Dubliners Research

As Seamas Mac Mathuna has written, "Sean-nos singing is at once the most loved and the most reviled, the least often heard and the least understood part of that body of music which is generally referred to as Irish Traditional Music

For the feeling and emotion of sean-nos singing is not expressed by the standard European 'bag-o-tricks

Its obvious association with a pastoral nostalgia and an implied 'authenticity' would suggest some association with the romantic zeal of the Gaelic Revival (especially post-1893), a term applied 'from without' by English-speaking, urban-based enthusiasts who required a label, a frame of reference with which to juxtapose their modernised, 'sophisticated', 'nos nua'/'new way' existence.

But even here the reader can see in embryonic form the technique that Joyce was to develop later on of introducing certain, deliberately chosen songs integrally into his fiction, using the music to advance or comment on the dramatic action.

In Dubliners, this device is used to particularly good effect in the final story, "The Dead."

Mr. D'Arcy sings it, the exact version of the ballad The Lass of Aughrim

scholars have cataloged literally thousands of musical allusions

integral to the understanding of his poems, stories, and novels

He had heard Hans Zimmerman, a student of mine and later director of the Zurich Opera, conduct a chamber orchestra for which I had arranged and performed a suite of Gluck's music, including the famous flute solo "Dance of the Departed Spirits" from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. Afterwards, Joyce said that he considered this solo to be the greatest piece of music ever written. He began going through the piece, note by note and phrase by phrase, literally transposing it first into word inflections and then into verbal images. At the end of this evening with Jovce I had learned more about the relationship of language to music than ever before or since.