Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
— Introibo ad altare Dei.
 
James Joyce, Ulysses

 
The first voice we hear in James Joyce’s Ulysses is that of Buck Mulligan (the fictional counterpart to the author’s onetime friend, Oliver St. John Gogarty), gleefully singing the Gregorian chant of the Roman Catholic Mass from atop Dublin’s Martello Tower (left), in an attempt to rouse his sullen fellow lodger, Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s literary stand-in and the hero of his previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). This is the first time music appears in this vast, rambling, and wonderful book, but far from the last. As much as any of the arts and sciences that contribute to the colors and textures of Ulysses, music is a highly significant element and one which should be studied closely. Certainly, specialists in literature and average readers alike know that Ulysses is one of the greatest literary phenomena of the 20th century, as well as a prominent title on lists of banned books, the subject of major plays and films, the generator of a vast scholarly industry, and the steady holder of the #1 spot in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list. Yet few music lovers seem aware that Ulysses is one of the most profoundly musical of the great books, even though music is neither the primary subject nor always apparent in the story.

Along with his mastery of wordplay and languages, James Joyce possessed considerable musical gifts that inevitably found a place in his writing. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a fine Irish tenor, and James could have been a great tenor if he had received the training to launch a professional career. Joyce had a lifelong love of opera, and his tastes ran to Mozart and 19th century bel canto. For a writer at the forefront of the 20th century’s literary avant-garde, Joyce was surprisingly conservative in his musical tastes, and quite skeptical of modernist trends promoted by the likes of Igor Stravinsky or Arnold Schoenberg.
 
Naturally, Joyce put all of his genius into his writing. To demonstrate his brilliance and verbal virtuosity, he made Ulysses a cornucopia of modern literary techniques. It features the most famous examples of the “Stream of Consciousness” method, which reveals a character’s innermost thoughts through an interior monologue, without the author’s intrusion. Joyce explored many other techniques and literary styles in Ulysses, including the use of a symbolic narrative framework, based on Homer’s Odyssey; parodies of journalism, heroic narrative, and romance novels; a survey of the history of English literature from its Latin origins to futuristic slang; a rendering of psychological states as a massive nightmare-play; a catechism of the day’s events and transactions; and most famous of all, an unpunctuated soliloquy that is the most celebrated run-on sentence in literature.
 
Ulysses’ story concerns events in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, which is marked around the world as “Bloomsday,” the actual date in history when Joyce met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and the fictional day when the destinies of Leopold Bloom, his wife, Marion Tweedy “Molly” Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus became entwined. On the surface, music plays a small part in the actual comings and goings of these characters, but is quite important in their thoughts and feelings. Stephen, a part-time school teacher and full-time intellectual, is perhaps the least obviously interested in music, though he can play the piano and remembers playing for his mother as she was dying. Leopold is an advertising canvasser, not a musician, though his love of music is strong, and his appreciation for it is fairly sophisticated for a man of the lower middle class. Molly is a touring singer, and her repertoire of popular songs filters through the story, particularly to bring Leopold’s vivid imagination around to her illicit relationship with her manager, Hugh “Blazes” Boylan. Leopold knows of and dreads an act of adultery that will occur between Molly and Boylan at 4:00 p.m. that day, so his thoughts are often filled with Molly’s songs and her impending assignation.
 
Joyce weaves musical references throughout the novel to convey Dublin’s atmosphere, to connect characters to their hidden thoughts, and to advance the narrative. “Love’s Old Sweet Song” is one of Molly’s most requested numbers, and is representative of the sentimental parlor music that was popular after the turn of the 20th century. The aria, “M’appari” (”She Appeared to Me”) from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera, Martha, comes to Bloom when he ponders his secret romantic correspondence with Martha Clifford (writing as “Henry Flower,” his own act of unfaithfulness.) “The Croppy Boy” pops up frequently in connection with Stephen Dedalus and Irish politics, but most pointedly in the pub scene with the bigoted Citizen. Many more songs popular in 1904 are nestled in the text like gold in ore. Indeed, the index of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated lists more than 200 songs and operatic arias that are invoked in Ulysses. Though most of those are quite hard to find on recordings today, here are a few samples of some of the vintage songs that appear in the book.
 
Julia Culp, soprano - Love’s Old Sweet Song
 
Luciano Pavarotti, tenor - Flotow: Martha - M’appari
 
Robert Shaw Chorale - The Croppy Boy
 
Joan Morris, soprano; William Bolcom, piano - After the Ball
 
Kiri Te Kanawa, soprano - The Last Rose of Summer
 
Edith Mathis, soprano; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone - Mozart: Don Giovanni - Là ci darem la mano
 
United States Army Chorus - Irish traditional: Garryowen
 
John McCormack, tenor - Goodbye Sweetheart, Goodbye
 
Webster Booth, tenor; Anne Ziegler, soprano - In Old Madrid
 
Thomas Allen - Sullivan: The Lost Chord
 
Because the music of these and other songs was familiar to his readers, Joyce usually restricted his quotations to a few lines or a single verse. However, in two key places, Joyce employs actual musical notation, with the Gregorian chant, “Gloria in excelsis,” that appears unexpectedly in the scene in the library, during Stephen’s internal theological rant:
 

 
And the anti-semitic children’s song, “Little Harry Hughes,” which intrudes on Bloom’s bedtime thoughts at the close of his day:

 
While neither of these explicit musical quotations is absolutely essential to the narrative — in fact, they are visually jarring and momentarily take the reader out of the flow — they demonstrate the strength of the musical impulse in the novel. While the myriad verses that pepper the book are noticeable to anyone who flips through a copy, these quotations and all the indirect musical references point to the place of music in the characters’ emotional lives and its function in expressing their moods, similar to the affect of a film soundtrack.
 
