Shutter Island (2017)
I. Shutter Island
II. Crystal
III. Airy

Laurie Anderson
(b. 1947)

Composed for
50 For The Future:
The Kronos Learning
Repertoire

About the work

Laurie Anderson’s first collaboration with Kronos Quartet centered on the experience of loss. Her mordant, wry, and disquieting account of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy became the emotional core of the Grammy-nominated 2018 album Landfall (Nonesuch), though she started writing and performing with Kronos a year before the epic 2012 storm. Somehow, after decades of moving in overlapping creative circles, Anderson and Kronos carved out time for an extended sojourn as her life took a series of wrenching turns. The resulting song cycle is unlike anything else in Anderson’s vast, variegated, and endlessly entertaining oeuvre.

Over more than four decades, Anderson has created radically inviting works that encompass songs and recitation, soundtracks and literary meditations, solo performances, and multimedia installations. An inventor who has thrived using cutting edge technologies, she’s recorded bona fide pop hits (particularly 1981’s “O Superman”) and served as NASA’s first artist-in-residence. It was only a matter of time before she joined forces with Kronos.

“We’ve been on the same circuit for decades, waving as our buses passed,” Anderson says. “It surprised all of us that we’d never done anything before. It was great fun coming up with things. I’d write phrases, and they’d play them and improvise and I’d work with the improvisation. It wasn’t like I was sitting in my studio and handed them the complete score. This really was a collaboration.”

In many ways, Anderson’s Shutter Island is an outpost that extends the singular Landfall odyssey. Commissioned as part of Kronos’ Fifty for the Future initiative and premiered March 17, 2017 at the Ecstatic Music Festival at The Greene Space at WNYC/WQXR, the piece carries Anderson’s unmistakable DNA. Skittish and insistent, incantatory and beatific, Shutter Island offers fresh insight into the capacious creative universe of an artist whose search for new sounds and textures has led to fantastical destinations.

“Some of the experimenting that Kronos did with Laurie influenced the writing, but just how that influence manifested itself, I’m not sure,” says Kronos’ David Harrington. “I can recognize some of the licks as things that we were close to in the early improvising that we explored for Landfall. She recorded everything we did, and then she’d go through and mine and refine phrases. I think she used a little bit of that process here.”

For Harrington, Shutter Island embodies the Fifty for the Future ideal in offering string quartets a portal into Anderson’s universe “and the way she arrives at ideas,” he says. “There are so many adventures that we get to have that other groups are never going experience unless we find a way of sharing.” As for the title, Anderson avers that it has nothing to do with Dennis Lahane’s 2003 novel or the 2010 film directed by Martin Scorsese. “The words just got picked out of a dictionary,” she says. “It has nothing to do with anything. I still like the middle movement. The others I like technically, but the middle I can dream into.”

Andy Gilbert