Unlike a lyricist who sets words to music, Margaret Rogers hears the music in words. And then she writes compositions from those secret melodies encoded in the words.
It all started with James Joyce, an Irish writer who died in 1941, whose complex works have long been the bane of college literature students.
“When I was introduced to Joyce’s writing, it was like a vaccination that didn’t take,” Rogers said.
While she can’t always make sense of the words, she can hear them musically in her head.
“I realized after reading Joyce’s texts that they were music. If you take a section of `Finnegans Wake’ and read it aloud, you will find music. Joyce was as much a musician as he was a writer.
“He put music behind the story. He considered what he wrote to be rhythmical, sounds, alliteration. I can’t always connect to what the words mean as I do to how they sound. I like puzzles and patterns, and I don’t necessarily need to make sense of everything.” Rogers noted that Joyce loved codes and puzzles too.
Rogers, who declined to give her age but joked “just say I’m the same age as Jacqueline Onassis” (64), has become internationally known for decoding the musical composition Joyce embedded in the Sirens chapter of his epic novel, “Ulysses.” Rogers also has written a musical composition based on a pattern she found in the 100-letter multilingual words Joyce used in his last novel, “Finnegans Wake.”
“A lot of people come to Joyce reluctantly because it’s daunting. He’s daunting,” Rogers said. “He was interested in what poetry was to art and what art was to music because he really was an innovator. He wanted language to be extended to hearing, seeing and smelling.
“I like a work that demands something of an audience. You have to participate when you read. Then you get returns. It’s an investment.
“What one finds in Joyce’s work is laughing and crying-what is sad is happy and what is happy is sad. It’s always the flip side. I like this kind of flip side. Some of the language is so incredibly beautiful that to me his ideas are just wonderful.”
Rogers came upon her fascination with Joyce by accident. When her husband was transferred from Chicago to Milwaukee in 1978, Rogers left more than friends behind.
She gave up her longtime role as a professional singer with the Chicago Symphony Chorus, and she left her work at the University of Chicago as a research assistant on “The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute.”
“It was a serious situation of life change,” Rogers said. The move prompted her to vow, “I’ll do some of the things I always wanted to do, like study Irish literature.”
Rogers enrolled in Irish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After she ran out of classes to take about ancient Ireland, Rogers enrolled in a class about “Finnegans Wake.”
“I always had heard `Finnegans Wake’ was an impossible book to read, and that piqued my interest,” she said. Indeed, “Finnegans Wake” contains about 2,000 musical allusions and 10 100-letter multilingual words.
During the class, the instructor urged Rogers to discern a musical pattern in the long words.
“Janet Dunleavy has a wonderful feel of knowing who her students are,” Rogers said. “I’m very attuned to the musical components of the languages and the musical allusions. `Finnegans Wake’ was written to be heard, and that appealed greatly to my musical way of perceiving things.”
After extensive examination, Rogers determined that the 100-letter words seemed to occur when a climax was about to happen in the story. Using this underlying structure, she pieced together melodies Joyce had embedded in the text and then added her own to create “A Babble of Earwigs or Sinnegan With Finnegan.” Critics praised the humorous chorale when it debuted in 1987, noting that it amusingly conveyed Joyce’s wonderful nonsense.
Retaining the joy in Joyce’s writing is important to Rogers.
“He’s funny. He once said, `I was just a man who really wanted to laugh,’ ” Rogers said, adding impishly: “My next most wonderful thing is to do a satire on Joyce going to an academic conference where they’re deconstructing `Finnegans Wake.’ Every time he raises his hand, he’s going to be told to shut up because all he is, is the author.”
Won’t that irreverence upset some academics?
“I don’t care,” Rogers said. “I’ve had it. The history is in the literature. It’s not in the critic. I think good criticism is essential, and I have great respect for it. But when it becomes an end in itself, it isn’t paying attention to what the author wrote.”
Scholarly colleagues “really like me because they take my work seriously.
“I’ve never had any problem at all,” Rogers said. “An independent scholar, I guess that’s what I am. I’m doing careful and honest work in the field. A lot of people work on the study of Joyce and music, but I’m one of the few who sets his writing to music.”
She also has discussed Joyce’s work with maximum-security prisoners in Wisconsin.
“I went one day to teach my Sirens decoding theory to the prisoners at Waupun. That was an interesting experience,” Rogers said, explaining she had been invited to lecture to a class that had been studying Joyce’s earlier works.
“There was a class of inmates, about 30 men in a room in three long rows. It was a two-hour course, and there was no guard in the room. I was petrified at first. I got up and started telling them about how Joyce had embedded a fugue in the Sirens episode. I went over the first few lines of Sirens and asked what they heard. What surprised me was how much they heard-the colors, the metals, the sounds.”
Rogers explained to the inmates that she had been determined to decode the musical composition. After much work, she discovered that Joyce had embedded a musical pattern by using soggetto cavato, a 16th Century musical form in which musical pitches are represented by the letters a, b, c, d, e, f and g in words.
Using this technique, Rogers was able to take selected letters from words in the first 63 lines of the chapter and match them to musical notes. She used this outline to write out the entire Sirens chapter as music. She then collaborated with composer Sigmund Snopek III to produce “The Sirens Fugue,” which debuted in 1991 at Milwaukee’s Irish Fest.
After her lecture, Rogers said, almost every prisoner came up and shook her hand.
“A couple asked if they could write their own version. I encouraged them to do their own research and writing. Some asked, `What chance have we got in here?’ `Probably more than the average person,’ I told them. `You have the time.’
Some of the inmates did write their own Sirens music.
“Their interpretation had more of a rap style,” Rogers said. “It was great.”
While James Joyce might sound like an odd topic for an incarcerated audience, this type of instruction is “one of the great hopes of the penal system, to broaden their perspective through literature and art, not just through job-training classes,” Rogers said.
Rogers has used Joyce’s work as the inspiration to write everything from academic papers to operas. Intrigued by Irish topics, Rogers also has written plays on subjects ranging from the Lilliputians’ reaction to Gulliver to the 1860 shipwreck of the Lady Elgin, in which hundreds of Irish Milwaukeeans drowned. Each year since 1986, Milwaukee’s Irish Fest Theatre has performed a Rogers work.
And Rogers isn’t even Irish.
“Irish studies wasn’t just a favorite thing,” she said. “This Irish thing was very intuitive, kind of the heart’s wonder. I’ve always been interested in mythology, legends and literature. It fascinated me.”
Rogers’ fascination with Irish subjects and music turned out to be a natural link.
“The one constant in my life, outside my family and all, is music. I never veer far from that, but one thing I’m not a natural in is language. Not at all. But I try to understand how people thought-to make some linkage of some sort. It appeals to me a great deal to think about my ancestors. I like continuum.
“At one point it occurred to me that I was singing a lot of other people’s music, and I thought, `Maybe it was time for me to express my own thoughts in music. I’ve been carrying that out over several projects. I had been building up to this. I like to go all the way in, as far as I can go. When I find something interesting, I really like to dig in.
“I will say it’s in the doing-the real joy comes from doing,” Rogers said. She is working on a musical comedy tentatively titled “Getting to Yes” that includes the last paragraph of “Ulysses,” in which the word “yes” appears repeatedly.
“I always like the next thing. It’s rewarding to be acknowledged, but the fun is in having that moment where you just know it’s come together.”
