Laurie Anderson

Sunset over Lower Manhattan, cool June breezes from the East River, a bevy of songbirds swirling above in the summer sky… What do these images & sensations conjure? Last night, friends & I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing a mesmerizing (and free!) concert by Laurie Anderson at NYCs Castle Clinton in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan in which this Awesome Woman of the Day collaborated with a fellow musician, Bill Laswell, for a night of improvisational & deeply-felt beats and melodies.

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born 5 June 1947) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, is an influential American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. She graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance-art piece—a symphony played on automobile horns—was performed in 1969. In the early 1970s, she worked as an art instructor, as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum and illustrated children's books.

Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased, or were only issued in limited quantities. In 1978, Anderson performed at The Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.

She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. She also hosted the PBS series Alive from Off-Center during this time, for which she produced the short film What You Mean We? Personally, I have been a fan of hers since a friend from college made me a mix tape, which I still play, that introduced me to her single, Big Science, and the album with the same name.

Anderson is a unique pioneer in electronical music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds. In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first artist-in-residence, which inspired her performance piece, The End of the Moon. The single "Sharkey's Day" was for many years the theme song of Lifetime Television.

Anderson married uber-cool singer/songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed (of The Velvet Underground fame) in 2008. Who would have thought that two of the most unorthodox icons in avant garde music, longtime live-in couple Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, would ever get hitched? The unconventional pair tied the knot after decades of living together in a private ceremony. Since the latter part of the 1990s, Anderson and Lou Reed have collaborated on a number of recordings together. Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her "outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to humankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life."

Last June, Laurie Anderson debuted her original "Music for Dogs" composition outside the Sydney Opera House on . Anderson - who often plays music for her rat terrier Lollabelle - said the idea originated during a chat with cellist Yo-Yo Ma while the two were waiting backstage at a graduation ceremony. Hundreds of dogs and their owners bounced around as Anderson entertained them with 20 minutes of thumping beats, whale calls, whistles and a few high-pitched electronic sounds imperceptible to human ears. What will she think of next…?

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Hildegard of Bingen

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) A writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama.

Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Women's History

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Hildegard was born of noble parents and was educated at the Benedictine cloister of Disibodenberg by Jutta, an anchorite and sister of the count of Spanheim. Hildegard was 15 years old when she began wearing the Benedictine habit and pursuing a religious life. She succeeded Jutta as prioress in 1136

Hildegard was born a "10"th child (a tithe) to a noble family. As was customary with the tenth child, which the family could not count on feeding, she was dedicated at birth to the church. The girl started to have visions of luminous objects at the age of tree, but soon realized she was unique in this ability and hid this gift for many years.

At a time when few women wrote, she wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and arguably the oldest surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature Illuminations.

When few women were accorded respect, she was consulted by and advised bishops, popes, and kings.

At age 8, the family sent this strange girl to an anchoress named Jutta to receive a religious education. Jutta was born into a wealthy and prominent family, and by all accounts was a young woman of great beauty. She spurned all worldly temptations and decided to dedicate her life to god. Instead of entering a convent, Jutta followed a harsher route and became an anchoress. Anchors of both sexes, though from most accounts they seem to be largely women, led an ascetic life, shut off from the world inside a small room, usually built adjacent to a church so that they could follow the services, with only a small window acting as their link to the rest of humanity. Food would be passed through this window and refuse taken out. Most of the time would be spent in prayer, contemplation, or solitary handworking activities, like stitching and embroidering. Because they would become essentially dead to the world, anchors would receive their last rights from the bishop before their confinement in the anchorage. This macabre ceremony was a complete burial ceremony with the anchor laid out on a bier.

Hildegard's writings are also unique for their generally positive view of sexual relations and her description of pleasure from the point of view of a woman. They might also contain the first description of the female orgasm.

'When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man's seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman's sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can old something enclosed in his fist. '

‎"The soul is a breath of living spirit, that with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life. Just so, the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it." 

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