Musical Allusions in “Sirens”
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The attached file (available as an Excel document or a Portable Document) is a spreadsheet displaying the correlation between the “Sirens” episode and music referenced therein. The key below explains the spreadsheet’s organization. The text is based on the Gabler edition.
In the spreadsheet, the lines in the overture number sixty. This arrangement is based on the Gabler edition which denotes sixty-three lines. However, three of these lines are indented, representing a continuation of phrase from the previous line. This study counts each of those continuations as part of the initial phrase and thus depicts sixty lines (or phrases) in the overture. All subsequent line numbering (64-1294) matches the Gabler edition exactly.
Description
The above screenshot shows three highlighted areas, two in green and one in yellow. Each of these areas is explained in more detail below:
Green Areas (Columns and Rows):
The column structure is based on the paragraph and line numbers in the text of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. The number 97 in the above sample represents the 97th paragraph in the body of the chapter (the overture is not included in the numbering). Beneath the number 97 is the number 226. This refers to the Gabler edition line numbers in the chapter. In some cases multiple lines appear under one paragraph.
The row structure is based on the various musical pieces referenced in “Sirens.” Each musical piece comprises a row in the spreadsheet. The text pictured above shows six of the forty-four references listed in the first column. “Down among the Dead Men,” “How Sweet the Answer Echo Makes,” etc. are songs that appear in the chapter.
Yellow Area (Content):
The screenshot above shows the first three songs referenced in the chapter and line 226 (in paragraph 97) of “Sirens.” When a musical work is referenced in the chapter, the box at the intersection of the corresponding allusion and line number displays the phrase from the chapter that invokes the song.
For example, the box at the intersection of “The Shade of the Palm” and line 226 of the text displays the words “O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas!” These words can be found exactly as written in line 226 of the Gabler edition ofUlysses.
Most references were identified using previous studies of musical allusions in Ulysses. This visualization is not an attempt to reveal new references but rather an attempt to display those references in a graphic interface.