio, which
means that every mom in England knew the song,” says
George. “When I took a cab later that night, the cabbie said,
‘Oh, you’re the guy on the radio!’ and he started singing ‘O
Superman’: ‘AH-AH-AH-AH.’ ”12
As August drew to a close, UK demand for the single grew
high. Only five hundred copies had shipped over the Atlantic,
but distributors were requesting tens of thousands. Rough Trade
Records was keen to sign Anderson, and even began printing
labels for the single in anticipation of a deal, but instead (with
help from Baran), she called Karin Berg, a Warner Brothers
A&R scout who’d been lurking at her shows. Berg, who’d signed
Dire Straits, Television, Devo, and the B-52s, negotiated swiftly
with Warner Brothers’ head of A&R Bob Regehr and with its
London office for a massive eight-LP deal. Anderson herself
was reluctant to play the pop game but took it on as a grand
experiment. (That’s the official story, at least; since early 1979,
though, she’d been making public announcements of a forth-
coming album.)13 At the time, Regehr said of her music, “I like
the wit of it. She’s very musical. Most performance artists and
minimalists, which is a category she falls into, aren’t musical . . .
the last time I felt this way was the Sex Pistols.”14
Warner Brothers quickly picked up the rights to “O
Superman,” and by early October, it had gone top 20 in six-
teen countries, taking the number two slot in the United
Kingdom’s weirdest-ever top 5:
1. “It’s My Party,” Dave Stewart with Barbara Gaskin

2. “O Superman,” Laurie Anderson

3. “The Birdie Song (Birdie Dance),” Tweets
4. “Thunder in the Mountains,” Toyah
5. “Happy Birthday,” Altered Images
With the large Warner Brothers advance, she renovated

her apartment into a recording studio and chose nine
songs out of the seventy-eight constituting United States
I–IV from which to make something like a pop album.
Big Science was the result. Vitally, this book is concerned
with the album as a functional unit and not some imper-
fect or incomplete slice of the “proper” experience. Big
Science is, after all, how much of the world came to know
Anderson.
The album sold well, almost going gold in America.
More interesting is this: Anderson may have toiled for fif-
teen years in SoHo galleries and on the pages of Artforum,
achieving cult status in that world, but to her new audi-
ence, she emerged from nowhere, fully formed like Athena.
Seemingly overnight, she was an event, the first (perhaps
the only) superstar of the multimedia avant-garde. As re-
viewer Rob le Frenais wrote, “the world knows what a per-
formance artist is now.”15
W H AT I S B E H I N D T H AT C U R TA I N ?
Now that I’ve pointed toward the topic and scope of this
book, allow me a word about its methods. The sensational
early-1980s rise of Anderson’s star caused interpretive rip-
ples in the way people wrote about her art. Years later, she’d
recall:

I felt that my work was never actually described. I like to think
I’ve gotten over that, but I do remember resenting being jammed
into someone’s abstract essay on language. Or else the writing
focused on the performance itself and analyzed the delivery—
“cyberpunk,” “Jack Benny,” “midwestern Madonna”— or fo-
cused on the spiked hair or the shiny black jacket, as if I were
someone who wandered onstage at the last minute to intone
monologues that had appeared out of nowhere. . . . I never felt
that art writers had the slightest idea what I was trying to do.16
It’s easy to grasp Anderson’s frustration with those who re-

framed her work, conscripted it to their academic agendas,
caricatured it, poked at her, and careened otherwise be-
tween the intrusive and the irrelevant. In many ways, her
attitude echoes the 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” by
Susan Sontag, whom she’d later befriend. “The function of
criticism,” Sontag writes of art, should be to show “that it is
what it is, rather than to show what it means.”17 She calls for
“a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary,” hence
Anderson’s wish that her work be “actually described.”18
As Anderson’s spiritual mentor Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
writes, “To the ear, sound is always just sound, nothing
more. Like and dislike are shaped by the interpretive mind
that remembers, adds, modifies, and spins: The interpretive
mind creates entire fictions around just sound, just sight.”19
Sontag goes a step further: “The modern style of interpret-
ation” doesn’t merely invent fictions, but “it excavates, des-
troys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is
the true one,” in favor of which critics too often discard the
lived experience (the “erotics”) of art.20
Musicology has engaged extensively with Sontag’s ar-
guments, and it’s not my goal here to evaluate or advance

that conversation.21 But I do want to recognize that Sontag’s
words read like a creative blueprint for Big Science: “Ideally,
it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by
making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean,
whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct
that the work can be . . . just what it is.”22 And so the album
brandishes anti- interpretive defenses. Its professionalist
sheen downplays markers of genre, gender, time, and place
(even as that sheen is itself a prerogative of white intellec-
tual culture). In Anderson’s text, we are undistracted by
narrative, because characters and settings dissolve into one
another. Real-world names and cities might feature in her
other works, but not here, and so politics are submerged.
Harmony is so limited and neutral that the album’s ton-
ality seems a landscape of simple polygons. The meaning
of words follows their function; “the sun is shining slowly”
becomes a viable pop lyric. By setting the record’s scope so
wide, seemingly the territory of Western modernity, her
topic becomes the infinitude of lenses through which we can
peer, preempting the value of any single interpretation—
and arguably of interpretation itself. Accordingly, media
scholar Douglas Kellner assesses, “Anderson’s images resist
interpretation. Her art is an erotics of surfaces and the play
of light, sound, movement, word, and performance.”23
Some of the first writing devoted to Anderson’s music
(and still some of the best) comes from Susan McClary’s
influential 1991 book Feminine Endings. “If her music resists
analysis as we practice it in the academy,” she says, it’s “be-
cause her premises are different.”24 And so to see through
the glossy surface of the LP down into its prismatic depth,
we might refocus our listening in sympathy with those

different premises. McClary’s plural here draws our atten-
tion to the album’s uncontainable modeling of now at a
scale of one to one. Notice the world, Big Science says, no-
tice all of it.
No single key unlocks Anderson’s work, and no single
meaning lurks encoded—as if one history or perspective
could tidily hold such multitudes or negate the insight of
all others. Just as Anderson mixes media in her art, I mix
approaches to listening, leaning on urban history, experi-
mental literature, phenomenology, and other perspectives
outside my ostensible field of music theory. Analyze if we
must, but without interpretive dogma and without mis-
taking map for territory. Nor, in what follows, do I defer
to the internal features of Big Science—as if any feature is
merely internal, as if we hear any music disconnected from
the world of style, convention, embodiment, and politics.
But sometimes musical terminology can help explain what
a song is doing as it moves along. Furthermore, I don’t
hunt down and scrutinize the events of Anderson’s life in
hopes of connecting a prurient moment to a key lyric—as
if she herself were the text of Big Science. But I also take
seriously her recollection in Heart of a Dog of the sawed-
in-half house sculptures by her friend Gordon Matta-Clark
and her excoriation of the postmodernists who analyzed
them but failed to connect them to the suicide of Matta-
Clark’s twin brother, Sebastian. Anderson’s call isn’t to psy-
choanalyze but to acknowledge when biographical realities
stare us in the face. Accordingly, I take as meaningful those
moments when she writes and speaks of herself, while duly
recognizing the circular ways that Big Science marks an on-
going negotiation of privacy amid a culture that demands

that women’s lives be public property. Finally, I resist docu-
menting my own free association with this album—as if you
would care. But I tune in to the intuitions I experience in
its presence. If I hear something as meaningful, you might
hear it too, and we might productively trace that insight—
to our bodies, our culture, the sound, Anderson’s agency, or
the prior world channeled into music.
I’m carefully agnostic, because academics get uniquely
excited about theorizing Anderson’s work. Apparently
speaking “our” language, she sparks questions that can seem
more the stuff of philosophy than of pop. Anderson has
published scholarly criticism and studied the philosophy
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida,
and Walter Benjamin. She knows the musicology, urban
studies, artificial intelligence research, and queer theory
through which professors process her output. In an online
chat, a fan asks, “Would you object to somebody writing a
Ph.D. dissertation analyzing your work?” Acknowledging
the many theses already written, Anderson (logged on as
“Laurie 212”) replies, “I’ve got a collection of them and
they’re pretty zippy reading.”25
Despite her awareness, Anderson rarely intellectual-
izes. She works through story, aphorism, and example—
showing-not-telling or, more often, doing-not-telling. An
essayist wary of technology, for instance, might cite polit-
ical theorist Paul Virilio: “When you invent the plane you
also invent the plane crash.”26 But Anderson spins your
head in weirder 3D by saying, “I think we should put some
mountains here. Otherwise, what are the characters going
to fall off of?” Anderson does Virilio’s philosophy by staging

