Just a song…
“Just a song at twilight
When the lights are low,
And the flickering shadows
Softly come and go ”
These are Clifton Bingham’s lyrics to a popular Victorian parlour song by James Molloy which has haunted me over the last couple of weeks as it forms the backdrop to one of the great literary works of the 20th century.
Listen to the wonderful Patricia Hammond singing this just as it would have been heard on the Titanic before disaster struck. [Love's Old Sweet Song]. Now you share my mood...
I guess at first, the idea that we would be tied to our homes and unable to travel anywhere seemed so unreal it didn’t quite register. As a musician, one takes it almost for granted that life involves travel; to rehearsals, recordings, concerts with diary commitments and projects both at home and abroad. The notion that all that just freezes or in many instances just evaporates seems too banal to contemplate. Following a few days of stunned silence in March I could feel my mind begin to freeze. I began to wonder whether there was actually any point of getting out of bed, and indeed were it not for the encouragement and gentle persuasion of my fellow family ‘inmates’ I dread to think of the bed sores I might have developed. So this was going to be a physical ‘lockdown’; but it didn’t need to be a mental one. Here was an opportunity to take an imaginary trip that until now had been impractical not to say impossible. I was going to get away, go on a mental odyssey; and what better way than to embark on a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses?
Being an inveterate dreamer, the difficulty I sometimes experience when reading is that I can find myself actually thinking of something completely different while reading; in effect reading blanks. What I seemed to discover while reading Joyce was that here was a writer whose literary expressiveness was inherently musical. I would go so far as to say that Joyce’s Ulysses is actually one of the great music books ever written. I had the curious impression that reading his words was akin to listening to music; it seemed even to allow for an element of dreaming. As it happens Joyce was intensely musical, and he almost uses language as a composer uses notes. The music of the language carries the reader on as in a symphony, and there are certainly many moments where the harmony is so dense and the volume so intense that the reader might involuntarily hold his hands to his ears in a sort of deafening confusion. In many ways there is not so much a ‘story’ to this Ulysses as a conjuring up of an atmosphere.
It has two main characters; Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The former represents the eternal wandering Jew, and the latter the lapsed Catholic alter ego of the author himself. The whole ‘action’ takes place in a single day on the 16th of June 1904. Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, but particularly in Dublin where the novel’s action occurs, celebrate the 16th of June as Bloomsday. I suppose the cohesive theme throughout the book is just ‘life’. Bloom comes across as a rather subdued middle aged figure who appears to have resigned himself to his wife Molly’s infidelity, while Stephen is a young man looking to sow his not inconsiderable artistic wild oats. Joyce uses episodes from Homer’s Odyssey to support the underlying structure of the novel; thus to a certain extent Bloom can be seen as Ulysses, Stephen as Telemachus (his son) and Molly as Penelope (his wife).
There are intense erotic passages as in the passage inspired by Nausicaa where the theme centres around Bloom’s unrequited love and his subsequent sexual fantasies. Aeolus is represented by the ‘hot air’ of journalism. But we musicians are drawn of course (off course) by the Sirens. It is worth recalling how in the original Homer, Odysseus (Ulysses), in order not to be thrown off course, has his ship’s crew block their ears to prevent them hearing the Sirens; meanwhile he has himself tied to the main mast, but with his ears unblocked in order to be able to appreciate the sound without being drawn off course. Here Joyce references numerous works but let me draw your attention to one song in particular, namely by Friedrich von Flotow. Flotow is now largely forgotten in the musical world, yet he wrote around 30 operas and was widely performed during his lifetime in the mid 19th century. Today he is chiefly remembered for one song ‘M’appari (she appeared to me) from his opera Martha. [M'appari]. I have placed a link here which should conjure up the atmosphere of Stephen’s father singing it in the Ormond hotel in Dublin. Both James Joyce and his own father John Stanislaus were reported to have had outstanding voices. No doubt in another life, not withstanding a ‘lock down’, they could have held successful careers in this realm. Here Joyce describes his alter ego’s father singing ‘...it soared like a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, spreading, sustained... soaring all around about the all, then endlessnessnessness...’ This is highly evocative writing! Then at the close of the chapter for those who appreciate the scatological absurdity of Joyce’s humour, Bloom brings us back down to earth in a manner of speaking with a simple fart ‘Pprrpfrrppfff...’
