Every now and again, Ictus provides some dramaturgical context for our good friend Brussels Philharmonic.

For this concert, that focuses on Richard Strauss and the question of Heroism, we suggested a lecture by philosopher Anton Jäger and, as support act, a cover of Laurie Anderson's famous hit "O Superman".

Here is the programme note written for this occasion.
      

Laurie Anderson

O Superman (For Massenet), 1981

Kelly Poukens, María Gil Muñoz: voices
Jean-Luc Plouvier: keyboards and arrangement
    

NOTE

O Superman is part of the great multimedia cycle “United States”. This eight-hour show, composed and performed by Laurie Anderson, premiered in Brooklyn forty years ago in 1983. It made its mark on its time, and the memory of it is still vivid. The composition is both monumental as well as an ostensible bricolage of various elements – video and still images, avant-garde and pop music, spoken text, gestural performance and playful electronics. The film of the show plays in a loop as part of the permanent collection at MoMA in New York. The song “O Superman” is a fine example of an unexpected encounter between a daring work of art and the collective imagination. This pure product of experimental art issues and practices, miraculously found itself at the top of the American and European charts when it was released in 1981. This took the record label that had released the 45 completely by surprise making it hastily reprint tens of thousands of copies of the unlikely hit!

Its bewitching charm lies in a series of ambiguities that were the subject of a long study by musicologist Susan McClary in her essay “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality” – one of the most widely read and controversial manifestos of American Cultural Studies. The ambiguity between the gentle maternal voice and the robotic Vocoder voice; the delicate, monotonous swaying between two almost interchangeable chords (a barely binary harmonic situation that seems to make a mockery of all the codes of classical harmony, one might say) – McClary uses all this to demonstrate brilliantly that music, however "universal" it may be, can occasionally convey ideology, and gender ideology in particular, through its own grammar. We were reminded of this when proposing a counterpoint to Richard Strauss's heroic and very virile symphonic poems...

The text of “O Superman” is a subtle, poisoned poem that switches between false leads, twists and turns. It opens with a delightful humorous passage: it seems that Superman's mother wants to check in and leave a message on her hero son's answering machine. Superman has to deal with a mother hen: what a comical spin! But "Mom's" voice soon changes its nature. It becomes The Voice itself, a disturbing figure of the Other, at once gentle, insinuating and anonymous: "Well, you don't know me, but I know you". On Superman's answering machine, The Voice then insists on leaving a very specific message: "Get ready, here come the planes, the American planes". The listener readily understands that Mom's voice may be nothing more than the voice of America itself, the vague patriotism that remains "when justice is gone":

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms, in your automatic arms, your electronic arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.

The subtitle of the work ("For Massenet") points out that the first words of the song

O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad

refer to one of Rodrigue's arias in Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid, based on Corneille – a bravura piece for tenor that enjoyed extraordinary popularity in the late 19th century. Rodrigue addresses God on the eve of a battle – which he believes he will lose, but ultimately wins in the end – using terms that interweave heroism, filial piety and guilt (the famous virile melancholy studied by Judith Butler):

O sovereign, O judge, O father,
always veiled, always present,
I worshipped thee in prosperous times,
and blessed thee in dark days.

Well, Richard Strauss, hero of German music,
full of incomparable virtues and discreet sins,
you won't be the only one speaking tonight!

With love,
Jean-Luc Plouvier

LYRICS

   
O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad
Hi, I'm not home right now
But if you wanna leave a message
Just start talking at the sound of the tone
Hello? This is your Mother
Are you there?
Are you coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home?
Well, you don't know me, but I know you
And I've got a message to give to you
Here come the planes
So you better get ready, ready to go
You can come as you are, but pay as you go
Pay as you go
And I said, "Okay, who is this really?"
And the voice said
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
Here come the planes
They're American planes, made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said
"Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night
Shall stay these couriers from the swift completion
Of their appointed rounds"
'Cause when love is gone
There's always justice
And when justice is gone
There's always force
And when force is gone
There's always Mom, hi Mom
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
In your automatic arms, your electronic arms
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
Your petrochemical arms, your military arms
In your electronic arms

