In the opening of Laurie Anderson’s newest performance, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, 1999, a single shaft of light illuminates a large, black-bound book, its pages turning and fluttering. Although Anderson observes in her program note that only “approximately ten percent” of Melville’s novel appears in her piece, she does faithfully retell the tale of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale. Anderson’s efforts to capture the novel’s atmosphere noticeably affected her musical style: Much of the score is in the form of sea shanty–like songs for three male voices singing in