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BATES, MARTYN - Chamber Music II : Song Setting of James Joyce Poems

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Sub Rosa SR91 Release Year: 1995 Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.00 More Info “1994 and 1995 sees the release of Martyn Bates settings of James Joyce's poems Chamber Music, Vol. 1 & 2 on Sub Rosa. Born simply out of love of Joyce's work, Bates one aim in setting tunes to the text was to bring out in notes and music all the musicality that was already written there on the printed page ... . Inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets and the airs of John Dowland, Joyce's richly musical texts lent themselves readily to the mellifluous style of Bates song writing ... with Bates envisioning the pieces as being created about and around Celtic/English folk idioms ... in a stark setting, almost a kind of essence of simplicity, like the very best folk tunes. Virtually an acapella work for solo voice, and air utilised, allowing Joyce's exceptionally beautiful poems to truly breath. Written whilst a young man in his early twenties,Chamber Music was Joyce's first published work and is essentially the story of first love passing from illumination to disillusionment ? it's a much neglected and maligned work, often over-shadowed by the colossal heights that Joyce's later works achieved. These later works (Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake) are reverently treated as high art by scholars, a feast for ardous intellectual wrangling and dissection. Often coldly cerebral, this misguided approach must surely contradict the true spirit of Joyce, whose actual work is often ribald, lusty, deeply compassionate and humane ? hence Bates use of warm, loosely folk idioms in his settings of Joyce's texts, providing a musical context that facilitate Joyce's subject. Martyn Bates Cd release sees the first complete cycle of song settings of Chamber Music's entire canon of thirty-six poems since it was written in 1902.” [label info]