(Laurie Anderson)      
        

Jesse Dorris in Pitchfork magazine:

   
And so began Laurie Anderson’s own state of the union. The record of this eight-hour, two-night show—1984’s four-and-a-half-hour box set, United States Live—is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a bold federation of hobbyist tinkering and scientific wizardry, sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. [...] Anderson untangled Reagan’s knot of tech and hope and power and wove together an alternative form of patriotism, one that centers disorientation and finds authenticity in imagination. Along the way, she created an American masterpiece.
(Pitchfork, Music Website, Chicago, July 2021)
      

Susan McClary in Feminine Endings

    
"O Superman," the 1981 hit single from the extended work United States, is a good example of Anderson in deconstructive mode. [...] The musical constant in "O Superman" is a pedal on middle c on a single syllable: "ha ha ha." In performance, one watches as Anderson generates this sound and establishes its technological reiteration through a delay mechanism. It gives the impression of being expressively authentic, as though it exists outside of or prior to language, and it evokes powerful though contradictory affective responses; alternately it may be heard as sardonic laughter or as anxious, childish whimpering. It runs for the duration of the composition, changing only when it is thrown temporarily out of kilter through phasing. Its apparent shifts in meaning are due solely to context, for the sound itself is frozen into place electronically.
Two alternating chords inflect the pedal harmonically: an Ab major triad in first inversion and a root-position C minor triad. It is her dependence on such minimal musical materials that makes some musicians dismiss Anderson as unworthy of serious analytical discussion. But like many other aspects of Anderson's work, the music often is carefully organized in terms of austere binary oppositions, the kinds of oppositions that structuralists such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss revealed as lying at the foundations of Western thought and that post-structuralists have been concerned with deconstructing. The binary opposition she has chosen is not innocent, and as the piece unfolds we learn a good deal not only about "O Superman," but also about the premises of Western musical discourse and our own postmodern condition.

Anderson's piece is in some ways like a performed-out analytical reduction of the axes upon which many such tonal pieces turn. Nothing extraneous is present —she gives us only the binaries that underlie and inform the more complex narratives of the tonal repertory. But the fact that the hierarchical relationship between her two chords is undecidable means that there is not even the potential security of the tragic ending. We may not like Schubert's rejection of the pretty theme and the affirmation of brutal reality at the end of the "Unfinished" Symphony's first movement, but that ending at least confirms the necessity of dissonance resolving to consonance, or the inevitability of second themes yielding to first. The formidable metaphysics of tonality and sonata form win out over romantic illusion, and there is considerable security in knowing that something —even if that something is harsh and tyrannical—guarantees meaning.

Anderson's monologue causes us to map the alternations with certainty at first: Man/Machine, Home/Alienation, and so on. But then things become confused, as Mom becomes Machine, and the cliches of American patriotism become codes of totalitarian control. Finally we are left with the ambiguity of the initial sound and the undecidability of the binarisms.

(Susan McClary, Feminine Endings, University of Minnesota Press, 1991)

NOTE

O Superman fait partie du grand cycle multimedia United States. Ce spectacle long de huit heures, composé et interprété par Laurie Anderson, a été créé à Brooklyn il y a déjà quarante ans, en 1983. Il a marqué son temps, et la mémoire en est encore vive. À la fois monumental et ostensiblement « bricolé », il est composé de vidéos et d’images fixes, de musique d’avant-garde et de pop, de textes parlés, de performance gestuelle et d’électronique ludique. Le film du spectacle est aujourd’hui projeté en boucle dans le cadre de la collection permanente du MoMA à New York. La chanson O Superman constitue un très bel exemple d’une rencontre inopinée entre une œuvre d’art audacieuse et l’imaginaire collectif, là où on s’y attendait le moins. Car ce pur produit des pratiques et des préoccupations de l’art expérimental s’est miraculeusement retrouvé au sommet des charts américains et européens lors de sa sortie en 1981. La situation prit de court le label de disques qui en avait sorti le 45 tours, obligé de represser en toute hâte des dizaines de milliers d’exemplaires de l’improbable hit !