a business-as-usual air disaster—“Please extinguish all cig-
arettes”—in which the crash is the business.
All this matters because I’m writing primarily for the
album’s fans, often overlooked in favor of cultural analysts
and techno-utopians. This happens both because Anderson
emerged from New York City’s artistic caste and because
the literati were mostly the ones whose reactions to her
work were preserved and reproduced. Their discussions
inform this book, but let’s be canny about the self-serving
ways intellectuals felt vindicated by Anderson’s popular
rise, as if to say, “Here at last on the pop stage is one of
our own, demanding our critical arsenal in all its shiny fer-
ocity!” This hungry attitude pervades a decade of schol-
arship on her work and overlooks her impish rejection of
standard academics: Anderson’s early monologues are rife
with her own pranks against the stuffiness of teaching and
critical writing. Unmoved by credential, she pushes against
the ravenous philosophers. True, this book is secondarily
written for my fellow musicologists, mostly in offering
archival findings and in humble hopes of collating discus-
sion around Anderson’s music and meanings. But to be
clear, academia always stood to gain more from an affili-
ation than Anderson herself did.
Besides, she learned early on that crowds unschooled
in her methods react with greater immediacy. Street and
community performances in the early 1970s put her face
to face with delighted and bewildered viewers. She wit-
nessed her work’s mass appeal in February 1978 at a
museum-sponsored show in Houston. “The museum was
designed for people who were doing huge sculpture, not
performance. There weren’t even chairs. So the event got

rescheduled in a country and western bar (the Texas Opry
House),” she told a newspaper. “That changed my life, that
particular event. Because, you know, the regulars came
early to get a place at the bar, and then the art crowd comes
in, fashionably late and all in black. At some point I realized
that the regulars understood perfectly what I was doing.
Wait! I thought, these people get it.”27 So where possible,
this book privileges the immediacy of fan-level interaction
with Anderson’s art and music, and if locating a here and
now means less airtime for abstraction, then so be it.
In a few cases, though, an excursion into the concep-
tual will illuminate the conversations that have surrounded
Big Science and help us understand its relevance today.
Such is the case with chapters 2 and 8, which unpack big-
ness. Chapters 3 through 6 take up specifically musical
concerns—the songs’ individual histories and features, as
well as issues of genre. Chapter 7 addresses the structural
and historical ways Anderson’s work navigates sexuality
and gender.
Now, onward to the plural paths through these songs’
plurality.

CHAPTER 2
TOO BIG TO FAIL
I T WA S A L A R G E R O O M
The landscape of Big Science sprawls, mythic and sublime.

I argue here that such widescreen magnitude in the late
twentieth century connoted both an eerily disembodied
sentience and the ubiquitous tedium of corporate America,
adding up to a broad gesture toward everythingness. Vitally,
though, Big Science also illuminates cracks in the gigantic
and pries them open. In her own small ways, Anderson
sizes up technology and authority, glitching their logic with
a humanity both heartfelt and wily. So let’s trace this foun-
dation on which fans, writers, and Anderson herself have
beheld the album. Let’s go big. Let’s go scientific.
The enterprise of big science stands here for techno-
logical society’s massively inhuman scale. In United States
2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190926014.003.0002
I–IV and Big Science, bodies are corporate, automotive, un-
named, and contingent. Decisions are arbitrary, authori-
tarian, and need-to-know. This is a world neither of the
people, by the people, nor for the people. Yet amid all the
huge machinery and myth, here we are, struggling to exist
at human scale.
United States I–IV is big, and Anderson imagined
making it even bigger: beyond its four parts, a late-1981 art-
icle by Keri Phillips reports, “she hopes to add two more
segments—Science and Communication.”1 But magnitude
isn’t just quantity: even the nine songs of Big Science cast
monumental shadows with the range and register of their
subject matter, their cavernous reverberation, and the vast
negative space they imply.
The title speaks loudly, too. Big science began as a Cold
War endeavor. Its projects— the bomb, cyclotrons, the
human genome, space shuttles—are massively funded and
their development decentralized. The expertise, resources,
and perspective needed for conducting big science lie be-
yond any individual’s grasp. Advances come through cross-
referencing knowledge across a project’s many labs. Adding
to the unwieldiness are its ideological stakeholders: organ-
ization and funding come from industry, the military, and
government none of which nobly engage in the pursuit of
pure knowledge. But despite the messiness of big science,
the man who co-coined the term in 1960, Alvin Weinberg,
frames it almost mythologically:
When history looks at the 20th century, she will see science and
technology as its theme; she will find in the monuments of Big
Science—the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the
Too Big to Fail 17
/17_revised_proof/revises_i/files_to_typesetting/validation
high-flux research reactors—symbols of our time just as surely
as she finds in Notre Dame a symbol of the Middle Ages . . . we
use our Big Science to add to our country’s prestige.2
Notice how Weinberg writes about time: in this quote,

there’s no present moment to dwell in, but instead we view
its symbols from the distant future, comparing them to the
distant past. Big science negates individual experience with
a kind of ethereal whiplash. From its industrial moment,
Weinberg’s conception of time anticipates the twenty-first
century’s post-Fordist alienation, “in which pasts, presents,
and futures do not flow chronologically or in sequence but
are open to a constant state of revision,” writes sociologist
Lisa Adkins.3 The institutions, technologies, and horizons
of neoliberal white America practice a dehumanization,
thwarting both our flights of fancy and our capacity for
mindfulness.
None of this is news to the disenfranchised mil-
lions chewed and digested by capitalism, the indigenous
and Black populations for whom centuries of “now” are
intolerable—whether in the industrial era or in the infor-
mation age. But to the bourgeois crowd of 1982 (the turning
point between those two eras), Anderson seemed one of
the few diagnosing the psychically exhausting paradoxes
now called capitalist realism.4 The mythical present-future
relationship of “progress” was growing ever more implaus-
ible, the inequity of its spoils ever more glaring.5 “That en-
gine,” she says, “you can feel it everywhere.”6
Anderson’s “overall thesis is simple,” says Testa: “past/
future . . . is a collapsed duality and this collapse has oblit-
erated the present under its rubble.”7 Her early-1980s work
doesn’t merely portray a world devoid of “now,” but, as
stated earlier, its superhuman scale also erases “here” and
anonymizes “us.” Marked by the monuments Weinberg en-
visioned (along with interstates, stock markets, and digital
megasystems), modern American time, place, and identity
happen on levels too massive for anyone to assimilate.
If the time of the “Renaissance man” ended when the al-
leged sum of human learning exceeded the individual’s cap-
acity to understand, then Big Science marks the turning of
another era: never mind the sum of knowledge, your brain
is too puny to grasp even a single domain like public trans-
portation in all its complexity. To wit, getting stuck in rush-
hour gridlock can’t reveal to you a mathematical model of
traffic flow, nor does the potential existence of such a model
comfort you amid the honking. Fittingly, Time’s 1982 “Man
of the Year” was the personal computer.
Science writer James Gleick states, “The birth of infor-
mation theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—
the very quality that gives information its value and its
purpose.”8 Early on, Anderson understood this trade-
off: her nerve-racking 1977 single “New York Social Life”
bombards us with enough small talk, phone ringing, and
urban noise to make us tune out. It’s like the more data we
have—the bigger the science—the less meaningful any of it
becomes.
Accordingly, Anderson’s work tantalizes with a feeling of
almost understanding. We know her measured profession-
alism is somehow a critique of measured professionalism.
But the mismatch of scale—you and me amid the whorl—
leaves us grasping. “Big science and little men,” she quips in
United States Part II. “Everything is close, and everything is
Too Big to Fail 19
far, at the same time,” Gleick continues, “not just crowded
but lonely.”9 We were not made for the world we have made.
Y O U TA L K A S I F Y O U K N E W M E
Knowledge too big to be known bears troubling implica-

