Yareah Magazine

Scott W. Klein

The importance of James Joyce to twentieth century music is perhaps as surprising as it is pervasive.

This influence was largely conceptual, as opposed to lines of influence in the nineteenth century, when composers used authors almost entirely by settings their texts or rifling their works for plots for tone poems or operas. Unlike Goethe’s work, for instance, whose Romanticism tended to attract aesthetically like-minded composers, Joyce’s work influenced a wide range of composers of almost impossibly divergent aesthetic presuppositions. In part, this reflects the variety of Joyce’s writings. His earliest prose works, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are based on late nineteenth century models of naturalism and symbolism, while his major works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake become increasingly experimental in their reconceptualization of literary form, style, character, and language, until Finnegans Wake can scarcely be said to have a conventional plot or characters at all. At the same time, Joyce wrote two collections of poems as well as a play, Exiles, which are distinctly traditional in form and tone. Composers have been drawn to these diverse sides of Joyce, in many cases the more traditional tonal and Romantic composers finding a congenial set of texts for setting from the poetry -- and Myra T. Russel has noted that there are well over 140 composers who have set them 1 -- while the more avant-garde musicians of the twentieth century were attracted to the formal innovations suggested by Joyce’s work, by his use in Ulysses of a variety of different styles, by the musicality of his language, particularly in the late and highly experimental Finnegans Wake.
That composers have found Joyce congenial is scarcely surprising. Joyce was himself an accomplished amateur musician, a tenor who in 1904 shared the stage with the great Irish tenor John McCormack. Music has a profound presence throughout his works. He titled his first collection of poetry Chamber Music, while concerts and amateur performances of music appear throughout Dubliners. Molly Bloom, one of Ulysses’s main characters, is a professional soprano, and an entire chapter of Ulysses, known as ‘Sirens’, takes music as its subject and style -- Joyce claimed he wrote it in the form of a fuga per canonem. Important moments throughout the novels are related in musical terms: in Chapter 4 of A Portrait, when Stephen Dedalus finds his calling as an artist, it is heralded by his hearing imaginary music that is described in some technical detail, 2 while in the climactic Circe chapter in Ulysses, a pianola and gramophone appear behind much of the action, and Joyce has Stephen pick out an octave on the piano as a symbol of returning home after an odyssey. 3 Joyce even writes in a few bars of actual musical scores in three places in his work -- a fragment of plainchant (9.499) and two fragments of a ballad in Ulysses (17.808-828) and what Joyce calls "The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly" in Finnegans Wake. 4 Allusions to music -- popular song and opera -- are everywhere. The first attempt to categorize these allusions, Song in the Works of James Joyce, by Matthew J. C. Hodgart and Mabel P. Worthington (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) contained 3,500 allusions, and the authors apologized for its lack of completeness.

So contemporary composers have found a great deal in Joyce to inspire their own efforts. They have found in his poems fruitful lyrics for vocal settings; they have been influenced by the originality of his literary form, by his use of different styles in chapters of Ulysses, his introduction of pastiche, parody, and cyclical ideas of history to narrative, and his musicalizing of language -- indeed, Joyce’s influence on the arts has been so pervasive that many contemporary artists and composers may well use techniques so firmly embedded in modernism and the avant garde that their origins in Joyce may be obscured by history. A challenge to today’s composers interested directly in Joyce would be, perhaps, to make a full-scale attempt to musicalize Ulysses; the only dramatic setting of that novel with which I am familiar is Anthony Burgess’s somewhat misbegotten The Blooms of Dublin, a kind of 'music hall opera' written for BBC radio in 1982, and never (perhaps for good reason) revived. But one impediment for contemporary composers is the Joyce estate, which still jealousy guards the use of Joyce’s language in other works of art. Most infamously, several years ago they blocked Irish composer David Fennessey from using only 18 words from Finnegans Wake in a choral piece.
And yet: I recently learned that due out soon from Fire Records, an independent rock label in England, is Chamber Music, a 2 CD set containing settings of Joyce’s 1907 poems by 36 independent rock bands. According to the Fire Records website (www.firerecords.com) among the artists contributing are Flying Saucer Attack, The Wardrobe, The Great Depression, Bark Psychosis, Saint Joan, and Green Pajamas (the list continues, as the conservative eyebrow arches ever higher). One presumes that Chamber Music, published in 1907, is now in the public domain, or that the project (perhaps with the help of one or more flying saucers) has flown beneath the Joyce estate’s radar. But before one gets up in arms about the incursion of rock into the realms of Joyce, it is worth noting that the Beatles’ Revolution #9 from the White Album -- however unlikely this seems -- was inspired not only by Paul McCartney listening to Stockhausen, but directly from his attending a lecture in 1966 on Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce). So if nothing else, the intersection of the avant-garde and popular music proves that a hundred years past Bloomsday, and some decades past the innovations of Boulez, Berio, and Cage, Joyce continues to exert a fascination, and an inspiration, to the artists of the twenty-first century. Joyce is reputed to have said that his works were so filled with puzzles and enigmas that it would keep the professors busy for centuries. Perhaps the composers will keep just as busy, finding new and different ways to translate Joyce’s language into the music of their times.

Text from: http://www.cmc.ie/articles/article850.html

BIOGRAPHY

Scott W. Klein

Scott W. Klein is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and is currently editing Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr for the Oxford World Classics series.

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