Program #109, June 20 2002: Harnessings of the sacred series, part II: Sexuality, sacredness, and love.

On the heels of last week's examination of a theocratic, sexually repressive dystopia, this week we examined a seeming reversal of the equation: music concerned with entanglements of sexuality, sacredness, and love. But it was not quite as simple as that, for two reasons.

First, this program's selections actually represented a progressive segue away from last week's The Handmaid's Tale. Hindemith's Sancta Susanna -- a tale of a nun gone bad, left over from some rather non-Hindemithian early musical experimentations based on Expressionist literature -- brings together religious ecstasy with sexual obsession in the context of normative sequestration away from sensuality, not a very distant leap from the repressions of the Republic of Gilead. Stockhausen's Stimmung (a repeat from my 2001 Valentine's Day program) continues the linkage of sexual ecstasy with spiritual expansion, but makes it cosmic and panhuman by bringing names of deities and demiurges from many cultures into the palette of vocal effects that form the backdrop for Stockhausen's occasional snippets of erotic poetry. The constantly shifting vocal effects themselves form a quasi-amniotic, pre-Oedipal feeling that implicitly connects spirituality to the ego-dissolution of love, while suggesting that sexuality is a kind of distillate of that undifferentiated connection. Hovhaness' Majnun Symphony, a realization of the story of Majnun and Layla ("the Persian Romeo and Juliet"), comes at these ideas from another angle, by focusing explicitly on the linkage between spiritual ecstasy and the idealization of one's Beloved. By juxtaposing these three pieces in this order, concern with religious ecstasy and feelings of numinousness was held somewhat constant, while allowing conceptions of how sexuality and love might be related to them to instantiate a continuous segue spanning the entire program.

However, I suspect these three pieces are far from exhausting the possible viewpoints on these matters. Consider, for example, that all these composers are male, and consider next that all of the tropes residing at the centers of their works can be viewed as importing various problematic presumptions, from the pedestal to the Madonna/whore complex to compulsory heterosexuality. (I'm not saying these composers necessarily embrace these presumptions -- merely that their work can be seen to be informed by them, most likely on nonconscious levels. And yes, I purposely started off with an "appropriate" (?) Madonna pop tune -- but even she has been accused of simply appropriating masculinist discourses for her own ends, for fair or foul, so the presence of her work does not by itself necessarily validate whatever problematic presumptions we may find connected with the larger works' views of spiritual matters.) Other such criticisms could doubtlessly be made. I had originally thought to try to include a more diversely socially positioned group of viewpoints on this program's topic, but ultimately decided it might be more interesting to focus on some very common approaches to matters of sexuality and the sacred, and attempt to problematize them a bit -- if only to highlight the fact that these approaches are so common, and to contest the degree to which their embedded presumptions might become normalized through lack of attention to them. And, frankly, I also wanted to highlight the fact that these approaches in general remain compelling to so many, including myself... a function no doubt configured in part by my own positioning in the big grid of social relations, among other things.