tions for authority: if nobody understands air traffic con-
trol, city planning, or telephone networks (to say nothing
of romantic relationships or the afterlife), then who is in
charge? How can we know the world is running properly?
Big Science orbits this empty circularity. Authority is face-
less. There is no pilot. This music’s stars and power brokers
are “they” and “it”: anonymous, all-implicating. Anderson
says, “the bodies I relate to most are the No Bodies. I’ve
written many songs and stories for these ‘people.’ They have
no names, no histories. They’re outside of time and place.”10
I’ll revisit these No Bodies. But for now, try supposing
they’re the ones who understand what we cannot, the ones
controlling the systems that control us, seeing patterns
where we see chaos: a meta-intelligence born of sheer big-
ness. If an invisible hand steers our behavior (as Adam
Smith put it), then whose? And what does it want?
Michel Foucault writes that power itself has intent, if not
subjectivity.11 Others venture further. Science fiction often
blurs networked multiplicity into systemic autonomy; recall
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where the Skynet computer
grows so powerful that it suddenly becomes self-aware.
In fact, theoretical science was preoccupied throughout
the 1980s with the question of whether minds were mere
byproducts of complexity. Neurophilosopher Patricia Smith
Churchland specifically researched whether informational
systems could experience consciousness (either spontan-
eously arisen or carefully programmed by humans). It’s
possible, she concluded. When she writes, “Descriptions of
mental states are functional descriptions of physical states
at a designated level,” she asserts there’s nothing immeas-
urably mystical that separates sentience from any other
process.12
Imagine “a robot with a behavioral repertoire much like
my own,” Churchland writes, “fitted out with sensory re-
ceptors [that] mimic my brain’s organization even down to
very low levels.”13 Accordingly, the robot acts, reacts, and
converses like a conscious being. Some in philosophy, lin-
guistics, and classical AI theory might argue that despite
the robot’s convincingly complex if/then system, it wields
only syntax (structure) and not semantics (meaning). But
first, is such a distinction real? Can we separate our lived
experience of meaning from the structural perception of
that same meaning? And second, how can I know what
the experience of meaning is like for the robot—or indeed
for anyone else at all? How can I assume it’s lesser than my
own? “To refuse to assign meaning—meaning as genuine as
it gets—to the robot’s internal states,” Churchland writes, is
“to apply a double standard, arbitrarily.”14
If I can find a mapping between its representational system

and my own, then I shall have a translation of its utterances.
So much is anyhow all one has to go on in ascribing intention-
ality to other humans. This is not to say that the robot’s internal
states have meaning only if I interpret them, for after all, the
elements of its representational economy objectively bear the
inferential/computational relations that they do to each other,
regardless of whether I encounter the robot or not.15
Too Big to Fail 21
This amounts to a defense of potential consciousness in ma-
chines, data, and algorithms. If the sentience of an abacus,
chessboard, or library seems far- fetched, Churchland
warns that our assessment tools may simply be calibrated to
the wrong scale. Co-writing on such lowly mechanisms ex-
plicitly in the context of bigness, she hypothesizes: “if such
a system were to be assembled on a suitably cosmic scale,
with all its pathways faithfully modeled on the human case,
we might then have a large, slow, oddly made but still func-
tional brain on our hands. In that case the default assump-
tion is surely that, given proper inputs, it would think, not
that it couldn’t.”16
So Anderson wasn’t alone in wondering whether con-
sciousness could exist on some order so diffuse and dif-
ferent from our own that we wouldn’t recognize it as such.
Larger, smaller, slower, faster— wherever this hypothet-
ical no-bodied intelligence would reside, it needn’t be on a
human scale, and it may not happen in a time we call now.
Impossible to disprove, such agencies dwell in the Fortean
domains of magic and paranoia.
Crucially, to Anderson, that’s hardly grounds for dis-
missal. She giddily reported, “People working in artificial
intelligence, for example, at MIT, claim that they are trying
to make a machine that is so sensitive that a soul will want
to enter it.”17 Her friend William S. Burroughs wrote 1977’s
The Third Mind with Brion Gysin, asserting the presence of
“an unseen collaborator” amid artistic collectives and even
amid accumulated information: “an absent third person,
invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence.”18 This
notion becomes wholly reasonable if you’ve ever played in a
musical jam session, where ideas take on lives of their own.
(For her part, Anderson had done group improv, circa 1975,
in the short-lived Fast Food Band.) Decades later, occult-
minded dot-com guru Paco Nathan would specify an intel-
ligence unique to capitalism—“Corporate Metabolism,” he
called it. “Corporations-as-species . . . present a relatively
new sentience which is not quite artificial intelligence, per
se, but more like unnatural intelligence [with] the sentience
level of a spoiled brat.”19
This kind of meta-human agency loosely overlaps with
landmark theories from across disciplines, each with its
own scope, framing, and degree of attributed intention-
ality. (I’m not presently concerned with whether these
formulations are “correct.”) Such models include Frederic
Jameson’s “political unconscious” (political theory), Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “multiplicity” (philosophy),
Niklas Luhmann’s “social system” (communications),
Michel Foucault’s “discourse” (theories of power), and
James Gleick’s articulation of chaos across fields of science.
Concepts like these seek to explain big complexity, but they
also reify it as a presence and reinforce anxieties about it.
T H E H A N D T H AT TA K E S
Being social animals, we notice big complexity most readily

when its behavior is most antisocial. The glitch that reveals
a program is no mere malfunction but a manifestation of
otherwise secret values coded into its design. The conclu-
sions of this line of thought are cynical, but cynical only
toward systems, not people. And is it so hard to believe that
the real function of a customer service line—with endless
waiting and misdirected anger—is to drain us of the energy
Too Big to Fail 23
it takes to complain? Big entities have powerful immune
systems.
When we focus our lens to see networked agencies as fal-
lible, discrete, and not just the “way things are,” then what
other systems duly come into view? What kinds of glitches
might reveal the secret functions of folklore or pop music?
What’s the relationship between American history and
our individual memories of childhood? Is the way we use
money anything like the way we use language? Is gender
a technology? How is authority maintained in a world too
anesthetically civil to admit physical violence? When force
is gone, there’s always Mom.
To hear Big Science like this is to behold the moment
when our creations become sentient, when power wields
itself. The album’s players are unknowably huge, fatally en-
trenched, and more invested in their own survival than in
human life—inoperable parasites larger than the bodies
they inhabit. Nathan plainly classifies corporate sentience
as demonic: “This thing is not human. It consumes your
will.”20 The global plot is no longer the story of people or
ecologies but of the techno-economic mechanisms they
serve. It’s the modern condition underlying the 2008 dec-
laration that America’s banks were “too big to fail.”
But Anderson offers hope, even if her methods some-
times contradict one another. First, she consistently calls
to mind human scales of time, magnitude, and presence—
even if only in their defamiliarizing absence.
Second, she leans into the aesthetics of alienation, al-
lowing us to imagine new pleasurable ways of submitting
to industry, urban flow, and surveillance. She invites us to
explore the rhythms of late capitalism as if careening in
an object-oriented cosmos rather than lying to ourselves
until we’re powerless and enraged. Musicologist Robert
Fink’s notes on minimalism apply: “repetitive music pro-
vides an acknowledgment, a warning, a defense—or even
just an aesthetic thrill—in the face of the myriad repetitive
relationships that, in late-capitalist consumer society, we all
must face over and over.”21
Third, Anderson enacts glitches in big systems of au-
thority. A pilot becomes a caveman in “From the Air.” A
backward voice erupts from nowhere in “Example #22.”
Her vocalization “ah” sticks like a broken record in “O
Superman,” prompting strange visualizations: a singer slips
out the back door as an automaton takes her place. Big
Science traces and seeks to pry open the human-sized rifts
in superhuman authority.
This third practice meshes with scholarship on magni-
tude. In 2016, researchers published a collaborative paper,
“Big Is Fragile: An Attempt at Theorizing Scale.”22 Amid ad-
vice for carrying out industrial and data-driven megapro-
jects, the authors argue that bigness tends toward fragility.
They write, “A thing or system that is easily harmed by
randomness is fragile. . . . As a system grows bigger, the
relative size of a stressor required to break it will decline
disproportionately.”23 Imagine here those glitches in reality
that Anderson stages. Continuing: “Behavioral and psycho-
logical biases will make the detection of hidden fragility
more difficult. Hidden fragilities in systems designed by
experts will be the norm, not the exception [and] in socio-
logical and organizational contexts, hidden fragility will be
hidden in plain sight.”24
Too Big to Fail 25
Laurie Anderson probes the hidden fragilities of sys-
tems, media, identity, and reason itself. National borders
are made arbitrary and permeable in 1977’s Stereo Decoy: A
Canadian-American Duet, just as torture’s mandate of de-
humanization unravels in 2015’s Habeas Corpus.
Language is the system in which Anderson most adeptly
finds stressors. Big Science’s closer, “It Tango,” casts He, She,
and It as instances of those aforementioned No Bodies.
These words are tiny but ubiquitous, respectively ranking at
number 15, number 31, and number 10 for frequency of oc-
currence in linguists’ Corpus of Contemporary American
English. Yet we overfill them with assumptions about sex,
agency, and proximity. These anonymizing stand-ins are
both essential and extraneous, nothing and everything,
not the bricks but the mortar. In the song, Anderson re-
peats and recombines these words, a scrambling technique
pioneered by the likes of Gertrude Stein and Burroughs.
Mixing speech and song to evoke pun, homonym, and pure
sound, she bedevils each sign until its meanings multiply
and crumble. Where they were overloaded, she empties
them—and in effigy, she duly empties language and gender.
Fragility in plain sight, indeed.
At the risk of overexplaining, I’ll point out a few of the
many fissures this text widens.
She said: It looks. Don’t you think it looks a lot like rain?
He said: Isn’t it? Isn’t it just? Isn’t it just like a woman?
She said: It’s hard. It’s just hard. It’s just kind of hard to say.
He said: Isn’t it? Isn’t it just? Isn’t it just like a woman?
She said: It goes. That’s the way it goes. It goes that way.
He said: Isn’t it? Isn’t it just like a woman?
She said: It takes. It takes one. It takes one to. It takes one to
know one.
He said: Isn’t it just like a woman?
She said: She said it. She said it to no. She said it to no one.
Isn’t it. Isn’t it just? Isn’t it just like a woman?
Your eyes. It’s a day’s work to look into them.
Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just looking into them.
If He and She begin as individuals, their placement in the

