Laurie Anderson publishes “Amelia”, a work about the US aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. Her fight for equal rights is incorporated into it.
One capriol too many: Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) Photo: Globe Photos/imago
When the pilot and aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart boarded her Lockheed 10-E Electra propeller plane on May 21, 1937, she had big plans: the 39-year-old American wanted to be the first person to circumnavigate the earth along the equator. The 40,000-kilometer route would initially take Earhart and her navigator from Miami through the Caribbean and along the east coast of South America.
The preparations were bumpy, a first record attempt had been aborted and the high-profile dangers of the undertaking put the famous pilot under additional pressure. In 1928, while still a passenger, she was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a non-stop flight, and four years later she was the first woman to fly solo.
The daring undertaking in the spring of 1937 ended tragically. After three quarters of the route had been successfully completed, radio contact was lost on July 2nd and the Electra and its crew were lost in the Pacific.
Thorough discussion
A year and a half later, Earhart was declared dead. Her life story has inspired wild theories about the plane crash as well as numerous films and songs. The most thorough musical treatment of her last flight comes from the musician Laurie Anderson, who was born in Illinois in 1947.
Laurie Anderson: „Amelia“ (Nonesuch/Warner)
The American artist is now releasing an album with music from this project. In the form of 22 miniatures, Anderson recounts Earhart’s last flight in “Amelia”. The project was initiated decades ago by the American composer Dennis Russell Davies as a commissioned work on the subject of flight.
For the studio recordings, Davies himself conducts the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, which provides the onomatopoeic soundscape for Anderson’s warm narrative voice. The request to collaborate with Anderson was not a coincidence, as she has repeatedly dealt artistically with themes such as flying, space travel and weightlessness.
NASA’s first art fellow
“Excellent Birds,” for example, is a great duet with Peter Gabriel, recorded in 1984 for a video installation by media artist Nam June Paik that was broadcast via satellite TV. In 2002, Anderson was the first art fellow of the US space agency NASA, and during this time she developed “The End of the Moon,” a mixture of travelogue and experimental soundscape similar to the new album.
Anderson also made an artistic contribution to the ceremony marking the closure of Berlin’s Tegel Airport in 2020 with the virtual reality work “To The Moon”. In April 2024, an asteroid in space was finally named after her.
Career aspiration: Pilot
It is therefore not surprising that she is enthusiastic about Earhart’s life’s work. Even as a teenager, the pilot insisted on her career choice and defied all social conventions. As her fame grew, she devoted herself to aviation as a women’s rights activist and demanded equal rights in aviation and engineering.
Earhart’s rebellious attitude, her sense of style and her affinity for technology, as well as her calculated handling of the media trappings, make her seem like an early kindred spirit of Laurie Anderson. Despite her roots in art and experimentation, Anderson was never afraid of pop aesthetics and entertainment culture. She affectionately refers to Earhart as “the first blogger”. Anderson condensed the text material for the album from Earhart’s extensive diary entries.
Visionary artist with a connection to space: Laurie Anderson Photo: Ebru Yildiz
“Amelia” begins with engine noises, then takes a turn towards repetitive minimal music loops and, as Anderson’s friendly narrative begins, suddenly sounds like an encyclopedia entry being read out loud, before lurching string legatos anticipate the tragic end of the story.
Audible amazement
“Amelia” follows the events of the fateful flight in chronological order, based on Earhart’s notes and delivered with Laurie Anderson’s typical enthusiastic attitude, which, even in the face of adversity, always expresses itself as audible amazement at the world in all its diversity.
Dramatic circumstances during the journey, such as heat and hunger and technical problems, are expressed more through the music, which becomes threateningly intense without tipping over into film music background clichés.
It gets a little kitschy at times, but the individual pieces are so short and varied and the lyrics so pointed that the album concept never strays far from its protagonist. Anderson switches seamlessly between narrative and narrated roles, she doesn’t dramatize or speculate, thus preserving her character’s dignity.
Relaxed, informative, touching
Earhart herself also has her say: “This Modern World” contains original recordings from her 1935 radio lecture “A Woman’s Place in Science”. Somewhere between a radio play feature, a tongue-in-cheek variation on the supposedly female genre of a women’s travel journal, and film music, Anderson and her colleagues have succeeded in creating a work that is as relaxed as it is informative and touching.
“Amelia” celebrates crossing boundaries in both the literal and figurative sense, celebrating emancipation and the belief in the positive potential of progress and science. It seems all the more paradoxical that Laurie Anderson recently attracted attention again through her support of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) boycott campaign.
In January 2024, she decided not to take up a professorship at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. The artist had already supported the content of the “Letter against Apartheid” that led to her break with the university in 2021 and in 2018, during the wrangling over the invitation and withdrawal of the band Young Fathers to the Ruhrtriennale, she publicly sided with the campaign that wants to isolate Israeli artists and scientists and relies on a policy of intimidation to do so.
No world improvement art
“Amelia” is not an activist album, just as Anderson has never used her art as a way of teaching about improving the world, but has always dealt with political and socially critical content in a way that is open to different perspectives and forms of perception. Her support of BDS marks a contrast to where Anderson herself draws the boundaries of her willingness to engage in dialogue.
This does not detract from her importance as one of the most important media artists of the last decades, but it resonates in an album that addresses the desire for freedom and the visionary achievement of a woman who did not want to accept social restrictions and a static view of the world.