Son charme envoûtant tient en une série d’ambiguïtés qui ont fait l’objet d’une longue étude de la musicologue Susan McClary, dans son essai Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality — l’un des manifestes les plus lus et les plus controversés des Cultural Studies américaines. L’ambiguïté entre la douce voix maternelle et la voix robotique du Vocoder ; le délicat et monotone balancement entre deux accords presque semblables (une situation harmonique à peine binaire, pourrait-on dire, qui semble se moquer de tous les codes de l’harmonie classique), tout cela est pour McClary l’occasion de démontrer brillamment que la musique, si « universelle » soit-elle, peut à l’occasion véhiculer par sa propre grammaire de l’idéologie, et notamment de l’idéologie sur le genre. Nous nous en sommes rappelés lorsqu’il s’est agi de proposer un contrepoint aux héroïques et très virils poèmes symphoniques de Richard Strauss...

Les paroles d’O Superman constituent par ailleurs un subtil et vénéneux poème alternant les fausses pistes et les retournements. Il s’ouvre avec un humour délicieux : il semble que la mère de Superman veuille prendre des nouvelles et laisser un message sur le répondeur automatique de son héros de fils. Superman a affaire a une mère-poule : c’est un ressort comique ! Mais la voix de « Mom » change rapidement de nature. Elle devient bientôt La Voix tout court, une inquiétante figure de l’Autre, à la fois douce, insinuante et anonyme : « Well, you don't know me, but I know you ». Sur le répondeur de Superman, La Voix insiste ensuite pour laisser un message bien précis : « Prépare-toi, les avions arrivent (Here come the planes), les avions américains ». L’auditeur comprend alors que la voix de Mom n’est peut-être rien d’autre que la voix de l’Amérique elle-même, le vague patriotisme qui demeure « lorsque la justice s’en est allée » :

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms, in your automatic arms, your electronic arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.

Le sous-titre de l’oeuvre (« For Massenet ») vient pointer que les premiers mots de la chanson

O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad

font référence à l’un des airs de Rodrigue dans l’opéra Le Cid de Jules Massenet, d’après Corneille, un morceau de bravoure pour ténor qui connut à la fin du 19e siècle une extraordinaire popularité. Rodrigue s’adresse à Dieu à la veille d’un combat — qu’il croit qu’il va perdre, mais qu’il gagnera finalement —, en des termes où s’entrecroisent héroïsme, piété filiale et culpabilité (la fameuse mélancolie virile qu’a étudié Judith Butler) :

O souverain, ô juge, ô père,
toujours voilé, présent toujours,
je t'adorais au temps prospère,
et te bénis aux sombres jours.

Eh bien, Richard Strauss, héros de la musique allemande,
tout plein de tes incomparable vertus et de tes discrets péchés,
tu ne seras pas ce soir la seule à parler !

With love,
Jean-Luc Plouvier
     

LYRICS

   
O Superman
O Judge
O Mom and Dad
Hi, I'm not home right now
But if you wanna leave a message
Just start talking at the sound of the tone
Hello? This is your Mother
Are you there?
Are you coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home?
Well, you don't know me, but I know you
And I've got a message to give to you
Here come the planes
So you better get ready, ready to go
You can come as you are, but pay as you go
Pay as you go
And I said, "Okay, who is this really?"
And the voice said
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
Here come the planes
They're American planes, made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said
"Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night
Shall stay these couriers from the swift completion
Of their appointed rounds"
'Cause when love is gone
There's always justice
And when justice is gone
There's always force
And when force is gone
There's always Mom, hi Mom
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
In your automatic arms, your electronic arms
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms
Your petrochemical arms, your military arms
In your electronic arms

(Laurie Anderson)