“he said/she said” cliché recasts them as stand-ins for their
gender. He and She hint at conflating each other with It
by their gendered observations “It’s hard” and “Isn’t it just
like a woman?” Stranger yet, He becomes more She with
“It takes one to know one” (ignoring for now the ways we
might hear “one to” as “one-two”—structural numbers or a
punching combo). By the ninth line, He dissolves into an
unanswering “no one,” and meanwhile, She grows more
alien from herself in speaking (homonymically) to “know
one”—to know a woman. All the while, He and She spiral
until they seem less like people than substances blending.
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto comes to mind: “cy-
borg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, re-
joicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine.
These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so
problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force
imagined to generate language and gender.”25
It suggests its own uncertainty as the object (or, daringly,
the subject) of the song. Not only is the wildly networked
structure more than the sum of its topics, but we might hear
the song as being about this very openness. The fragment
“Isn’t it just?” affirms this hearing, inasmuch as “just” also
Too Big to Fail 27
means “righteous.” The song’s clockwork repetition calls to
mind the famous 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process,”
where fellow minimalist composer Steve Reich predicts,
“musical process makes possible that shift of attention away
from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”26
Fittingly, that little pronoun can wind listeners into album-
wide tangles: It’s the heat; It’s a sky-blue sky; It could be you; I
no longer love it; It was a large room; It’s a place about seventy
miles east of here. The issue is central to Anderson’s often-
recycled riff on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Where
he writes, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over
in silence,” she paraphrases, “If you can’t talk about it, point
to it.”27 And out there in the world beyond, the unit It re-
curs with a ubiquity both eerie and mundane.
So the song’s concluding volta is significant: the un-
expected humanity of “Your eyes” offsets the facelessness
of the No Bodies. Certainly, in “a day’s work,” we recog-
nize the exhausting unpaid emotional labor that women
provide to men in misunderstandings like this song. In
a sweeter listening, pop audiences might savor a note of
romance, where the exhaustion of “a day’s work” is love’s
breathlessness. Alternatively, the line self-referentially tells
us how difficult it is to connect with an audience—to look
into their eyes—through the one-way medium of recorded
sound, and with the meager tools of so few words. Or, for
those whom capitalism affords a paltry humanity, the lyric
pits the mammalian comfort of eye contact as the reward
after a day of exploitation. In any event, this final text pulls
us from obscure dialogue. It’s unsurprising but compelling
that in live performance (both before and after Big Science),
the last two lines don’t appear in “It Tango” and are instead
the closing of “Let X = X,” indicating an awareness of
albumcraft separate from songcraft.
Those lyrics are also a needed reminder that not all of
life is encompassed in structures, theories, governments,
and data. The article “Big Is Fragile” notes, “Building big
has traditionally been seen as necessary . . . to lock com-
petitors out of future rivalry.”28 Its authors refer here to
operational monopolies in engineering and corporate
structure, but the observation is revelatory when we apply
it to realities. Capitalism, Christianity, the internet, binary
gender, your native language—these are all built so big
that they can seemingly lock out competing worldviews.
“It’s easier for people to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism,” Anderson says in
an interview (paraphrasing Frederic Jameson and Mark
Fisher).29 But you have choices beyond accepting “he said/
she said” scripts of gendered interaction, whether or not
they’re easy to imagine—just as there exist alternatives to
capitalist realism. A good first step is to insist on a pesky
humanism, to carve out a lucid now in which individual
experiences matter, where mechanisms serve you (not the
other way around). Here the big doesn’t lose sight of the
small, but instead we perceive things as nothing more or
less than wholly and presently themselves. (With impre-
cise overlapping, Buddhism calls this tathātā; Deleuze
calls it haecceity; I adopt the elegant phrase “just this-
ness” from the social sciences and philosophy.)30 Another
way out of the bind is to change the conversation. The last
two lines of “It Tango,” indeed the concluding words of Big
Science: do both.
Too Big to Fail 29
CHAPTER 3
DESCRIBING SIDE ONE
THE SOUND OF THE TONE
The musical states of Big Science are united, but their cohe-
sion rarely sounds like harmonic inevitability or the dili-
gent development of melodic themes. Unity instead seems
the incidental outcome of strikingly spare aesthetics. So
let’s listen and describe.
The album’s nine songs fit into key signatures ranging
from zero to three flats. This maximizes the compatibility
of Anderson’s violin (with strings on G–D–A–E) with the
saxophones in her band (tuned to B♭ and E♭ major). As we’ll
see, the album’s tonal centers also allow for the presence
of bagpipes and for musical quotations of Terry Riley and
Jules Massenet.
2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190926014.003.0003
Harmonies are few; no song invokes more than three
chords, and most use just two (“Sweaters” arguably has only
one). Such economy smacks of neither restraint nor a pau-
city of ideas. There’s no hint of tonal maximalism against
which this minimalism takes shape. Instead, we wander a
factual universe mapped in happy wholeness by just two or
three relations. Here the sound of sound matters more than
its role in some hypothetical harmonic system.
It’s tempting, if reductive, to relate this to the Buddhist
teachings that Anderson has embraced since 1972.1 Yongey
Mingyur Rinpoche writes, “All that we are looking for in
life—all the happiness, contentment, and peace of mind—
is right here in the present moment. Our very own aware-
ness is itself fundamentally pure and good.”2 Applied to
music, this idea offers a radical alternative to the direc-
tional yearning that traditional European harmony exerts.
Anderson joins John Cage, Philip Glass, and many others
in a historical coupling of minimalist music and Eastern
spiritual thought.
If we do want to relate the harmonies on Big Science,
we might bluntly categorize the interval of a song’s tonic
to its most prominent supporting harmony. Half the songs
favor authentic relations (a supporting chord of V or ♭VII),
while half favor plagal relations (a supporting chord of
IV or ♭VI). The lack of overall valence helps illustrate why
Anderson’s chosen chords seem less about progress than
free exploration.
Describing Side One 31
Song Primary Harmony Relation
(alternate)
“From the Air” Cm (A♭) Plagal
“Big Science” Dm (C; rarely F) Authentic
“Sweaters” B♭ (perhaps A♭) Authentic
“Walking and Falling” Gm (F) Authentic
“Born, Never Asked” Gm (F) Authentic
“O Superman” Cm (A♭; rarely E♭) Plagal
“Example #22” G (C; rarely E♭m) Plagal
“Let X = X /It Tango” C (F) Plagal
As the music happens, it makes a big unrolling gesture

