Margaret Atwood and Music

Margaret Atwood received an unprecedented reception when she appeared for a curtain call on the opening night of the Canadian Opera Company production of The Handmaid's Tale – 'the greatest roar I've ever heard from a Toronto audience,' according to one critic (Bernstein). This is confirmation that for many people, the main interest in the Toronto production of The Handmaid's Tale was Atwood's novel, rather than Poul Ruders's music or Paul Bentley's libretto, notwithstanding the considerable merits of both. As a result, it seems an opportune moment to consider how music has intersected with Atwood's life and career over the years. In the interests of imposing some order on this unruly topic, this essay is divided into two sections: 'Music in Atwood's Life and Works,' and 'Atwood as Librettist.'

Music in Atwood's Life and Works

Drawing on the Atwood papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and on various published accounts, including the biographies by Rosemary Sullivan and Nathalie Cooke, we can piece together an account of the role that music has played in Atwood's life.¹

Judging from written accounts, music does not appear to rank at or near the top of Atwood's interests. Political and environmental activism, the biological sciences, the visual arts, and food and the culinary arts all seem to be of greater interest and more importance to her than music, to judge from her public statements and writings. Any number of reasons could be cited for this, from the strong influence of her science-oriented family to the underdeveloped state of music education in Canada during her youth. But let us start at the beginning and work our way forwards from there.

Though born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood moved to Toronto with her family at the age of six, and has lived in the latter city off and on to the present day. As a toddler, Atwood, like most children, was given to humming and singing to herself while playing. When her mother commented on her singing once, Atwood replied 'Oh yes, I have lots of little hums like that running around inside my head' (Sullivan, 34). This inarticulate youthful singing soon matured into impromptu performances of radio ads, Brownie songs, and popular songs of yesteryear. 'Land of the Silver Birch' was certainly in her repertoire as a Brownie. Atwood's article 'True North,' written for the one hundredth anniversary issue of Saturday Night (January 1987) and republished in the collection Moving Targets (43–58), was originally titled 'Land of the Silver Birch,' and it begins by quoting the first verse of that well-known Canadian song. The article continues, 'We sang this once, squatting around the papier-mâché Magic Mushroom in the Brownie pack ... It brought tears to our eyes, and not for simple reasons' (43–44). The article ends with Atwood's parody of the song: 'Land of the septic tank, / Home of the speedboat, / Where still the four-wheel-drive / Wanders at will, / Blue lake and tacky shore, / I will return once moore / Vroom-diddy-vroom-vroom / Vroom-diddy-vroom-vroom / Vroo-OO-oo-oom' (57). As is often the case with Atwood, music is a symbol of things gone wrong: the childlike imagery of the original version of the song at the start of her article represents the time before acid rain and mercury and lead deposits etched their deadly poison into the northern landscape. The parodied version of the song at the end of the article brings us to the stark present, a time when 'the north is no longer a refuge,' as Atwood writes (57).

In grade school Atwood was subjected to piano lessons, still an obligatory part of a middle-class Canadian upbringing in a time before television and computer and video games monopolized children's spare time. The lessons, however, as was and is so often the case, seem not to have led anywhere. It may not be altogether a...