“And Dub Did Glow”, Steve Pantani’s Experiment

This essay was written by Steve Pantani, a long-time devotee of Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake is a maximally unconventional text. So to accompany it with music in a conventional, conservative classical idiom seems an unpromising choice.

But I had a different, perhaps perverse, thought.

I wondered if something fun could come from a clash between the eccentric text and music with a “nothing here is unusual” feeling. But I also wondered if the outcome might be something more than a clash. For all its strangeness, the Wake’s dense texture includes recognizable narrative elements. Maybe the music could make these more prominent in an interesting way.

So I decided to try the experiment. But what passage to set? I set out a few criteria. The passage needed to display the full gamut of the Wake’s linguistic virtuosity – from outrageous puns, to funny portmanteau words, to just plain English. That’s not a particularly hard standard to meet, given the riches of the Wake. But the next criterion was more restrictive. The passage needed to convey a sense of being able to stand alone, or of being self-contained, while not being too long (I felt that about one page of text would be the outside limit, given the Wake’s density). With those goals in mind, I began to flip through my copy, on the lookout for possibilities. There were plenty of these. But when I came upon the “Wedding” passage from Book II, Chapter 3 I knew I’d found what I was looking for. The passage has one more element that I hadn’t explicitly made a selection criterion, but which related directly to my sense of why the experiment might be worth doing. The Wedding passage has a fairly clear (in Wake-terms, at least!) narrative line, one that would give the music a chance to build its own narrative arc.

The music is organized around a few “building block” elements suggested by the text. The first of these is the musical motif H-C-E, which is of course a tribute to our “hero.” Reading these letters as German note names gives us the series B natural, C natural, and E natural. This little motif pops up at various points, from the very opening to the coda for strings (which is built up out of overlapping layers of the three notes).

The second musical element is suggested by a sentence from the passage: “The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself.” This seems to refer to the moment in Plato’s Symposium when Aristophanes explains his theory of love. He claims that originally all human beings were two persons joined together. The Gods spitefully divided these double-persons in half. Therefore love between two people (each being one half of an original whole) is nothing more than the desire of each half to find and rejoin with its long-lost other half. The notion of two things combining that are really one thing suggested a musical analogy with counterpoint, in which two (or more) voices that could stand separately are combined into one whole. So the music includes some contrapuntal passages. (An admission: I doubt my efforts are without errors, which probably aren’t Joycean “portals of discovery”!)

A third element is a famous tune to which the text makes punning reference. So that also gets thrown into the mix. A fourth element comes from the sunrise implied by the end of the passage. This gets a musical depiction in a sort of down-market, brief echo of a very famous orchestral sunrise (in this case, built on the HCE motif).

Those are the ingredients. The recipe for combining them was just to “follow the story” that the passage, for all its quirkiness, actually does manage to tell.

That’s the experiment!

Steve Pantani contributed to the Opendoor Edition of Waywords and Meansigns in 2017, recording “And Dub Did Glow”, page 329 line 14 through page 330 line 11.