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Today, Mahlerman examines the legacy of James Joyce: the language in the music, and the music in the language…

The great modernist writer James Joyce was so saturated in music that, for a while as a young man, he considered devoting his life to it, but although music’s loss became literature’s gain, the two art-forms are in a constant embrace throughout most of his novels, as he appeared to superimpose onto music his own magically naturalistic literary dreamscape. A fine pianist, he possessed a sweet tenor voice and, through deep study, an encyclopedic knowledge of music from as far back as the Renaissance. The now-famous difficulty that most of us have with his ‘language pushed to the limits of language’, particularly in the two leviathans Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is that much of it is simply too dense and impenetrable and, in this age of instant gratification, we tire quickly. But ‘from swerve of shore to bend of bay’, our loss is plain to hear below.

To anyone who has read Ulysses [for tips on how to, see Brit’s 1p Review here], it is often mentioned as a favourite – and the mesmeric conclusion of the book are the eight vast sentences of over 4000 words that make-up the internal musings of Leopold Bloom’s randy wife Molly Bloom, as her fertile memory and imagination go to work. The use of ‘yes’, at the start and finish, endorses Joyce’s view of it as ‘the female word’, and ‘the most positive word in the English language’. For this most complex of men, this tiny word had an almost carnal significance, and represented ‘acquiescence and the end of all resistance’. How ‘musical’ it sounds, breathed into life here by the great Abbey actress Marcella Riordan.

The influence that music exercised upon Joyce is matched by his influence on countless other writers and musicians – Boulez, Cage and Barber are just a handful. And when the Italian iconoclast composer Luciano Berio fulfilled his commission to the NY Philharmonic in 1969 by producing his amazing Sinfonia, the debt to Joyce was clear to hear – although the text is by Beckett and Levi-Strauss. Against a tapestry of the third movement scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony, Berio layers misty fragments from Debussy’s La Mer, Ravel’s La Valse, as well as some Schoenberg, Brahms, Stravinsky’s Rite, and a chunk of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. This gallimaufry shouldn’t work but it does, gloriously.

Although both men were born in suburban Dublin, Joyce was 25 and working in a bank in Rome when Samuel Beckett first saw the light of day in 1906. They met often and Beckett became, in effect, a Joyce scholar and paladin. The stock view of these two giants has it that Joyce is a wordy motormouth and Sam is a monosyllabic near-mute and here, in less than three minutes of Theatre de L’Absurde, the writer and director Donald Clarke imagines the two meeting on a Zurich Pitch ‘n’ Putt – in itself, a mad thought.

In the mid 1930’s, on a trip to Zurich to see his opthalmologist, Joyce sought-out the then well known Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck. They became friends and Joyce, always a supporter of the avant-garde, an enthusiastic champion of the composer. As with the near eclipse of Gustav Holst, it remains a mystery why this distinguished figure is now virtually forgotten, his music heard almost never. Many of his orchestral and vocal pieces are bathed in a marvellous post-Wagnerian glow, as here in the first part of the delightful Summernight for String Orchestra.