Any given sentence in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a puzzle with its own internal network of possible meanings, which may or may not “make sense” in the context of anything else in the work.  There are two ways of understanding Joyce’s language; we can either meticulously extract the meaning of each sentence from annotation guides, or we can experience Joyce’s “book of the dark” as a stream of fuzzy allusions that would make perfect sense in an altered state of consciousness.  This concept of “dream logic” is the basis of Finnegan’s Logic.  The work is in five movements; the first and third are for the acoustic ensemble alone, while the second and fourth (“Sequences I and II”) are for electronic playback alone.  The final movement features both the ensemble and some subtle electronic playback.

The first movement (“Prelude”) is an introductory downward cascade of strange instrumental sounds.  The second movement spatializes four voices whispering unintelligible text.  The third movement is a highly distorted Irish jig; its dance rhythm is routinely interrupted by cross-rhythms and errant inserted upbeats.  The fourth movement further garbles the voices heard in the second movement and subjects them to varying degrees of filtering and frequency shifting.  The final movement (“Epilogue”) features fragments of quasi-Celtic melodies in the strings and winds.  As these deteriorate, the prerecorded voices reappear, nearly comprehensible this time.  What follows is essentially the first movement in reverse; the filigree wind gestures ascend to the high violin note that began the work.  The first few bars of Finnegan’s Logic are repeated but are cut off suddenly, just as the final sentence of Finnegans Wake (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the”) connects to the very first (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”).

Finnegan’s Logic was premiered by the Eastman Composers Sinfonietta with Jonathan Girard conducting on March 19, 2009.