Joycean Scholarship

James Joyce by Jacques Moitoret

Joycean scholorship

Joyce considered his poems music
and encouraged the setting of them to music.
One of the first to do so was G. Molyneaux Palmer in 1907.
Joyce told Palmer "I hope you set all of Chamber Music"
I don't know if they have all been set.
The ones I set were;
Lean out of the window, Goldenhair,
In the dark pine-wood,
Dear heart, why will you use me so?,
Ecce Puer.
Ecce Puer wasn't part of Chamber Music or Pomes Pennyeach.
It was written much later on the occasion
of his grandson's birth and his father's death.
Chamber Music was a portrait of a love affair that ended.
The four poems I set were an encapsulation of that affair.
Plus Ecce Puer.
I think often of setting the whole pile (50 altogether),
but I always get stuck reading
"I hear an army Marching on the land"
because that first line reads so well to the tune of Lili Marlene.

Doug Palmer

Posted over on Feel Free to Laugh