Wayward Flicker

Wayward Flicker reflects on mood/imagery, disintegration, memory and enlightenment through the blurring of timbre and the unfolding of time. 

The text is comprised of excerpts from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.”  All of Dubliners, but especially “The Dead,” employs the use of free indirect discourse as a narrative style, which is when the voice of a third-person narrator has begun to turn into a first-person narrator, that is one of the characters in the story.  This literary shift between observation and embodiment is analogous to the three primary musical materials in Wayward Flicker

  1. Three distinct sounds represent imagery from the text: breath (air), tears (keyclicks/slaps) and flickering (buzzing).  These dissolve over the course of the piece.
  2. The Irish ballad, “The Lass of Aughrim” presents itself abstractly as a memory that gradually becomes more perceptible, therefore more real, as the piece progresses.  The song tells a story of imperfection and fragility, heartbreak and death.
  3. The text is extracted from the final pages of “The Dead” and moves between spoken and sung words as the main character Gabriel reaches an epiphany which gradually takes him outside of his own thoughts and makes him view his partner and humanity in a new way.

Text:

Trying to catch the air.

Listening to distant music.

Like the tender fires of stars.

They were all becoming shades.

Pass boldly into that other world.

Sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.

On crocked crosses and headstones on the spears of the little gate.

On barren thorns.

If you’ll be the lass of Aughrim as I’m taking you mean to be.

Tell me, the first token that passed between you and me.

Oh, don’t you remember that night on yon lean hill.

When we both met together which I’m sorry now to tell.

Oh the rain falls on my yellow locks and dew it wets my skin.

My babe lies cold within my arms.

Generous tears. Dripping tree.

His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.

Wayward and flickering existence.

His own identity was fading out into a grey and impalpable world; the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

All becoming shades.