in (more or less) the key of C. On side one of the record,
C minor winds toward G minor. On side two, C minor
bounces again to G (Mixolydian this time) and then con-
cludes on C major, which loosens (or even solves) the ten-
sions lurking in both C minor and G.
Western musicians would be forgiven for thinking caden-
tially about these harmonies, summarizing side one as a i–v
half cadence (“open”) and side two as a i–V–I authentic ca-
dence (“closed”). But the just this-ness of Anderson’s music
cautions against attaching classical baggage. The order of
its keys and chords is neither inevitable nor random; in-
stead, it’s a stroll amid sisterly harmonies. Just as Ursa Major
and the Big Dipper are two ways of seeing the same stars,
Anderson could have constellated these sounds otherwise,
but we’d still behold both the album’s broader consistencies
of pitch and the monolithic immanence of each chord. This
is part of how Anderson’s music works. Harmonic relations
on later albums Mister Heartbreak and Homeland are nearly
identical to those here.
Melody is likewise minimal. The most important moves
are descending steps. Among them, the slide from G to F
carries the most weight. The G–F motive opens the album’s
title track, it characterizes the “Born, Never Asked” riff (as
do–te in G minor), and it returns in “Let X = X/It Tango” (as
sol-fa in C major). Along the way, it extends to G–F–E♭ on
“Mom and Dad,” the first cadence of “O Superman.” And
it’s implied as a melodic connection between “O Superman”
and “Example #22” (see figure 3.1).
As with the album’s harmony, we can admire the cohe-
sion of its melodies. But let’s resist the temptation to hear
them too teleologically. Doing so would impose narrative
and structural hierarchy on a record that openly mocks
those conventions— whether in the lyrical deferrals of
“Walking and Falling” and “Born, Never Asked” or the
unresolved ambiguities of rhythm in “From the Air” and
tonality in “O Superman.” Even the trademark G–F motive
celebrates inconclusivity at the end of the LP’s side one and
side two. Both in “Born, Never Asked” and “It Tango,” the
note F dangles unresolved above the tonic, and in each case,
the riff just repeats and fades out instead of reconciling, as if
to say that all we are looking for is right here in the present
moment.
The nine songs share musical features—and this intro-
duction hasn’t even discussed timbre and text. However,
their family resemblance doesn’t constitute a transcendent
Fig ure 3. 1 Pitch reduction of Big Science.
Describing Side One 33
whole. The music and words reach outside the LP’s borders
to the rest of United States I–IV, to the past and future of
Anderson’s output, and to territories beyond, rendering
Big Science anti-absolute and anti-hermetic, a snapshot of
Anderson’s corpus in mid-dance. But a Polaroid doesn’t
mean any less than a portrait. So even if the following de-
scriptions only occasionally engage with Anderson’s spe-
cific intent, they identify observable effects. As needed, they
offer contexts of a deeply felt now, in chronos (the songs’
circa 1980 creation) and in the moment-by-moment sound
attuning us to the kairos experience of present listening.
“FROM THE AIR”
Now: C h ronos
“From the Air” showcases Anderson’s knack for remixing

themes and images. In late 2001, she reused the title for a
video sculpture confronting post-9/11 anxiety. In 2017, she
debuted Aloft, a virtual-reality piece staging the mid-flight
disintegration of an airplane from inside: introducing her-
self as the captain, Anderson repurposes monologues from
1994’s Puppet Motel and her Buddhist-inspired works, act-
ing as a tour guide through death’s museum. Back in 1979,
her light- based installation Reversible Flight/Night Light
blurred airplanes into stars (see figure 3.2). These works
take up the simultaneous banality and awe of commercial
flight.
As with much of Big Science, “From the Air” retools pre-
vious fragments. Its title phrase also appears in Anderson’s
monologue “Odd Objects,” a late addition to United States
Part III. The music was originally the instrumental walk-on
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
A Chinese Ritz.
Page 40
From Yünnanfu we took the ordinary route via Malong, Kütsingfu,

and the Yünnan Pass into Kweichow Province. It has been admirably
and fully described in Sir A. Hosie’s latest book On the Trail of the
Opium Poppy, so it is unnecessary for me to do it, and I shall merely
describe the things which struck us as of special interest.
The journey from Yünnanfu to Anshun took us seventeen days—a
distance altogether of about three hundred miles.[6] From Anshunfu
we struck north, through much wilder and less-frequented country, in
order to visit the haunts of aboriginal tribes, and made a wide detour,
returning to the main road near Kwei Yang, the capital. We greatly
wished to visit other tribes in the eastern part of the province, but
that was absolutely vetoed by the governor, and we were obliged to
follow the high road through Ping-yüe and Huang Ping Chow to
Chen Yüen. Here we took to the waterway, from which we did not
once swerve till we reached Shanghai. The first part of the journey,
up the Yüen Kiang, is a distance of four hundred and forty-six miles,
and one may go down it in five days, if it is in flood, with a fair
chance of getting drowned! We took ten days, but a good deal of
time was spent at places on the way. Coming up stream the journey
is long and tedious: it may extend to months instead of days. The
natural superstition of the Chinese is displayed on such a journey by
the lavish use of crackers[7] and incense to ward off evil spirits.
These superstitions will die hard: nothing less vital than genuine
Christianity can displace them.
We entered Hunan on May 14, having spent forty-two days in
Kweichow Province. The frontier is indicated by two elaborate
archways, as we saw on entering the province from Yünnan.
Although Hunan is within fifteen days’ reach of Shanghai, it has so
far no facilities for travel better than by water. It is true there is a
short railway line on its western border, but we were not encouraged
to try it, and in summer there is always a good steamship line from
the capital Changsha to Hankow—a distance of two hundred and
twenty miles. The railway is part of the projected line from Hankow to
Canton, and will be of great trade value when it is completed, as
there is no good route to connect this part of the country with the
south. We intended going from Changsha into Kwangsi Province on
account of the beautiful scenery, but unfortunately that was
impossible owing to the fighting going on between the troops of the
north and the south exactly in the region where our road lay. It might
be supposed that we could have taken an alternative route through
so vast a country, but such is not the case. If you leave the great
high road (and what a misnomer that is!) there is no way except by
devious paths through endless mountain ranges, where no
accommodation and little food would be obtainable. In a province of
83,398 square miles there appear to be only two main roads running
from north to south, and three from east to west; yet it has a
population of over twenty-one millions. The two main roads running
from north to south are near the eastern and western borders, and
all the central part of the province has none. We crossed the
province entirely by water, first in a house-boat as far as Changteh,
thence in a miserable little native steamer across the Tong Ting Lake
to Changsha; from Changsha up the Siang-kiang,[8] across the Tong
Ting on to the Yangtze, which bounds the province on the north.
We had no choice, therefore, of leaving Hunan except by going to
Hankow, and we found good accommodation on a British steamer,
the Sinkiang. There are six good lines between Changsha and
Hankow—two British, a Japanese, and several Chinese steamship
companies, whose ships run in the summer; owing to the
extraordinary subsidence of the lake in winter (see Chapter VI) it has
to be discontinued then for several months. The journey from
Changsha to Hankow takes about thirty-two hours: at Hankow we
transhipped for Shanghai on a most comfortable steamer (with nice
beds), the Nganking, belonging to Messrs. Butterfield & Swire. It is
quite easy for travellers knowing no Chinese to penetrate by this
route into the very centre of China. I am so often asked about the
possibilities of doing this that I can only recommend this as a wholly
charming and easy way of getting about and much to be preferred to
railway travelling.
Hankow itself is a big bustling cosmopolitan town, with a rapidly
increasing volume of commerce. It is a link between old and new,
and has no less than thirty-six associations, called “hangs,” for
different kinds of goods. It has its foreign concessions like the
seaports, and the important trading companies have their own
floating wharves, where the big ocean liners moor, six hundred miles
away from the coast. There are said to be 25,000 junks engaged
here in river traffic, and they connect Hankow with all the central and
western provinces, often travelling as much as a hundred miles a
day.
Hankow is a great centre of educational and missionary activity,
and many European nationalities are engaged in it. The great
viceroy, Chang Chih Tung, ardently promoted education here when
he was in office. He said in his book, China’s Only Hope (p. 61), “In
order to render China powerful, and at the same time preserve our
own institutions, it is absolutely necessary that we should utilize
Western knowledge. But unless Chinese learning is made the basis
of education and a Chinese direction is given to thought, the strong
will become anarchists, and the weak slaves.” It is most deplorable
that this is ignored by so many Chinese of the present day.[9] He
urged that old Buddhist and Taoist temples, falling into decay, be
transformed into schools, and he estimated that seven out of ten,
with their property, might well be devoted to this purpose. This is
quite in accordance with what is now being done, especially in
Northern China. He argued that the temples are national property,
and should be used for the common good.
Hankow is wonderfully situated as the internal trade centre of
China, being the meeting-point of its main railways as well as
waterways (when the former shall have been completed), linking up
north, south, east and west. There are three cities in the angles
formed by the junction of the Yangtze and the Han rivers—Hanyang,
Hankow and Wu-chang; the last was far the most important in the
past, and is the capital of Hupeh, but now Hankow rivals Shanghai in
commercial importance, and is rapidly growing. The three cities have
a joint native population of 1,150,000, of which Hankow has 800,000,
and as its native quarter was completely destroyed by fire during the
civil war in 1911, the fine old monuments of the past were destroyed
with it. Its whole interest is modern.
Between Hankow and Shanghai are several important cities which
must be most interesting to visit, several of them being treaty ports
with foreign concessions, such as Chin-kiang and Wu-hu; the
steamers stop at least fourteen times on the way. It is delightful to
spend the days sitting in comfortable chairs on deck, watching all the
varied life on the river, hearing the “honk-honk” of the wild geese
soaring overhead, or watching the wedges of ducks crossing the
river on strong wing to the big marshes, or lakes, into which it pours
its overflow.
From time to time the steamer draws to the riverside and loads or
unloads its cargo. One of the most interesting stopping-places is
Nanking; indeed, it is said to be one of the most interesting in China,
and is only about two hundred miles from Shanghai. It has an hotel
kept by an Englishman. We greatly enjoyed the river scenery of the
Yangtze: there are so many picturesque monuments in this lower
part on the numerous islands and along its banks; although it has not
the wild charm of the gorges, it is well worth making the trip. Now
there is a steam service all the way up to Chunking, so that travellers
can easily do one of the most beautiful journeys in the world at
reasonable cost, in reasonable comfort and in reasonable time,
going about a thousand miles up the finest of the great rivers of the
world.[10]
On reaching Shanghai I had to part with my travelling companion
and start the journey home alone, but as events proved my steamer
was delayed, and I had several weeks in which to visit the coastal
provinces of Chekiang, Fukien and Kwantung, and to study the
student movement, as described in the concluding chapters of this
book.
Chapter II
The Model Governor—Yen Hsi-Shan
“Who is the true and who is the false statesman?

