Program #108, June 13 2002: Harnessings of the sacred series, part I / 20th-century theatre pieces series, part XVII: Poul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale.

Originally, I thought it would be better to start off this series with some more general type of program, one that would set up large-scale questions I could then address from different angles over the next few weeks. In the end I decided against this, and in favor of beginning with a more specific type of program -- one centered on Poul Ruders' opera version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the story of a woman adrift in a harshly dystopian near-future theocracy erected on the ashes of the former United States.

I can think of three main reasons for choosing to do so.

There were purely programmatic reasons: I'd been wanting to play Ruders for a while, and it was a natural fit for this series, but in order to balance it off musically and thematically against all the other pieces I wanted to include, things worked out best if I started with it. (And I was also attracted by the idea of segueing to Ruders from Ryuichi Sakamoto's soundtrack for the film version of Tale, which we examined last week during the last of three soundtrack programs. The segue worked especially well, because the coolly eclectic Ruders -- one of the best in some time at the art of telling stories by juxtaposing styles and compositional schemes in a kind of macrocompositional framework -- claims to have composed the opera as if he was directing a film, and it shows in the great sense of narrative drive embedded in his music.)

I suppose it also came somewhat naturally to me to begin from an examination of a fundamentalist Christian milieu, since I was raised in such a milieu myself. Of course, my background was not nearly as harsh as the Republic of Gilead, the antifeminist, ultraconservative dystopia the US has become in Atwood's novel (Baptists are hunted as dissidents there!), and it has been a long time since I was directly involved with it. Nevertheless, whatever thoughts I have about spiritual matters continue to be influenced, for fair or foul, by my own religious background, so it makes sense that I would commence this series with a piece touching on some of the same themes and content.

That leads to the last reason it occurred to me to begin with Tale. One of the objects of this series is to explore ambiguous territory for which I don't claim to have answers, territory toward which the music will point but not map in final form. I certainly don't advocate the heinous deeds that occur in the Republic of Gilead, and have just as certainly cast my spiritual lot elsewhere than with Christian fundamentalism -- but it is well to remember that fundamentalist ideals (whether Christian versions or Islamic versions or whatever) appeal to so many in part because they enshrine institutions and ideals of great importance to those many: family, community, hope, struggle against that which is perceived to oppress, freedom from fear and adversity, the stuff of life itself. Whether we agree with the particular answers provided is beside the point I'm making here, as is the question of whether those answers can be twisted to bad ends. Rather, the fact that those institutions and ideals are so enshrined means that they are, perhaps, the truly sacred things, rather than the theological abstractions that stand for them -- the things that people will strive to protect, even to the point of harming others, or restricting them in ways those others might find odious. (Note how Tale encodes many ironies demonstrating its awareness of this issue -- for example, the central character's mother initially voices some support for the fundamentalists, because her hardline feminist orientation that pornography is necessarily degrading to women leads her to laud the fundamentalists' suppression of access to pornography.) And this creates a useful zone for beginning to rethink our own notions of what is sacred. How do we decide who threatens what in our lives, and why, and in what context? Which of these things do we hold so dear as to render them de facto sacred? What will we do to protect those things? The rulers of Gilead had answers to those questions. What are ours? Why?

We started off with a short piece for guitar by Mr. Ruders, who is an essentially self-taught Danish composer rapidly moving onto the map of interesting new voices. We then moved on to the main work of the evening, an opera which is even now beginning to be staged in North America (the US premiere is slated for Minnesota in spring 2003) -- I look forward to its deserved entry in the contemporary opera repertoire.