The Women of Leopold Bloom

for solo bassoon

Duration - approx. 9 min.

Program Notes:

The Women of Leopold Bloom is a set of pieces that caricature the women surrounding Leopold Bloom during James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.  He has a wife that will cheat on him before the end of the day, a mistress that he only communicates with through the post, an infidelity that occurs from across a beach, and various barmaids and prostitutes that hassle and proposition him throughout his busy day.  Bloom is Joyce’s modern Odysseus, a character lost in his own city and in his own life, who spends a day around Dublin finding himself and his way home.  

Molly Bloom (morning)

The morning begins with Poldy leaving to get breakfast while he contemplates Molly’s impending infidelity.  Before dinner, Molly will have slept with Blazes Boylan, and this piece represents the two lovers in Molly Bloom’s life.  Bloom is the low slow notes and Boylan the fast high passages.  The piece ends as ambiguously as Molly’s day, asking, does the last lone short eighth note represent her return to Bloom or her continuance with Boylan?

Martha Clifford

Martha, a pseudonym, is one of the women who answered Bloom’s ad looking for a typist.  Although they have not met, there is a feeling of possible infidelity associated with their continued correspondence.  Martha’s letter reads as part S&M and part ignorant sheltered housewife.  The piece represents this in the “aggressive” staccato notes and the more slow innocent moving lines.  The piece is slow, and unfolds like a letter that asks to be savored.

Lydia & Mina

The “Sirens” of the Ormond Hotel, Lydia and Mina try and “crash” Bloom with music.  One of the more seductive songs of the chapter is the street ballad “The Croppy Boy”.  This piece takes “The Croppy Boy” and creates three variations of the melody in F major, with a final unmarred repetition in A major.

Gerty MacDowell

Late in the afternoon Bloom winds up on the beach and sees Gerty MacDowell, who is at the beach with another lady and some children.  Gerty, a parallel of Homer’s Nausicaa, notices Bloom and shows him her upper thigh and underwear.  Bloom is aroused and masturbates.  This piece starts with a glissando (a sexual innuendo) and continues with spastic, fast-moving passages until the climax of the piece.

Zoe Higgins

Zoe Higgins is the prostitute that Bloom meets while trying to save Stephen Dedalus.  She asks Bloom many crude questions, and eventually gets annoyed with him after a long oration.  This piece creates the aura of Zoe’s crassness through offbeat notes and fast register jumps.  Bloom’s responses are the fast connected lines.  The adagio section is an homage to Wagner’s Ring cycle, which is alluded to in the climactic moment in the novel.  The piece ends with an ascending run that represents Bloom’s terrifying vision at the end of the chapter.

Molly Bloom (evening)

This piece is derived from the experimental final chapter to Joyce’s novel.  The final 44 pages of Ulysses is written in a “stream-of-thought” style that focuses on the thoughts of Molly Bloom.  The piece is directly created from the chapter, with the length of each word used serially to determine interval-size (direction and octave displacement allowed).  Also, the rhythmic notation is static, like the novel, with tempo accelerations and decelerations creating an elasticity like which would occur naturally during a reading.

This piece was premiered on a NACUSA concert on June 5th, 2006 by Richard Kandetzki.  It will be recorded in spring 2007.