A Conversation with Victoria Bond

The following interview with composer and conductor Victoria Bond was recorded on March 29, 2011, about three weeks after the Fordham University concert Voices Up: Songs for James Joyce and Hart Crane. The program included "Songs for Joyce," featuring pieces by Victoria Bond and Samuel Barber, and "Songs for Crane" with works by Eliott Carter, Alexander Nohai-Seaman, and Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of Literature and Music at Fordham, who also organized the event as the second in an annual series. The tenor Rufus Müller and pianist Chi-Hui Yen performed Bond's most recent work on Joyce, Leopold Bloom's Homecoming, a setting of the closing section of the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses. Bond's other Joyce composition, Molly ManyBloom, takes its libretto from "Penelope" and consists of a prologue and sixteen musical episodes. Written for a soprano and string quartet, this earlier work premiered in 1991. Bond plans to continue her work on Ulysses, possibly treating sections from all eighteen episodes. Lawrence Kramer joined Joyce Studies Annual coeditors Philip Sicker and Moshe Gold in a discussion of the Joyce compositions that Bond has completed and the dimensions of her larger project.

Philip Sicker:

How did you choose the specific portions of "Penelope" that you set to music in your first Joyce composition, and what first drew you to Molly's monologue? Was it possibly because Molly is herself a singer?

Victoria Bond:

Well, that entered into it certainly. I've been drawn to Ulysses ever since I was in high school. I went from a small, wonderful private school, the Rudolf Steiner School, here in New York to Hollywood High in Los Angeles. And in a course I was taking out there, the teacher said, "These are the books you cannot read." Of course, Ulysses was at the top of that list, so that was the first book I read. And the amazing thing to me is that even though I probably understood a bare fraction of what the novel was about, it spoke to me so vividly. It was written more in the way I thought than any other literature I had read—not in complete sentences, but in fleeting images and allusions, in a stream of consciousness. Well, I had never seen anything like that before, so I read the whole book. I actually read the whole novel while I was in high school. And Molly's monologue appealed to me immediately. That was so understandable: the lack of punctuation for a high schooler seemed normal and natural. I have just always loved the "Penelope" section. So when I got a commission from a group in upstate New York, L'Ensemble, to compose a work, Molly's monologue is what I wanted to do. There was a string quartet and a soprano, and that's how that piece got started. There are so many musical allusions all the way through Ulysses that you can just sort of drop your finger on any passage and find something that relates to music. Of course, Joyce himself was a wonderful singer and Molly is also. My favorite line in "Penelope" is, "I could have been a prima donna, only I married him." That thought is the essence of her negative side, but then she comes out of it in a much more positive light with all of the yeses. And, yes indeed, the fact that Molly is a singer made her words all the more delicious. There are so many specific musical pieces alluded to in "Penelope" alone, and I tried to quote them all. I love found objects in the novel, songs like "Shall I Wear a White Rose" and "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey." I tried to weave those kinds of specific pieces into the composition.

Moshe Gold:

Your work on Ulysses starts at the very end of the book's narrative sequence. It's fascinating that you chose the end of the novel to begin your work.

VB:

I'm Jewish, what can I tell you?

PS:

So you're sort of reading the novel backwards?

VB:

Exactly—and besides, we always want to know...