ABSTRACT
It’s a well-established fact of literary history that music was at the heart of James Joyce’s life and art. Although celebrated as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century – certainly one of the most influential – Joyce’s inspiration was at least as musical as it was literary. He heard the world as much as he saw it – as Harry Levin wrote: ‘ultimately it is the sense of hearing that dominates and modulates his prose: what gets said and, not least, what gets sung’ (‘Foreword’ in Russel 1993: xi). Joyce’s ideas about the world and how the human fits into it were shaped to a great extent by his own musical imagination, which in turn was largely determined by the general cultural atmosphere in which he was born and raised. Put simply, Ireland in the late nineteenth century was a musical country, Dublin was a musical city and the Joyces were a musical family. In his memoir of their undergraduate days together at the National University, Joyce’s university friend Con Curran wrote that ‘Music … was an abiding passion. It was a heritage from both sides of his family. His mother as well as his father was a singer, and also a pianist’ (1968: 40-1). It’s only fitting in light of this that the first book published by the ‘Young
Man’ who was to go on to become such a celebrated ‘Artist’ should be one so thoroughly inspired by, and infused with, music. Chamber Music is a collection of thirty-six love lyrics first published in London in 1907. These short poems were composed by Joyce in the opening years of the century, and it’s clear (for reasons that I shall presently explain) that musical considerations – in terms of theme, form and media – were uppermost in the author’s mind from the outset. Even amongst Joyce scholars, however, Chamber Music remains something
of an anomaly. Early reviews were by and large positive, with commentators
such as Arthur Symons in London and Joyce’s old university friend Tom Kettle in Dublin commending the collection’s delicacy and beauty (Deming 1970: 37-45). As the canon of his work expanded, however, the position of Chamber Music was necessarily altered. Whereas ‘minor’ texts such as Giacomo Joyce and Exiles – and even Pomes Penyeach (1927) – might be incorporated within the general trajectory of the canon, such a manoeuvre is more difficult with a book that at first glance appears to be at odds with established Joycean concerns. The commendatory status of Chamber Music began to be eroded after the appearance of the major prose works, at which point ‘Joyce the Great European Modernist’ superseded ‘Joyce the Burgeoning Irish Artist’, and the early lyrics came to be regarded by some as little more than juvenilia. Herbert Gorman, for example, found them slight to the point of triviality (1924: 9, 15), whereas Levin (1941: 27, 37) initially thought the lyrics of Chamber Music to be ‘plaintive and cloying … empty of meaning’.1