“The true statesman is he who brings order out of disorder;
who first organizes and then administers the government of
his own country; and having made a nation, seeks to
reconcile the national interest with those of Europe and of
mankind. He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in
expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his
mind; while the head is conceiving, the hand is executing.
Although obliged to descend to the world, he is not of the
world. His thoughts are fixed not on power, or riches, or
extension of territory, but on an ideal state, in which all the
citizens have an equal chance of health and life, and the
highest education is within the reach of all, and the moral and
intellectual qualities of every individual are freely developed,
and ‘the idea of good’ is the animating principle of the whole.
Not the attainment of freedom alone, or of order alone, but
how to unite freedom with order is the problem which he has
to solve.
“The statesman who places before himself these lofty aims
has undertaken a task which will call forth all his powers.”—
Benjamin Jowett.
Chapter II[11]
The Model Governor—Yen Hsi-Shan
The province of
Shansi boasts
having the best
governor in the
Chinese Empire,
and he has
accomplished in the
last ten years a
remarkable change
in the entire
province—a
province which is
considerably larger
than Great Britain.
The city of Taiyuanfu
is perhaps the most
striking evidence of
this change. The
whole place is
unrecognizable
since the days when
I first knew it in
1893. The streets
are wide and well
kept; at night they are lighted by electricity, and an efficient police
force keeps order and regulates the traffic, whereas in old days the
crowd used to fight their quarrels out in their own sweet way. The
horrible pariah dogs which infested the streets without let or
hindrance have entirely disappeared; for a dog, licence has now to
be obtained, and any unlicensed dogs are promptly destroyed. The
Governor Yen Hsi-Shan is the promoter of education in all its
manifold aspects; though not a Christian, he realizes that there must
be a radical change in morals, as well as in education, if China is to
become a strong nation, capable of taking her place among the
Great Powers.
To this end he has formed an organization called the “Wash the
Heart Society,” which strongly reminds one of the Mission of John
the Baptist, although he does not recognize the fact that repentance
is only the first step on the upward path. A large hall has been built in
a nice open part of the city, close to the city wall, but, alas! not in
Chinese style. The Governor is unfortunately under the influence of a
Teuton, who is the worst possible adviser in matters of architecture,
as well as other things. The hall is a deplorable mixture of every
conceivable style of Western art; it holds 3,000 people and services
are held there every Sunday morning, each lasting one hour, and
each for the benefit of a separate class of people—merchants,
military, students. So far there seems to be no provision for women,
but perhaps that will come later. The population is bidden to come
and reflect on its evil ways and to seek amendment of life. A special
feature of the service is a time of silence for self-examination. This
Society was started in the province of Shansi, but I found its halls in
other parts of the Empire as well, and it is a hopeful sign of the
times. The approach to the hall is by a good macadamized road, and
near by is a tea-house beside the tiny lake—the Haizabien—and a
bandstand where the élite of the city gather on summer evenings to
listen to sweet music and sip countless cups of tea.
Yen Hsi Shan, Statesman.
Page 49
Big houses are being built by wealthy Chinese in this

