above: Rinde Eckert below: Odysseus (Ulysses) and Penelope

Homer on the Highway

Ryan McKittrick talks to writer-composer Rinde Eckert about the genesis of Highway Ulysses

Ryan McKittrick: You started to write Highway Ulysses when Robert Woodruff commissioned you to compose a piece based on your song cycle Three Days Under the Sun. What is the narrative of that earlier work?

Rinde Eckert: It presents a man at a spiritual crossroads. His girlfriend rejects him, and he takes a fateful hitchhiking journey across the country. He's picked up by a couple in Joliet who assume that he's Christ, and he basically plays along. Over the course of the three days he spends with them he learns to love them. This actually happened to me, outlandish as it seems.

R.M.: How did Highway Ulysses evolve from Three Days Under the Sun?

R.E.: Someone pointed out to me that the original story was a kind of odyssey, which piqued my interest. I reread The Odyssey, and soon Homer was taking over the project. Much of my recent work has been based on literature - I'm a predator, reading other people's texts to find a way into my own. I wrote an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which I castigated Romeo. In another piece, based on The Divine Comedy, I completely disagreed with Dante's notions of paradise. When I looked at The Odyssey, I started asking questions about the relationship between a returning war hero and the operations of a state. At one point I took the part of the suitors who move into Odysseus' home during his absence. If you're thinking about the reestablishment of order, the suitors are in the right. Odysseus' wife Penelope has steadfastly refused to reinstall the normal order of government by taking a new husband. Odysseus has been away far too long, and there's no indication that he's alive. The suitors are staging a protest, a sit-in, to compel Penelope to make a decision. They're perfectly justified in insisting that Penelope preserve the order. When Odysseus comes home, he performs a ritual slaughter that makes absolutely no sense. There's no glory attached to it, it's simply a slaughter. I'm attracted to Odysseus because he's a complicated figure.

R.M.: A number of critical readings of The Odyssey cast Odysseus' adventures and homecoming as a process of re-acclimation or re-civilization after a terrible war.

R.E.: I understand the search for redemption in The Odyssey, though I'm skeptical of the degree to which Odysseus is redeemed, given his opacity and lack of self-criticism. He never reproaches himself, though his failures are legion. Odysseus is responsible for the loss of over five hundred men. Even the Trojan horse, his great scheme, was an incredible mistake. The Greeks should have left Troy earlier, because to win the war was to lose everything. Odysseus is not willing to take responsibility for authorship. I believe that self-reproach is an important element of an enlightened sensibility. You have to admit what you've done. You don't have to flail yourself with guilt, but you have to stand up and say, "This is what I did and I don't feel good about it. I must move on, but I don't want to forget what I've done, I don't want anyone else to forget it, and periodically I will remind myself exactly how I got here." That would create the climate for possible redemption. Odysseus doesn't demonstrate this. In American history, you can't sweep under the rug the treatment of Native Americans. Let's be clear about our own past. I think that's the sine qua non of civilized society, but I don't see it happening yet in our own time.

R.M.: The Odysseus figure in Highway Ulysses mostly sleeps. He isn't given an opportunity to reproach himself.

R.E.: He's been damaged by the war and can't remove himself from his own situation enough to reach a new understanding. Yet his son is faced with a really interesting problem. He doesn't want to be subverted by his father's ghosts, but he needs to know his history. He doesn't want to inherit his father's fears, but he wants to recognize them. He needs to know where his father has been without feeling the weight of his father's guilt. In a sense, that's where we are today. We are the children of an America that is struggling with its own past and own machinations. The obfuscation in our own politics makes me weary.

R.M.: What else struck you on reading The Odyssey?

Polyphemus

R.E.: Odysseus' cunning or trickery makes him a quintessentially modern figure. We're all involved in a kind of duplicitousness - it's a feature of modern life. Ever since Versailles, international politics has been based on cunning. Language has been used to deceive rather than illuminate. During the Vietnam era, there was outright lying. One need only look at advertising and the plethora of exaggerations we live with constantly. The environmentalist feels it necessary to exaggerate his claims because if he doesn't, nobody will pay attention. Everybody's busy crying wolf. I worry about our own society's failure to revere truth. Odysseus is not a figure of antiquity, he has great contemporary relevance because of his strange relationship to truth.

R.M.: How did you settle on a musical vocabulary for Highway Ulysses?

R.E.: I wanted to honor the ancient Greeks' use of the pentatonic, which I did by creating a sequence of open intervals - perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and major or minor thirds - that have an ancient quality. In music, you can't define exactly where you are harmonically until you define the third element of the chord. For instance, if you have a C and an E, and you put a G on top, then you are in C major. But if you put an A on bottom, you're in A minor. Put an F on the bottom it's probably a major 7th chord. Focusing on the interval opens up the world. It becomes modal and modular. An open fifth could put us anywhere in the world. A triad, a C major, say (especially in an even-tempered scale) puts us squarely in the West.

R.M.: What is it about this ambiguity that suits Highway Ulysses?

R.E.: The open intervals, in progression, share a greater number of common tones. They imply a wider variety of worlds. They give the singer freedom of modulation among these worlds. We can more easily vary the harmonic unfolding or progression. In Indian music, which uses a lot of open intervals, the soloist can turn his or her gaze to heaven or earth at any moment. The tempo of unfolding can slow to a beautiful crawl or zip along. A lot of western classical music got tied to a specific tempo of harmonic unfolding, to a kind of academic adherence to theoretical structures. These are concepts that have been applied, codified, and sometimes ossified over the years. I was classically trained and I have a great respect for this kind of formal thinking. But the world is broader and culture is more complicated than some of these elaborate structures pretend. By thinking in terms of a simple structure like the interval (rather than highly evolved structures such as blues, minimalism, or serialism), I am better able to respond to the various qualities of an eclectic modern culture, better able to find a common thread through this tangle of moods and manners.

R.M.: What is the function of music in your theatrical work?

R.E.: Music can take the weight off the words. It allows language to function poetically rather than serving to build character or deliver exposition. Music can be an ineffable, emotional sweep - something bigger than anything that's said. I want music and words to work together rather than hamper each other. I also want to avoid recklessly calling up other forms of music theatre. The audience should never sit back and think, "Oh, I've heard this before."

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.'s Associate Dramaturg.