Beyond the direct borrowing from songs, Joyce also adopted the idea of using leading themes or leitmotifs from the music dramas of Richard Wagner. The recurrence of short ideas and phrases throughout the book are clearly intended to draw associations with the characters’ memories and thoughts, as well as to stand for more abstract concepts. For example, Bloom sees the worn letters on his hat band — which spell “High Quality Ha” — and this incomplete phrase becomes a joke that floats in and out of his interior monologue, as it refers to high brow pretensions and low brow comedy. Recurring phrases associated with Stephen include, “Cracked lookingglass of a servant,” “Agenbite of inwit,” and, “Word known to all men,” the last phrase being central to understanding that love is the main theme of Ulysses. Jingling sounds are always associated with Boylan, representing jangling bed-springs and cuckoldry in Leopold’s mind. And Molly’s famous soliloquy at the end of the novel brings us her symbol, the life-affirming and ecstatic “Yes,” which recurs throughout her late-night meditation. Even inanimate objects serve as leitmotifs, such as the peripatetic Stephen’s ashplant walking stick, and the hygienic Leopold’s bar of lemon-scented soap, which keeps traveling from pocket to pocket on its own miniature odyssey. Ulysses is full of many other tags and memory triggers, and their continual interplay leads to a deeper psychological exploration of the characters, especially in the “Circe” or “Nighttown” chapter, where many of the leitmotifs and objects become personified as players in a gargantuan and grotesquely operatic nightmare. Of course, the road from Wagner’s Ring cycle to Joyce’s dark psychodrama is a convoluted one, coming by way of the Symbolist movement and Sigmund Freud, but it is one which merits deeper analysis.
 
Ultimately, and most significantly for Ulysses’ special relation to music, the most technically difficult of all classical musical forms was adapted by Joyce into a new literary technique: the verbal fugue. Joyce prided himself on discovering a contrapuntal style of writing, and he indulged himself with a level of complexity that anticipates the musical dream-language of his last novel, Finnegans Wake. In setting the scene of the “Sirens” chapter in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, Joyce uses music and sounds of all kinds — from street noises, snippets of popular songs, and tinkling piano music, to clinking glasses and even flatulence — to develop his linguistic “composition.”
 

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: I dolores.
Peep! Who’s in the… peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer.
Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas!
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
Martha! Come!
Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlight nightcall: far: far.
I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
Listen!
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each and for other plash and silent roar.
Pearls: when she. Liszt’s rhapsodies. Hissss.
You don’t?
Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock and a carra.
Black.
Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.
Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.
But wait!
Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.
Naminedamine. All gone, all fallen.
Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.
Amen! He gnashed in fury.
Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.
Bronzelydia by Minagold.
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.
One rapped, one tapped with a carra, with a cock.
Pray for him! Pray, good people!
His gouty fingers nakkering.
Big Benaben. Big Benben.
Last rose Castille of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.
Pwee! Little wind piped wee.
True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk.
Fff! Oo!
Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?
Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.
Then, not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.
Done.
Begin!

 
It looks like a daunting passage, but that’s only the exposition for Joyce’s multi-subject fugue! Each phrase is introduced for its sonority, presented almost as concrete poetry, and aside from the references to Bloom, Boylan, Molly, and Martha, the actual meaning of the words can’t really be deduced until later in the chapter. Indeed, some actual songs are manipulated for their musical connections, such as “The Shade of the Palm” (”Oh Idolores, queen of the eastern sea”), “Rose of Castille,” “Goodbye Sweetheart, Goodbye,” and “The Bloom is on the Rye.” When the fragments appear in their proper context, we find that the “Bronze by Gold” refers to the hair colors of the two barmaids, Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce, who are watching a parade through a window and hearing the steel horseshoes ringing on the pavement. The phrase “imperthnthn thnthnthn” is the snide response of the dishboy (or “the boots,” as he is reduced through synecdoche), after being called an “impertinent person.” “Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips” is a description of Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, picking at his thumbnail. And so on. Thus, each phrase is associated with a particular character or action, but batted about and set running alongside the others in a steady current of speech, thoughts, and sounds, much as subjects are deployed and changed in a true fugue. Yet this is the music of poetry.
 
It is often claimed that Joyce’s acute attentiveness to sounds and music may have been in compensation for his bad eyesight, which was failing during the time he wrote Ulysses, and almost completely lost during the writing of Finnegans Wake. Yet this overlooks the obvious gifts Joyce had as a singer and lyrical writer, and even though Joyce left no recordings of his singing, we can detect his musicality in the lilt of his voice in two spoken word recordings he made, which are paid tribute in these remarkable clips on YouTube.com.
 
James Joyce Reads from Ulysses (Poem Animation)

 
James Joyce Reads from Finnegans Wake

 
Some excellent resources on the music in Ulysses can be found here and here, and further information on James Joyce and his revolutionary work can be found here. Have a Happy Bloomsday!