Abstract

The Last Trumpet

Alarming is not the only way music can respond to an emergency such as the nuclear arms race. Laurie Anderson has served on the board of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, and much of her music has a deliberate nuclear-age stiffness. In "Finnish Farmers," from her five-time-zone set United States Live, she plays a shrill electric-violin solo that rises and falls like a siren's wail and is, naturally, alarming. Before the solo she recites, in the horrid stylized inflection she shares with Lucinda Childs, a text about Finnish farmers firing into holes in the snow made by invading Russians whose parachutes have failed, and about Mid-western farmers informed that some of the grain silos in their neighborhood are going to house missiles, possibly linked by a subterranean railroad.