neighbourhood, and there are large Government schools for girls as
well as boys. Facing the entrance to a girls’ school, which is housed
in a disused temple, we saw a list pasted up on a wall, giving the
names of successful girl students in a recent Government
examination. What an amazing contrast to the old days, when no
Government schools for girls were in existence; they only came into
being since the downfall of the old regime in 1907, but the Chinese
Ministry of Education, which based its present system on that of
Japan, is recognizing the importance of women’s education and is
encouraging it by this official recognition of success in examinations.
It is not sufficient only to give the women schools, but it is
imperative to supply them also with scope for wider culture and
congenial activities when they leave school. To this end a kind of
club, or institute, is to be started at once on ground opposite the
Governor’s hall, and it is in response to the ladies’ own request: they
have long been saying, “The men have their Y.M.C.A., why cannot
we have such a place?” and although the mission ladies have done
their best to meet the need, obviously no private house can be
adequate, not to mention the fact that Chinese ladies have too much
self-respect to be willing to be always guests of ladies with limited
incomes, to whom they can make but scant return. It is hoped that
the new hall will do much to forward the woman’s movement in
Taiyuanfu; there will be social gatherings, lectures on hygiene (for
illustration of which there is to be a complete installation of sanitary
fittings), a child-welfare department, invalid cooking, lessons on
nursing, and many other classes connected with women’s welfare.
There is room for a garden and tennis courts in order that recreation
and physical culture may be encouraged and the place made
attractive to girls as well as women. The Governor is promoting this
last matter indirectly, by putting a fine on foot-binding, which is
unfortunately still extremely prevalent. The movement that took place
some years ago in favour of a natural foot seems to have died down,
and everywhere there is foot-binding in full swing. The queue has
practically disappeared from China during the last few years, and
men wear their hair mostly rather short, while some go in for a clean
shave. I find this quite attractive when the skull is well-shaped, and if
the man is in immaculate summer garb, the effect of cleanliness is
wonderful. If the women of China were less conservative, and would
make an equally clean sweep of foot-binding, it would make an
immense difference to their health.
The Governor has encouraged physical culture not only indirectly
but directly as well, for he even went so far as to ride in a bicycle
race once in Shansi, and in 1918 public sports took place at
Taiyuanfu, which Sir John Jordan honoured by his presence, having
taken the tiresome nineteen hours’ journey from Peking for the
purpose.[12] A disused temple acted as the grand-stand and an
angle of the city wall was converted into the arena, the tiers of seats
being hewn in the base of the wall. Quite a fine sports ground was
prepared under the superintendence of one of the missionaries,
whose advice in practical matters is continually sought by the
Governor. The only matter for regret on this occasion was the
deplorable weather, for even sunny Shansi has moments when a
dusty fit of temper obscures its lustre.
One of the Governor’s most valuable new institutions is a farm for
cattle-breeding. It is just outside the city and has been successfully
started by an American and his wife. The main object is to improve
the breed of horses, cows, sheep, etc., and for this purpose stock is
being imported from the United States, whose Government has
recently supplied the necessary transport for horses, when this
difficulty of shipment arose with regard to animals already
purchased; a large number of sheep have already been imported
from Australia. Shansi is a suitable province for this experiment and
missionaries have already proved there the excellent results of
cross-breeding cows, obtaining supplies of milk of improved quality,
as well as largely-increased quantity. In a recent book on China,
highly recommended to me, an American writer states that there is
only one milk-giving cow in the Empire, and that tinned milk supplies
the rest, but evidently the traveller had not travelled far!
Another of the Governor’s institutions is a College of Agriculture
and Forestry in connexion with which there are many mulberry trees
being planted for the promotion of sericulture. This has never been
pursued with success in Shansi; hitherto only the commoner kinds of
silk have been produced, but it is considered a patriotic deed to
promote it, and the most exquisite and costly silk is now being made
in a disused temple, by Yen’s order. Perhaps the almost religious
way in which it was regarded in bygone times, when the Empress
herself took a ceremonial part in the rearing of silkworms 3,000
years ago, has caused this revival of schools of sericulture. I visited
one in the South, and after seeing all the processes was invited to
take a handful of worms away as a memento! Governor Yen has
sent 100 students to France to study textiles. Afforestation is
nowhere more needed than in Shansi, and it is to be hoped that the
Government will push this side of the work of the college. We found
such a college had been started in remote Kweichow also, cut off
from most of the new movements in China. Plantations had been
made in various parts, but they will need to be carefully guarded, as
the poverty of the inhabitants lead them to destroy ruthlessly every
twig they can for firewood; where there used to be large forests
nothing now remains of them. The genius of the Chinese race for
agriculture is so remarkable that one may well expect great results
from these colleges: the vast population has been able in the past to
produce food more or less according to its needs, but when there is
a dearth of rain, or other cause producing bad harvests, there is at
once terrible scarcity, and the application of Western knowledge and
agricultural implements ought to be of considerable value.
There are in some parts such as Chekiang as many as four
harvests per annum, and no sooner is one reaped than the land is
prepared for the next. The introduction of new trees, vegetables,
etc., would add greatly to the wealth of the country, and with its
unrivalled climate and soil there is every reason to promote the
multiplication of agricultural colleges.
One of the most noticeable changes in Taiyuanfu is the complete
absence of the beggar of hideous mien, who dogs the steps of
strangers in every other city in China, and who seems to be the most
immovable feature of life in the East. He was an integral part, one
had been taught to believe, of the social fabric, and as hallowed as
the very temple itself; yet Taiyuanfu has the glory of having solved
this difficult problem. All the male beggars have been collected into
the splendid old temple of Heaven and Hell to be taught a trade, so
as to be able to earn a living, and they are not dismissed until they
are capable of doing so. They seemed quite a jolly crew, and were
hard at work in various buildings, though others of these were closed
for the New Year. The most interesting part of the institution was the
town band which has been formed out of the younger part of the
beggar population. They were summoned to play for our
amusement, and they ended by playing for their own. The
performance was most creditable, especially considering that the
band was only seven months old; if there was some defect in tune,
there was an excellent sense of rhythm, which I have found lacking
in many bands of long standing at home; and it was really fascinating
to see the gusto with which they all played. The band has already
taken part in various town functions, and is making itself useful. The
music is, of course, Western, as are the instruments. Chinese
musical instruments do not give enough sound, as a rule, for large
gatherings.
The rules of the workhouse seem good, and the inmates can earn
money (five dollars per month) so as to have something in hand
when they leave. The women’s department is in another part of the
city and we had not time to visit it. It is very noticeable how the
temples are being everywhere used for such useful purposes, for the
housing question is here, as at home, a serious problem. No doubt it
would be good from a practical point of view that these buildings
should be replaced by new ones, built for the purpose, but the loss of
beauty would be incalculable. The temple of Heaven and Hell has
glorious turquoise-blue roofs and handsome tiles and large
medallions of green pottery on the walls. It is the most beautiful of all
the temples, in my opinion, though the Imperial Temple, where the
Dowager Empress stayed on her historic flight to Sianfu, is also very
fine. This is now used as a school for the teaching of the new script,
which is a simplified form of the Chinese character. It was devised in
1918 by the Ministry of Education in order to make literacy easier for
the population. The ordinary Chinese boy takes three or four years
longer than the Western boy to learn to read. When the old system
of education was abolished in 1907 a new one had to be devised,
but it is an extremely difficult thing to carry out such a reform
throughout so vast an empire. Governor Yen Hsi-Shan is an ardent
promoter of the scheme, and he has established the school for the
express purpose of promoting it. Every household in Taiyuanfu is
required to send at least one member to study the script; in order to
make it easier, there are a few characters, with their equivalent in the
old script, put up outside many of the shops, so that people may
learn it as they go about their business. Not only so, but all over the
city may be seen notice boards with the two scripts in parallel
columns, and these boards have generally some one studying them,
not infrequently with notebook in hand. Many of the schools are
teaching it, but it is difficult to add this to an already well-filled time-
table. It may be of interest to know that it is “a phonetic system
containing thirty-nine symbols (divided into three denominations, viz.
twenty-four initials, three medials and twelve finals).”—North China
Daily News.
This is one part of an important movement for the unification of the
language, the importance of which can only be fully realized by those
who have travelled widely in China. Not only every province varies
from every other province, but also every district from every other
district. There are sixty-four dialects in Fukien alone. The unification
of the Empire would be greatly promoted by the unification of the
language, and this has been frankly recognized by the Ministry of
Education, which has issued a notice to that effect:
“We recognize that because of the difference between our
classical and spoken language, education in the schools makes slow
progress, and the keen edge of the spirit of union both between
individuals and in society at large has thereby been blunted.
Moreover, if we do not take prompt steps to make the written and the
spoken language the same quickly, any plans for developing our
civilization will surely fail.
“This Ministry of Education has for several years made positive
advances in promoting such a National Language. All educationists,
moreover, throughout the country are in favour of a change by which
the teaching of the national spoken language shall take the place of
the classical language. Inasmuch, therefore, as all desire to promote
education in the National Language, we deem it wise not to delay
longer in the matter.
“We therefore now order that from the autumn of this current year,
beginning in the primary schools for the first and second years, all
shall be taught the National Spoken Language, rather than the
National Classical Language. Thus the spoken and written
languages will become one. This Ministry requests all officials to take
notice and act accordingly.”
It is not sufficient, as we all know, merely to issue such an order.
Governor Yen has taken various practical ways of enforcing it.
Posters with large script characters have been widely set up,
exhorting the people to study the script, and a daily paper is issued
in it. He has had 2,500,000 copies printed of a simple script primer,
and has published at a nominal price, and in vast numbers, various
educational books, such as What the People Ought to Know,[13]
New Criminal Laws of the Republic, and Handbook for Village
Leaders. The last-named is of special importance in view of the fact
that by his order reading- and lecture-rooms have been established
in all the cities and large villages of the province, where lectures and
talks are given from time to time on various subjects of interest to the
people. A regular educational campaign may be said to have been
inaugurated by Yen. On every post and wall in the remotest villages
may be seen maxims inculcating honesty, diligence, industry,
patriotism and military preparedness.
Temple of Heaven and Hell, Workhouse.
Page 53
An important new book which Governor Yen has recently

published, is called What Every Family Ought to Know, and is a
description of what he conceives to be a good home and the
happiness which results from it. “If we desire to have a good home,
virtue is of first importance,” he says, but alas! he gives no clue as to
how it is to be achieved.
The chief rules for family life are, (i) Friendliness, (ii) Magnanimity,
(iii) Dignity, (iv) Rectitude, (v) Diligence, (vi) Economy, (vii)
Cleanliness, (viii) Quietness. He makes the Head of the House
responsible, as setting the example, and exhorts him to repentance
(if he falls short) before God and his ancestors. The whole book is
eminently practical, and he recommends what would be a startling
change of immemorial custom, that the son should not marry until he
is grown up and able to support a wife in a home of his own—
namely, not under his father’s roof. This is an innovation which is
beginning to be seen elsewhere, as the result of foreign intercourse.
As a writer, Governor Yen is concise and practical: he has
completely broken away from the old Chinese classical style. His last
work is written, like all his books, in simple mandarin instead of in
beautiful classical mandarin, so that every one may be able to
understand it. This is the more noteworthy, because the additional
cost entailed was $5,400 per leaf; he states this fact in the preface of
What the People Ought to Know.
His one object appears to be the uplift of the people in every way,
and he believes in God and in righteousness. As an index of his view
of life it may be interesting to quote a few of the forty Family Maxims
which form the concluding chapter of his above-named book.
“Unjust wealth brings calamity.”

