Tag: music

A Song from the Past: Joyce, Music, and Memory

Music in James Joyce’s The Dead

The work of James Joyce is full of music. It is not used only as decoration, but also as a way to express hidden feelings and inner emotions. This is especially clear in the short story The Dead, where Joyce uses the song The Lass of Aughrim to give deeper meaning to the narrative.

James Joyce Tower, Sandycove, Dublin

Every year, at the beginning of January, I return to both the story and its film adaptation with a feeling of nostalgia. It is a deeply personal story about love, loss and identity, which T. S. Eliot called one of the greatest short stories ever written. When I listen to the old Irish ballad, I often reread the final, most beautiful paragraph of the story. It always fills me with wonder and deep emotion, and it moves me every time. This passage also has a musical quality, as its gentle rhythm and softly flowing melody create an atmosphere of silence, sadness and reflection, bringing the story to a close.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce, The Dead

Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

Music is present throughout the entire story, from Italian opera to popular folk songs. Singing, dancing and playing music create the background of the Christmas party, while conversations at the table refer to famous singers and the musical life of Dublin. All of this slowly leads the reader towards the emotional centre of the story.

James Joyce Centre, Dublin

The Lass of Aughrim in the Story

The song The Lass of Aughrim, heard almost by chance after the party, is not just background music. It becomes a voice from the past that suddenly enters the present. For Gretta Conroy, the song brings back the memory of her first love, Michael Furey, a young man who once sang this song for her and who died tragically young. This memory reveals how strong and sincere that love was, and it clearly contrasts with the emotional distance in her marriage. The past feels more alive and more real than her quiet everyday life.

James Joyce Centre, Dublin

The song is also essential for her husband, Gabriel, as it leads him to a moment of deep understanding. He realises how empty his emotional life is and understands that the dead can have more power over the living than those who live without strong feelings. In this way, The Lass of Aughrim brings together the main themes of the story – memory, love and death – and leads to a sad, quiet ending that invites deep reflection on human life.

* * *

Let the music invite quiet reflection as we listen, accompanied by the restored guitar that once belonged to Joyce himself.

See also: The House of the Dead & Music in the Works of James Joyce

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11/01/2026
Music is a Woman

A few thoughts from the borderland of literature and music, marking today’s International Music Day.

When reading the novelised biography The Pianist: Clara Schumann and the Music of Love by Beate Rygiert, one cannot help but wonder: how many talents have been lost or forgotten simply because they belonged to women? Clara and her art are something of an exception, but even today, the name ‘Schumann’ is mainly associated with her husband, Robert. Clara herself, an outstanding pianist and gifted composer, is still too often remembered mostly as the wife of a famous composer, or as the unfulfilled love of Johannes Brahms.

Anyone who has studied even a little music history knows how few women’s names appear there. The reason is the same as why the Brontë sisters once published under the name ‘Bell’, or why Mary Ann Evans is remembered only under her male pseudonym George Eliot. George Sand, standing between literature and music, is another striking case: she became known for her bold themes and independent way of life, going beyond the customs of her time. But again — not without trousers, a cigar, and a man’s name.

Virginia Woolf wrote powerfully about the situation of women and their place in art in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. It is striking how many of the problems she described are still relevant today. Thinking about what English (and world) literature might have been like if Shakespeare had been born a woman, she concluded:

Yet something like genius must have existed in women (…). That genius was certainly not fully transferred to paper. When we read of the drowning of a witch, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise witch selling herbs, or of a mother of some extraordinary man, then, I think, we are on the trail of a silenced novelist or poetess, some mute Jane Austen of whom no one ever heard, or some Emily Brontë who smashed in her skull somewhere on a moor or wandered dazed and wretched along roads, driven mad by the genius to which she was condemned.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

I believe these words apply just as well to music. The Spanish musicologist Sakira Ventura has tried to help fill this historical gap. She has pushed aside old prejudices, social rules, and taboos that, for centuries, kept women in the shadows, and she has created an interactive online map featuring hundreds of women composers, past and present. Each entry includes a short biography and links for further reading.

They don’t appear in musical history books, their works aren’t played at concerts and their music isn’t recorded,” she told The Guardian. “I had always talked about putting these composers on the map – so it occurred to me to do it literally.

Music is a woman!

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01/10/2025