Here Comes Everybody: composer Alastair White begins his Finnegans Wake project with an overture at London Irish Centre with Ensemble Exposé & Roger Redgate

A drawing of Joyce (with eyepatch) by Djuna Barnes from 1922,
the year in which Joyce began the 17-year task of writing Finnegans Wake

Alastair White:Here Comes Everybody: an overture to Finnegans Wake; Ensemble Exposé, Roger Redgate; London Irish Centre
5 September 2026

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

How to approach James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in music? This is the question that husband and wife team of composer Alastair White and producer Gemma Williams have been asking as they create a new musical treatment of the novel. They launched the project last year at Irish Design Week [see my article] and the first instalment of White's musical adaptation was presented at the London Irish Centre on Saturday 5 September 2026. White's overture was performed by Ensemble Exposé - Rowland Sutherland, flute, Christopher Redgate, oboe, Heather Roche, clarinet, Chris Brannick, percussion, Caroline Balding, violin, Bridge Carey, viola, Clare O'Connell, cello - conducted by Roger Redgate. (Alastair White studied with Roger Redgate at Goldsmiths.)

The full project is planned to last 13 years and come to completion in 2039, the centenary of Joyce's publication of the complete novel. For the long timescale and fragmentary approach, White and Williams take inspiration from Joyce's work on the novel as he published fragments over a period of 17 years only publishing the complete novel in 1939.

As anyone who know's White's music will understand, his approach to writing an overture is distinctive and what we heard at the London Irish Centre was approaching an hour of music, challenging in its complexity and refreshing in White's desire to go his own way. There is a distinct didactic element to the project as White and Williams take a view of Finnegans Wake (and other modernist texts) that is at odds with modern interpretations. White argued at the post-concert Q&A that commentators err in trying to dig into the work and that we should treat it as a surface. White pointed out that people can enjoy music without being musically literate, and that a similar analogy should be taken with Finnegans Wake, we enjoy the surface without the need to explore every allusion.

The music began with something that could almost have been mid-century English, but then the three strings erupted into contrapuntal violence. There were moments when violinist Caroline Balding seemed to be holding a line against the other two strings. The overall tone was that of jagged violence though the opening material did return. The moment when the wind finally joined the ensemble made a highly dramatic point, and the six indulged in multi-layered complexity with six highly independent and complex lines.

The piece included two readings from Joyce performed by Cathal Murray. In the run up to the first, the music quietened to a mix of silence and gestures, with subsequent free counterpoint leading to a more conventional sustained climax. The ensemble continued with sustained chords during Murray's vivid reading.

Then sharp violence erupted, and percussion was added to the complex layering. An interweaving of long expressionistic lines led, finally to a sustained climax with lots of cymbals. The music wound down to a single repeated tone for Murray's final reading.

At the Q&A Williams explained that having collaborated on several operas - WEAR (2018), ROBE (2019), WOAD (2020), RUNE (2021) - she and White wanted to continue creating operas. There was also a wish to do something in Ireland (Williams is Irish) and both are big Joyce fans. This led to Finnegans Wake. Too big for a single project, the idea led to emulate Joyce by working in fragments.

For reasons of running time, none of White's earlier operas used an overture so writing one of Finnegans Wake was a novelty for him. He sees the operatic overture as an interesting form, being adjacent to the story. He found it a perfect way to begin Finnegans Wake, after all the novel starts in the middle of things.

White's interest in Finnegans Wake also held structural implications. He feels that Joyce has already solved a problem that besets modern composition. The difficulty of choice between writing where this happens then that happens, or a return to the developmental line of earlier classical music. White's reading of Joyce means it has helped him with the development of his own music. White's works for Institut Abeceda in Slovenia, including Fields of Vision, explored these ideas.

White writing in Finnegans Wake owes something to fractals, which occur throughout the work and are ever-changing. He feels this links to relationships with Joyce's work, and White relishes the tension between clarity and obscurity, and the use of repetition. White rejects a one-to-one identification between the music and what is happening in the novel, after all that is what Joyce rejects too. But White has used the language itself as the rhythm of the music.

Ensemble Exposé was formed in 1984 by the composers Richard Barrett, Roger Redgate and Michael Finnissy. Originally, the three created the ensemble because their music was considered too difficult to be played! And the ensemble has continued to be associated with complexity. 

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