A “Ulysses” Playlist

James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses has hummed with sound for one hundred years. “Mrkgnao!” goes Leopold Bloom’s cat while he makes breakfast; “Pprrpffrrppffff” goes his posterior after dinner later. We hear the chattering of the telegraph in the “Aeolus’” episode, the clattering of cutlery and clinking of glasses as Bloom eats and drinks his way around Dublin over the course of one day, June 16th, 1904. (”Bloomsday” for Joyce aficionados.) 

Music is part of the novel’s tapestry too: Snatches of songs and half-remembered lyrics (“Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited / To come to supper tonight, / The rum the rumdum”) percolate through the consciousness of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Music is one strand in the thick weave of quotation that gives the book such a distinctive texture. (That and Bloom’s potato.) The hallucinatory “Circe” episode—a boozy stagger through Dublin’s red-light district—makes the pianola and the gramophone two of its central images. 

Joyce himself was a keen amateur musician, at one time hoping to become a professional tenor. He even came third in the Feis Ceoil Competition in 1904. He was a capable pianist and one of the most famous pictures of him has him holding a guitar. His flexible, sprightly voice, which has a wonderful feeling for color and weight, underlines especially the musicality of Ulysses. Joyce’s text crackles with such lively consonants that reading it aloud calls for the virtuosity of a lieder singer. His first collection of poetry was called Chamber Music. Reading Joyce to others often has the feeling of an intimate recital. 

Just as music feeds in to Ulysses, so too has it spilled out; this is in the nature of Joyce’s writing, in which everything is always in motion and borders between world and text, inside and outside, are porous (“a commodius vicus of recirculation,” as he wrote in Finnegans Wake). Some of the music here plays a part in the inner and outer lives of the novel’s key characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom; other pieces take Joyce as a model for a working method, or integrate his writing in equally ambitious artistic projects that tread in its wandering footsteps.