Joycean Chamber Music
December 3, 2022 11:18 AM   Subscribe

How James Joyce Almost Became A Famous Singer. "Joyce was angry at his defeat in the competition—but in typical fashion, blamed the rules, not his own shortcomings. He complained about the pigheadedness of judges who evaluated contestants in singing music they had never rehearsed. Who cared how a musician learned a song, he argued, when the real measure of ability is what you do after you learn it?"

"As Joyce’s fame mounted higher and higher, he grew more explicit in describing his literary work as a kind of music. He told Georges Borach that the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses was a “fugue with all the musical notations.” He made similar claims to Ottocaro Weiss, and when the two friends were at a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Joyce raised the issue again during the intermission: “Don’t you find the musical effects of my ‘Sirens’ better than Wagner’s?” When Weiss answered “No,” Joyce was so irritated that he stormed out of the theater and missed the rest of the performance. "

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"His final, enigmatic novel Finnegans Wake is the culmination of these attempts to translate language into music. Joyce seemed to have two conflicting opinions of how this book should be embraced by readers. In correspondence with Harriet Weaver, he would sometimes explain the many layers of meaning, offering her elaborate glosses—so useful in her reading of the text, that she asked to him to consider “along with an ordinary edition, also an annotated edition (at double or treble price, say?)” In an extreme instance, he once offered her seven different interpretations of a nine-word passage from Finnegans Wake, each one raising more questions than it answered. Yet at other times, he would suggest that no such interpretive work was necessary to read his work. It could be enjoyed, like music, for the sound alone. “It is all so simple,” he explained to Claud Sykes. “If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need to do is read it aloud.” "
posted by storybored (5 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
In Joycean lore, the title “Chamber Music” of his collection of poems, referred to the sound of the tinkling of urine in a chamber pot.

Joyce grew steadily more blind from glaucoma as he aged, and his writings shifted more and more into something to be heard.

Finnegans Wake…. At one point in my first real read through of the whole book, I was reading along and suddenly realized that what I was reading should be sung to the tune of “Casey Jones.” There are songs all over the book. And yes, read it out loud. Preferably with a group of people. It’s also handy to have been to Dublin to just hear spoken Dublin English. After a week in Dublin, I felt more comfortable reading Ulysses, because now I could sort of hear it as it was intended to be heard. FW is a symphony heard through the eyes.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:33 PM on December 3, 2022 [5 favorites]


I totally agree with what you say about the Wake, njohnson23. I belonged to a weekly Finnegans Wake reading group for thirteen years -- that's how long it took us to get through the book glossing and discussing between 1 and 2 pages each week. As far as I know there is no other experience quite like Finnegans Wake anywhere in literature. And yes, to be both understood and appreciated, it absolutely must be read aloud.
posted by /\/\/\/ at 1:42 PM on December 3, 2022 [3 favorites]


This musicality is also true for both Thomas Pynchon as well as William Gaddis, among others
posted by chavenet at 2:26 PM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


Golden Hair by Syd Barrett. Not technically a Joyce song, but an interpretation.
posted by ovvl at 4:30 PM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]


Oddly enough, all of The Dubliners can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
posted by Ishbadiddle at 4:54 PM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


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