The Contemporary Music Centre ventured into the open air on Sunday, 20 June with an outdoor concert as part of the Bloomsday celebrations.

June 16,1904, was the day that James Joyce’s fictional characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus took their epic journey through Dublin in the novel Ulysses. One hundred years later, this date has become known as Bloomsday and formed the centrepiece of ReJoyce Dublin 2004, a five-month festival that celebrates all things Joycean.

As part of this, ReJoyce in Music was a programme of contemporary Irish music inspired in various ways by the works of James Joyce. Organised jointly by the Contemporary Music Centre, the Association of Irish Composers and Temple Bar Outdoors: Diversions 2004, it took place in the open-air theatre space of Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin’s city centre cultural district.

The ninety-minute concert featured four pieces written in the last twenty years and five newly commissioned works in a diverse display of styles ranging across the spectrum of contemporary Irish composition. The performers, all leading Irish professionals, were directed by conductor Fergus Johnston.

Opening the event was a ReJoyce in Music commission, Benjamin Dwyer’s Afterjoyce for flute, percussion and electronics. The composer notes Joyce’s creation of a via media between music and literature and attempts ‘through specific instrumental techniques to locate this’. Rob Canning took a similarly abstract starting point with his commissioned piece, Myriorama (Penelope Sleeps) where the players’ independent lines echo Bloom and Dedalus’ differing journeys through the same streets. In contrast, new works from Michael Holohan and Vincent Kennedy took a more direct musical approach: Holohan’s His Final Journey depicts the funeral of Paddy Dignam (an episode in Ulysses) while Kennedy echoes Joyce’s comic aside at death in The Great Leveller. Aeolus by Trevor Knight brought an air of exoticism to the Dublin streets.

These new commissions alternated with older works selected from the Contemporary Music Centre’s library. Frank Corcoran’s Four Concertini of Ice (1993) ‘act like a deep-freeze of the emotions’ while stridently questioning literature and musical expression. Their performance saw the conducting debut of composer Fergus Johnston whose own piece Líofa (1994) stems from ideas of flux and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Eric Sweeney’s Strings in the Earth and the Air (1988) took its cue from a poem in the collection Chamber Music and sets violin and viola weaving around ‘the opposing yet interlinked elements of earth and air’, each instrument taking turns to lift or ground the music.

The concert closed with the full ensemble and a performance of Epithalamium (1994) by John Wolf Brennan: as labyrinthine and epic as Joyce’s narratives and a satisfying finale to this celebration.

This event was grant-aided by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism via the ReJoyce Dublin 2004 -- Celebrating Bloomsday 100 Festival.

Scott McLaughlin