Although there are many Irish writers for whom music has exerted a primary and indeed formative influence, the case of Joyce is exemplary. Joyce’s musical remembrances and reliances are of such magnitude and imaginative resilience that his work permanently attests to the condition of music, even when he aspires to this condition not wisely, but too well. From the very title of his first collection of poems, Chamber Music (1907), which this recording of exquisite new settings so memorably celebrates, to the Da capo which ends Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce’s entire enterprise retrieves and redeems the agency of music as an essential conduit of the Irish literary imagination. Music for Joyce was far more than a repository of emotional signification: it was also a mode of structural intelligence, the source of formal paradigms (especially in Ulysses [1922]), and, at the last, a mesmeric enchantment which, in Joyce’s own impish phrase, ‘put the English language to sleep’.

The pale cast of Joyce’s lyric verse in Chamber Music gives little indication, if any, of the innovation and symphonic extravagance of his later prose. The compact diction and restraint of these poems, which Ezra Pound attributed to Joyce’s ‘strict musical training’, suggest that Joyce may have intended them to be set to music from the outset. Even prior to their publication, he wrote to his brother Stanislaus expressing the hope that someone would do so, ‘someone that knows old English music such as I like’. Pound shrewdly remarked that the poems reminded him of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a likening gently underlined by the archaic personal pronouns Joyce occasionally employs in Chamber Music. Pound also suggested that if Herrick’s close contemporary Henry Lawes (1596-1662) were alive, he would be ideally placed to set these verses, given his achievement as the greatest seventeenth-century composer of English song before Henry Purcell.

As matters transpired, Joyce did not have to wait long before Chamber Music attracted the attention of a composer, who happened to be his exact contemporary, Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (1882-1957). Born in England the son of a Protestant clergyman with strong Anglo-Irish roots dating to the seventeenth century, Palmer studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford between 1904 and 1907 and lived in Dublin from 1910 until his death. In his diaries, which have only recently been retrieved from private ownership, Palmer notes (on 16 July 1907) that he ‘set the first of a little book of poems called Chamber Music by James Joyce, “Gentle lady, do not sing”.’ Between 1909 and 1928, Joyce and Palmer corresponded with each other, with Joyce trying to persuade Palmer to publish the settings he had made. In the end, nothing came of this proposal, although Palmer continued to make settings from Chamber Music until 1949, by which time he had set 32 of the 36 poems in the collection. Joyce meanwhile had written to his son Giorgio in 1934 to say that ‘30 or 40 composers at least have set my little poems to music. The best is Molyneux Palmer. After him are [E.J.] Moeran and [Arthur] Bliss’.

Many settings of poems from Chamber Music were to follow, but the Palmer cycle is self-evidently of the first significance not only to Joyce scholarship (the settings were discovered in their entirety as recently as 1982) but to the history of Irish art song. In this connection, we should note the contribution of several British and Irish composers to Joyce’s musical afterlife, including Herbert Hughes, who edited The Joyce Songbook in 1933. This volume, on which Joyce expressed mixed sentiments, was intended nevertheless as a tribute to the writer. It contains settings by various composers of all thirteen poems from Joyce’s second collection, Pomes Pennyeach (1927).

Other works by Joyce have attracted the attention of composers, including George Antheil (1900-1959), the self-confessed ‘bad boy of music’, who proposed a setting of the ‘Cyclops’ episode from Ulysses shortly after its publication in 1922. Given the resources which Antheil envisaged for this setting—these included voice, chorus, amplified gramophone, eight xylophones, electric motors with steel and wooden attachments, electric buzzers, and sixteen mechanical pianos—we may perhaps be grateful that this project lapsed. But in any case, by 1907 Joyce was so fully embarked on the musicalization of his own prose, that opera per se might well have seemed to him a superfluous enterprise in relation to most of his work, even if (as Denis Donoghue remarked many years ago), Joyce loved opera above all other art.

It was in 1907 that Joyce wrote ‘The Dead’, the culminating story in Dubliners (which he was to publish in 1914). Richard Ellmann describes ‘The Dead’ as Joyce’s ‘first great song of exile’, a musical metaphor that justly alludes to the structural and expressive governances of music, especially Italian opera and Irish traditional song, in the unfolding of Joyce’s arresting remembrances. Near the story’s end, Gabriel Conroy, its principal protagonist, uses the phrase ‘distant music’ to conjure a painting of his wife, Gretta, standing at the top of the stairs in a house on Usher’s Island in Dublin, at the end of a party on 6 January 1904. Gretta is listening to the tenor Bartell D’Arcy, who sings ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. His performance disturbs Gretta and prompts her intensely poignant and emotional confession on which the story comes to a close. In this uncanny simulation and recovery of the power of music itself, Joyce is in complete command of his genius.

‘The Dead’ remains an echo, albeit a uniquely potent one, of that art which Joyce revered and revisited throughout his life. ‘Jim should have stuck to the music and not bothered with writing’, Nora Joyce remarked with characteristic directness, soon after the publication of Finnegans Wake. But ‘the distant music mournfully murmureth’ in Joyce from first to last, and these wonderful settings of Chamber Music attest to its life-force in everything he enterprised.

Harry White © 2024

‘And the wise choirs of faery
Begin (innumerous!) to be heard.’
(James Joyce, Chamber Music XV)

In 1907 Joyce wrote a letter to his brother Stanislaus candidly expressing the hope that his poems from Chamber Music would one day be put to music: ‘I hope someone will do so’, he wrote, ‘someone that knows old English music such as I like’.

Joyce was an accomplished tenor, having won a bronze medal for solo singing in 1904 at the Dublin Feis Ceoil competition. The influence of singing is seen throughout Joyce’s work. In addition to mentioning John Dowland in Ulysses, Joyce references ‘Byrd (William) who played the virginals […] Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull’, composers equally praised for their choral music. The imagery of Joyce’s lyrics—such as the ‘soft choiring of delight’ (XXVI), ‘the wise choirs of faery’ (XV), and ‘for many a choir is singing now’ (XVI)—calls for a new project, a full collection of choral settings of the poetry of Chamber Music.

With the aim of fulfilling the wishes of James Joyce, I have commissioned eighteen composers from around the world in this Volume I collection. Volume II is already underway! Our composer-partners who have created new music for this first album hail from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the United States of America. Pairing each composer with their own Joyce poem seemed a fitting way to acknowledge the international aspect of the author’s personal journey. As Joyce was himself a singer, it became an important feature of the project that these pieces would be satisfying to sing: to compose music that respects singer, player and listener alike takes craft, and I am grateful to each of the composers for their collaborative approach as much as for their new music.

Joyce was a graduate of our beloved University College. Choral Scholars are proud of our unique connection to Joyce’s Dublin story: not only do we hear and create the accents and speech patterns of his literary characters, but we also understand their cultural history. It is a pleasure and honour for us to be the first choral ensemble to wrap James Joyce’s ‘suite of songs’ in an Irish choral voice.

Desmond Earley © 2024