“It’s almost impossible to tell a story through instrumental music,” says composer Patricia Morehead. Such attempts usually “come across as trite coloristic effects.” Yet she’s named her latest piece, a composition for two pianos, after Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist allegory in which women are forced to become breeders for those rendered sterile by the toxic environment. When she read the book ten years ago, Morehead says, she felt “helpless outrage” at the prospect of chemical and nuclear contamination in the near future. “I’m terribly frightened as a mother and grandmother–more so now that our society has moved only closer to that scenario.”
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Morehead says she based her composition’s four movements on a few details from the book. “You’ll hear an odd-cadenced march punctuated by ringing bells that suggest the handmaidens being ordered to walk in unison. And their whispering in the night is a perfect opportunity for a dialogue between the pianos.” A fugue conveys menace and futility, while another movement plays on Atwood’s references to pop tunes from the 50s and 60s. “I use a rock backbeat reminiscent of ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’” Morehead says. “After all, I grew up with Elvis.” But that’s the extent of her scene depiction.
Their stay in Boston lasted 12 years, during which she earned a degree from the New England Conservatory, worked as a freelance oboist and teacher, and founded a chamber opera troupe with her husband–all while juggling family duties. It wasn’t until 1979, when Morehead was almost 40, that she began studying composition in earnest, inspired by a summer at Darmstadt, the German mecca for new music. “I’d come to believe that every instrumentalist must know how to compose, and vice versa. Otherwise you’re not a true musician.” Four years later Morehead enrolled at the University of Chicago to study under Ralph Shapey, who’d been influenced by Stefan Wolpe, one of her idols. (She also wanted to join her husband, who had landed a job at the Lyric Opera.) Besides Shapey, Morehead credits local composers Shulamit Ran and John Eaton with helping to develop her style.
