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The sound of dreams : Toru Takemitsu's Far Calls. Coming, Far! and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Toru Takemitsu (1930--96) composed several musical works which adopt as their titles quotations from James Joyce' s final and most revolutionary novel, Finnegans Wake. In this thesis I focus on one of these compositions, Far Calls. Coming, Far! (1981) for solo violin and orchestra. I explain the ways in which Takemitsu and Joyce possess similar philosophies and aesthetics, and examine their mutual interest in the phenomena of dreams. The Wake explores one night of a family's unconscious sleep activity and is heavily influenced by Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. I argue that Takemitsu composes Far Calls. Coming, Far! as a "dreamwork" modelled after Joyce's similar literary endeavour. Accordingly, I categorize the analogous dream structures between Takemitsu's music and Joyce's text. These are: The Dreamer, Language, Time and Water, which I discuss in turn.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21242
Date January 1998
CreatorsMiller, Lynette.
ContributorsLevitz, Tamara (advisor)
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Faculty of Music.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001655242, proquestno: MQ50547, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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