“Vitiated air kills more people than prison.”
“To be cruel to one’s own is to be worse than a beast.”
“Of people who lack a sense of responsibility—the fewer
the better.”
“If your conscience tells you a thing is wrong, it is wrong:
don’t do it.”
“The experience of the uneducated is much to be preferred
to the inexperience of the educated.”
“The wise are self-reliant, the stupid apply to others.”
“There is no greater calamity than to give reins to one’s
desires, and no greater evil than self-deception.”
Governor Yen, it will be seen, from his words as well as from his
deeds, is a clear-sighted, independent thinker, and he believes in
religious liberty. His reforms deal with a wide range of things—
opium-smoking, narcotics, polygamy, infanticide, early marriages,
early burial, gambling, training and morals of the troops, compulsory
free education for boys, the introduction of uniform weights and
measures, alteration in legal affairs. All these and other matters have
within the last five years occupied his thoughts and been practically
dealt with—no small achievement, especially when the insecurity of
his position and lack of trained men to carry out his projects is taken
into consideration.
As will be readily understood, all these enterprises cost money,
and taxation is never looked on kindly by the taxed, so there is some
discontent among the people of Shansi, and the Central
Government, instead of showing satisfaction at the prosperity and
good government of the province, which is in striking contrast to that
of so many others, has taken the opportunity of threatening to
impose a Civil Governor in Shansi—that means a heavy squeeze,
and in consequence, the stoppage of many of the Governor’s
schemes. He is continually threatened by those who would like to
see him out of the way, and is consequently rarely seen, and then
strongly guarded.
The system of having military governors is extremely bad, but in
the case of an exceptional man like Yen it has worked well, and the
Government saved its “face” by uniting the civil and military
governorship in his one person. At the present time the Government
has ordered the military governor of Shensi to retire in favour of
another Tuchun. He refuses to do so, and his various military friends
are all hurrying to the rescue. It is estimated that there are one and a
half million soldiers in China, largely unpaid, so that they are glad of
any excuse to loot and pillage. Feng Yu Hsiang has been sent up to
Shensi by the Government to compel the Tuchun to leave, and has
carried out the work with brilliant success. He has in vain been
demanding money to pay his troops, while turbulent, unscrupulous
generals have been receiving large sums to prevent them from
committing excesses.
The Tuchuns have been encouraging opium-growing in order to
get funds, and now there is hardly a province where it is not done
more or less openly. Governor Yen has set his face against it, but
smuggling goes on all the time, mainly from Japan, and morphia is
also becoming increasingly popular. No wonder Young China is
clamouring for the suppression of the Tuchuns and disarmament:
there can be no peace in China till this is done.
One of the most interesting places in the city is the model gaol,
which was planned and carried out by Mr. Hsü, who studied in Japan
and has progressive views. It covers a considerable space of ground
and is entirely one-storied; it is in the shape of a wheel, with many
spokes radiating from the centre. The entrance is charming, as
unlike as it is possible to imagine to any English prison. Within the
gates is a lovely garden, for Chinese are first-rate gardeners, and the
prisoners raise all the vegetables necessary for the inmates, and a
grand show of flowers to boot. An avenue of trees leads to the
offices, and when we were there in February we saw beautiful little
trees of prunus in full bloom on the office table! All the prisoners
have to work at useful trades, and if it were not for their fetters it
would be difficult to imagine one was in a prison at all. The
workshops were bright and airy; every one looked well cared for and
not unhappy. A feature of the workrooms was the boards on which
all tools were hung up when not in use, each tool being numbered
and outlined on the board, so that it should be hung on its own peg.
Every kind of trade was in full swing, and the work is so well
executed that there is never any lack of orders. Certainly one would
be only too glad to have things made under such good conditions.
The sleeping accommodation was excellent: the cells and beds of
remarkable cleanliness and comfort; no one could object to them.
The bath-house was of some interest. All the inmates have to
undergo a weekly bath on Sundays, in batches of ten at a time, and
their clothes are also kept thoroughly clean. The kitchen looked most
attractive, and the rice and soup, which form the staple of their food,
compared favourably with what one sees in the inns. The prisoners,
too, are allowed as much as they like at their two daily meals.
Throughout the Army there are no more than two meals a day. The
place of punishment looked uncommonly like a theatre stage, and
one cannot but hope that soon all executions will take place within
the prison precincts instead of in public; but as Europe has not yet
learnt to do this, one cannot be surprised that China has not.
After inspecting the Delco Engine, which provides light for the
whole place, we went to visit the women’s prison, which is within the
same enclosure as the men’s, though separated by a wall. It was
very much smaller in extent but equally well kept, and even, I must
add, attractive. The matron was a pleasant-faced, comely woman,
and her own room quite a picture. The white-curtained bed, pretty
coverlet, vase of flowers, and various little treasures suggested a
home, and as she took us round, it was easy to see that she was
happy in her work. We passed through the dining-room, where the
tables were spread with clean cloths, and bowls and chopsticks were
ready for the forthcoming meal. The prisoners were only about thirty
in number, and were busy making mattresses and clothing, knitting
and crocheting. It was suggested that they should sing a hymn,
which they did with evident pleasure, and some of them talked with
the missionary, who comes to see them once a week. The matron is
not a Christian, but finds the singing and reading does them so much
good that she has taken to learning and to teaching them herself.
The missionaries were originally invited by the master to come and
speak to the prisoners, and it is now a regular custom. One woman
who is in for murder has become quite a changed character, and her
term has been shortened in consequence of her good behaviour.
Some were in for opium-smoking, which is here a punishable
offence, while in other parts of the empire it is frankly encouraged.
The prisoners are allowed to have a visitor once a month, but no
complaints are allowed to be made. Visits are stopped if this

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O xford Keynotes reimagines the canons of

vi Series Editor’s Introduction

T hank you to Laurie Anderson for her communi-

I was asked to come and give a talk at a country club in front

Thanks are also due to those who hosted my Big Science

FINDING THE NOW IN

Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut LP, Big Science, opens as if her

2 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 3

4 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

Born to an affluent and large Chicago family, Laurie

I used to use myself as subject matter pretty much—​personal

To this effect, some critics (all of them men) have, with

FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 5

6 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 7

1. “It’s My Party,” Dave Stewart with Barbara Gaskin

8 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

With the large Warner Brothers advance, she renovated

FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 9

It’s easy to grasp Anderson’s frustration with those who re-

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 11

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 13

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 15

TOO BIG TO FAIL

The landscape of Big Science sprawls, mythic and sublime.

Too Big to Fail 17

Notice how Weinberg writes about time: in this quote,

18 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

Too Big to Fail 19

Knowledge too big to be known bears troubling implica-

20 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

If I can find a mapping between its representational system

Too Big to Fail 21

22 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

Being social animals, we notice big complexity most readily

Too Big to Fail 23

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Too Big to Fail 25

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vi Series Editor’s Introduction

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 3

4 LAURIE ANDERSON’S BIG SCIENCE

I used to use myself as subject matter pretty much—personal

FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 5

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 7

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 9

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 11

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FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE 13

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Too Big to Fail 17

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Too Big to Fail 19

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Too Big to Fail 21

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Too Big to Fail 23

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Describing Side One 31

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Fig ure 3. 1 Pitch reduction of Big Science.

Describing Side One 33

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