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Release date: 27th January 2023

Over 11 instrumental pieces Chester is joined by renowned musicians Steve Wickham, Vyvienne Long and Kenneth Rice to tell the story of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce. 2022 marks the centenary celebrations of the release of his seminal work, Ulysses.

TRACKLIST:

1. Northampton

2. The Little Match Girl

3. La Princesse Primitive

4. The Jury's Verdict

5. Beckett

6. Fragment From Work in Progress

7. Nuvoluccia in her Lightdress

8. Candlemas, 1932

9. Asylum

10. What's he Doing Under the Ground, That Idiot

11. A Flower Given to my Daughter

ABOUT LUCIA:

As part of the celebrations marking the centenary of James Joyce's Ulysses taking place in Dublin and globally on the 16th of June 2022, Axis Ballymun presented the world premiere of ‘LUCIA’ - a suite for guitar and strings composed by multi-award nominated musician Joseph Chester.

Lucia Joyce spent 47 years in institutions as a result of mental illness, including long periods in isolation. She died in the notoriously cruel St. Andrew’s asylum, Northampton at the age of 75. And yet, in her youth she had shown enormous potential, as a dancer and illustrator. Over the course of two years, Chester took ten key moments from the life of Lucia Joyce, ten facts of her existence, and composed a piece of music for each, to pay tribute to her, to bear witness to her and, in some fantastical, imaginary way, let her speak. The Paris Times wrote that, “James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father." Some say she was a muse for Finnegans Wake. Her father described her as, “A fantastic being with a mind as clear and unsparing as the lightning.” However, after undergoing tests, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was committed in 1936.

She would never know freedom again.

“I was interested in Lucia’s story for what it tells us about our historic fear and lack of understanding of mental illness and how perhaps creativity and mental illness can be inextricably linked. Silenced in life, Lucia was silenced once again in death when her papers (including her correspondence with Samuel Beckett) were all destroyed by her nephew, Stephen Joyce.

I released my last album, Jupiter's Wife, at the very start of the pandemic and so, what would ordinarily have been a very busy time of concerts and promotion became a time of reflection and taking stock. Jupiter's Wife and indeed its predecessor, The Easter Vigil had been quite lyrically dense albums and, as with every new project, I wanted to move on to a new challenge. And so I thought, 'What could be more challenging than to make an album with no words?' I had already started to expand my musical horizons by beginning to learn to read and write music and teaching myself some classical guitar technique. I made some arrangements of Turlough O'Carolan and some old traditional Irish tunes, adapting them to the classical guitar and was casting around for a theme.

It was around this time that I heard a radio documentary on RTE Lyric FM called "Dancing With Lucia," about the daughter of James Joyce who had been a dancer of great potential before being diagnosed with schizophrenia and spending 47 years in institutions. Her story resonated with me very deeply. The idea came to me very quickly to try and tell Lucia's story through music. There followed an intense period of research, trying to dig up any reliable information. The problem is that when it comes to Lucia, there is such a whirlwind of rumour and speculation around her, lots of it wild and salacious, most of it completely devoid of evidence, that it becomes incredibly difficult to glimpse the real person.

To avoid adding to the noise and gossip around Lucia, I decided to take ten key moments (I added one later), facts of her life and compose a piece of music for each, with the hope that these pieces would add up to a cohesive whole, both musically, and more importantly as a portrait of Lucia as a real, breathing, living person. No judgement, no speculation, just empathy.

I wanted the music to have a sense and feel of Paris in the early 20th century and as such was influenced greatly by the sound world of Eric Satie and Claude Debussy but also other more modern composers such as Toru Takemitsu, Leo Brouwer, Stephen Goss, Laura Snowden and many other composers of contemporary music. This has been by a mile, the most ambitious, project of my life, at turns seemingly impossible, yet exhilarating, painful, and yet enlightening. At times it felt like an insurmountable challenge. And then I thought, "If not now, when?"

Joseph Chester, Rennes, 2022