A Summer Music Odyssey

The following is a guest post by 2024 Junior Fellow Jacob LaBarge. I am Jacob’s project mentor for the project Mind the Gap: Taking Stock of Contemporary Composer Voices with the assistance of Music Specialist David Plylar. Jacob’s objective this summer is to inventory the Music Division’s holdings of select published contemporary music scores through three mini-projects: Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists from 1970-2024, the Meet the Composer Commissioning Music/USA grant program from 1996-2012, and living self-published women composers. Jacob holds a B.M. in flute performance from West Virginia University and has completed his first year towards a master’s degree in musicology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Contemporary music has been a focus of my research and the center of the music I played as a performer. I thought I had a good grasp on contemporary composers before my work on the Junior Fellow project Mind the Gap: Taking Stock of Contemporary Composer Voices. However, as I have explored lists of composers from Pulitzer Prize contenders to those commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, I have found both a wealth of new pieces by composers I was already familiar with and new names I had never heard of before. Through this process, one name has continued to pop up. Surprisingly, they’re not a composer. Rather, it’s the Irish modernist writer James Joyce (1882-1941). This is not all that surprising to me, as Joyce has long been a source of inspiration for composers.

During the summer of last year, I read “Ulysses” for the first time. A year later, during the 2024 Junior Fellows Program, I looked at a first edition of “Ulysses” in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The one I saw was particularly interesting because it was owned by musical theater composer Jerome Kern (1885-1945) – and the Music Division holds the Jerome Kern Collection.

As someone with an interest in musical adaptations, my odyssey to the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room caused me to deep-dive into the collection of Joyce-inspired works here in the Music Division. I love to see how composers and librettists alter a story to make new works. So, in honor of Bloomsday (celebrated annually on June 16th), I wanted to share some of the new-to-me music inspired by Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

I’ll begin with a composer who was completely new to me, Stephen Albert (1941-1942). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1987, Albert’s “Flower of the Mountain” uses text from the end of the final chapter of “Ulysses,” Penelope. Told through stream of consciousness thoughts of one of the characters, this chapter includes the famous line, “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Albert’s rapid changes in tempo and emotion recreate this style perfectly. As for the text Albert uses, the soprano sweeps over the orchestra singing Molly Bloom’s reminiscences of her husband’s proposal. The composer even dedicated the work to his own wife!

The Music Division also holds a score for the companion work, “Sun’s Heat.”  The two pieces are part of a larger composition titled “Distant Hills Come Nigh.” Unlike “Flower of the Mountain,” “Sun’s Heat” pulls its text from multiple chapters in “Ulysses” such as Lestrygonians and Nausicaa. Here, the tenor sings of the same proposal Molly recalls, but from the perspective of her husband Leopold. The Music Division also has a handful of Stephen Albert’s other Joyce-inspired pieces like the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Symphony: RiverRun,” “To Wake the Dead,” and “TreeStone.”

I also want to touch on a new piece I’ve learned about by a composer I already know, Libby Larsen (b. 1950). In 2005, the Cassatt Quartet commissioned Larsen to write a piece to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. Part of the funds for the commission were from Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, one of the programs I am researching during the Junior Fellows Program. The result was the string quartet titled “Quartet: She Wrote” based on this passage from the Ithaca chapter of “Ulysses:”

What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out.

This chapter, which is one of my favorites, is told through a series of questions and answers. Unlike Albert, Larsen does not directly use Joyce’s words. Rather, she responds to them. In the piece, she picks out the last handful of sentences (“She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out.”) and writes music to depict what happens between the sentences. These became the names for the movements: “What She Saw,” “What She Did,” “How She Felt,” and “And Then.” By doing this, Larsen takes the opportunity to answer the questions posed by Joyce’s simple sentences musically in the spirit of the text that inspired her.

These are just a handful of the countless Joyce-inspired scores that can be found in the Music Division’s collections. Whether you are a music lover or a Joycean, I hope you have discovered some great works just as I have. Now you can have some new music to get you in the Joyce-spirit the next time Bloomsday rolls around!