Back to the Page: Celebrating the Text

For its celebratory Bloomsday 2004 magazine, the James Joyce Centre in Dublin asked Irish and international writers and artists to recall their first experiences of reading Joyce and to outline the impact his writing has had on their work. This is composer Frank Corcoran’s contribution.

IN German it works better: James Joyce was not only il miglior fabbro, he was Wortdichter and Tondichter. Joyce was our first Irish composer, on one level our greatest. His work straddles the divide, the wash and flow of his, yes, meta-musical stream. This is all the more odd in that – on a conscious level – he shared your normal Irish artist/intellectual’s blindness to new Irish art-music, indeed also to the composing pioneers of his time, eg. Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Two generations on, the majority of Irish writers for instance (ask my Aosdána colleagues), are indifferent to, don’t want to know about contemporary Irish composers. But enough of that… Joyce shared in Zürich the same house as Philip Jarnach, the distinguished composer who after the war become president of my Hamburg Musikhochschule. They shared nothing else.

Yet his work is word and music. My Joycepeak Musik is ‘about’ his phonemes and his musical themes, the aura of those knots of synaesthetic associations that transcend the logos-myth divide. My music celebrates his juxtaposition of Eros and Death in our memory. His influence is, on this level, boundless. It’s indirectly lurking behind my new Quasi un Canto for full orchestra, behind my Quasi un Lamento for chamber orchestra, behind my Quasi un Concertino which we premiered in 2003 down near lovely Joycean Trieste. It haunts the post-Wake word-music-word of the new computer-vocal Tradurre/Tradire that my commissioner, DeutschlandRadioBerlin will premiere on July 2nd next.

Reprinted by kind permission from the special centenary James Joyce Bloomsday Magazine 2004. Published by The James Joyce Centre, 35 North Great George’s Street, Dublin 1, Ireland.