Summary
Although it is widely reported that the title refers to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, this is a later Joycean embellishment, lending an earthiness to a title first suggested by his brother Stanislaus and which Joyce (by the time of publication) had come to dislike: "The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent", he admitted to Arthur Symons in 1906. "I should prefer a title which repudiated the book without altogether disparaging it." [1] : 124
Richard Ellmann reports (from a 1949 conversation with Eva Joyce) that the chamberpot connotation has its origin in a visit he made, accompanied by Oliver Gogarty, to a young widow named Jenny in May 1904. The three of them drank porter while Joyce read manuscript versions of the poems aloud - and, at one point, Jenny retreated behind a screen to make use of a chamber pot. Gogarty commented, "There's a critic for you!". When Joyce later told this story to Stanislaus, his brother agreed that it was a "favourable omen". [2] : 154
In Ulysses , Leopold Bloom reflects, "Chamber music. Could make a pun on that." [3]
In fact, the poetry of Chamber Music is not in the least bawdy, nor reminiscent of the sound of tinkling urine. Although the poems did not sell well (fewer than half of the original print run of 500 had been sold in the first year), they received some critical acclaim. Ezra Pound admired the "delicate temperament" of these early poems, [2] : 479 while Yeats described "I hear an army charging upon the land" as "a technical and emotional masterpiece". [2] : 391 In 1909, Joyce wrote to his wife, "When I wrote [Chamber Music], I was a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that one day a girl would love me." [1] : 161
Musical adaptations
In a February 1907 letter to his brother Stanislaus, prior to the publication of Chamber Music, Joyce wrote: "...[]It is a young man's book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope someone will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like. Besides they are not pretentious and have a certain grace." [4]
Today, although the individual poems of Chamber Music are less frequently anthologised than the later Pomes Penyeach , they continue to have - as Joyce hoped - an accessible lyricism which has led to a wide-ranging number of musical adaptations, including pieces by Samuel Barber, Karol Szymanowski, Luciano Berio, Ernest Moeran, Ross Lee Finney, [5] Aleksandar Simić, Ivan Božičević, Israel Citkowitz, Robin Williamson, Dr. Strangely Strange, Syd Barrett, Oswaldo Gonzalez, Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza, and Jim O'Rourke and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. In France, Nicolas Grenier and Torphy composed an ambient song about the collection.
In 2008, Fire Records released a two-disc compilation featuring all thirty-six poems set to music by contemporary alternative acts, including Mercury Rev, Gravenhurst, Ed Harcourt, and Willy Mason.
On Bloomsday 2017, Node Records released Goldenhair, featuring twenty-one of the thirty-six Chamber Music poems set to music by Irish composer, arranger, producer, and pianist Brian Byrne, performed by Kurt Elling, Glenn Close, Julian Lennon, Judith Hill, Keith Harkin, Andrew Strong, Gavin Friday, Curtis Stigers, Kate McGarry, Sara Gazarek, Kristina Train, Jack Lukeman, Cara Dillon, Declan O'Rourke, Lisa Lambe, Cara O'Sullivan, Balsam Range, and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Byrne's music was originally a collection of chamber works composed over six years, which he then arranged for Goldenhair in a range of genres, including adult contemporary, jazz, big band, classical, bluegrass, and spoken word. [6]
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language that blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms, and puns in multiple languages. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [...] with the work of analysis and deconstruction"; many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people, and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text. Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce asserted that every syllable could be justified. Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909).
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty was an Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and conversationalist. He served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.
"The Song of the Cheerful Jesus" is a poem by Oliver St. John Gogarty. It was written around Christmas of 1904 and was later published in modified form as "The Ballad of Joking Jesus" in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was a British novelist and poet who also wrote essays and reviews. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos. Other influences on her were Richard Watson Dixon and Christina Rossetti. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as 'wonderously beautiful… but mystical rather and enigmatic'.
James Elroy Flecker was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, whose poetry was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.
"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.
Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres". Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".
Malachi Roland St. John "Buck" Mulligan is a fictional character in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. He appears most prominently in episode 1 (Telemachus), and is the subject of the novel's famous first sentence: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by William Butler Yeats in blank verse. It was dedicated to Maud Gonne, the object of his affections for many years.
Giacomo Joyce is a posthumously-published work by Irish writer James Joyce. It was published by Faber and Faber from sixteen handwritten pages by Joyce. The text is a free-form love poem that tracks the waxing and waning of Joyce's infatuation with one of his students in Trieste.
An Stad was a guest house located at 30 North Frederick Street, Rotunda, Dublin 1, which was frequented by notable historical figures, including Douglas Hyde, the first President of Ireland, Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin, author James Joyce, Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) founder Michael Cusack, writer Brendan Behan and poet William Butler Yeats. It was a tobacco shop, guesthouse, restaurant and meeting place and its guests had wide-ranging influence over the Irish Nationalist movement, well-known works of literature and the development of Irish sport in the early 20th century. It has been located in various buildings on North Frederick Street, including 1B, 9 and 30 North Frederick street.
Muriel Emily Herbert was a British composer of the early 20th century. Much of her work is for solo voice and piano, with art song settings of texts by English and Irish poets such as Thomas Hardy, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, and W.B. Yeats.
Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer was an Irish composer, mainly of operas and vocal music, among them the first musical settings of poems by James Joyce.
