Abstract
Practically everyone who knew Joyce observed his enduring love for music, as well as the fundamental role that it played in his life. Many of these reminiscences have been preserved, either in formal memoirs or in interview with researchers. This chapter provides a survey of that material in order to approach an understanding of Joyce as an artist for whom music came to represent a fundamental social and subjective experience—a key mode of connection between his own life, his art and the people that he wanted to represent in his work.
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Notes
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Joyce 1958: 133. According to Herbert Gorman, JJ set about eight lyrics by Yeats, as well as ‘Morn and Eve’ and ‘The Swabian Love Song’ by Mangan (1939: 78). J. F. Byrne recalled a setting of Mangan’s ‘My Dark Rosaleen’ (1953: 66) on which he accompanied JJ on piano. Epiphany No. 19 describes JJ’s mother interrupting his piano-playing at Glengariff Parade to ask him about the illness which killed his brother George (1991: 179).
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Joyce 1958: 143. One of the Joyce girls (quoted in Hutchins) recalled that ‘Jim used to play the piano for hours, I well remember it, while our brother George was dying upstairs’ (1950: 62). The piano’s association with death is invoked in Ulysses where JJ made much of its structural similarity to a coffin (1993: 252, 523, 659). This was something to which he had
first alluded inGiacomo Joyce(1983: 16). - 5.
Hutchins 1950: 72. The final verse of ‘Sally in Our Alley’ (written by the English poet and dramatist Henry Carey in 1725) runs: ‘But when my seven long years are out, / O then I’ll marry Sally! / O then we’ll wed and then we’ll bed, / But not in our Alley’.
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In this Dublin Diary, Stannie wrote that his brother had composed two poems under Mary Sheehy’s inspiration, although she remained ‘ignorant of his tributes’ (1971: 24). The lyrics in question were later included in Chamber Music.
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The Mudcat Café, an online forum for all things relating to traditional music, suggests that this could be a Donegal Gaelic song called variously ‘Cumha mo londubh buí’, ‘Cuacha lán de buí’ and similar. Another comment links it with the Dublin ballad singer Frank Harte who claimed to have learned it from Dominic Behan, who in turn said that it was a translation from Irish by the poet James Stephens.
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Smyth, G. (2020). Here Comes Everybody! Remembering Joyce’s Music. In: Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61206-1_2
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