Ulysses Walks into an Irish Bar

The Accidental Epic Behind Odusseia

I should start with a confession: Odusseia exists because I couldn’t write something else.

The assignment was straightforward. My colleague Anthony Moreno needed a three-to-five-minute art song (voice and piano) for his Master’s recital in vocal performance. We agreed on the Silk Road as a subject. I wrote a poem. And then I stared at the poem for months, unable to put a single note to it. Every time Anthony asked how it was coming, I told him it was coming along—hoping that his asking would somehow shake the music loose. It didn’t. The poem sat on my desk like a polite accusation.

Finally, with less than a month before the deadline, I did what I suspect every writer and composer has done at least once: I threw out the thing that wasn’t working and followed the thing that was. I set the Silk Road poem aside and started writing about Odysseus. Not a three-to-five-minute art song. A fifteen-minute concert work that traces the story of Odusseia through the voices of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and—because this is how my brain apparently works—James Joyce.

The piece I’d been asked for was supposed to be a candle. What showed up was a bonfire. Anthony, to his great credit, looked at fifteen minutes of music for a recital slot that was meant to hold five, quietly removed other pieces from his program to make room, and performed it beautifully.

But the heart of Odusseia—the moment where I knew the piece had found what it was really about—is the Sirens. The Sirens have been following me for years: from Homer to Debussy’s Nocturnes to Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. And here they were again, demanding to be part of the story. But I didn’t want to set the scene on some mythical rock in the Mediterranean. I wanted to put it where Joyce did—in the Ormond Hotel in Dublin.

In the novel Ulysses, Joyce’s “Sirens” episode is set in the bar and concert room of the Ormond, where Leopold Bloom—who is Odysseus himself—listens to music while the city hums around him. Joyce wrote the chapter as a kind of musical fugue: stream-of-consciousness layered with humor, song fragments, and pub chatter. It’s one of the most musical pieces of prose ever written. I realized I could put Homer and Joyce in the same pub—the ancient poet and the modern one, separated by three thousand years but telling the same story about the same man, listening to the same dangerous, beautiful music.

So that’s what Odusseia became: a voyage that begins with Homer’s wooden flute, passes through fire and storm, lands in a Dublin pub where the Sirens are Irish session musicians and the danger isn’t drowning but staying too long, and ends with Dante whispering from the Inferno as Bloom walks out the door. Homer meets Joyce. Greece meets Ireland. The epic meets the pub.

Anthony performed Odusseia at his recital, and it was later featured at an international music festival in Padova, Italy—which felt right, given that Dante and Virgil were in the piece.

And the Silk Road poem? It became part of Extraordinary Tales in Music, a concert-opera selected as Best Original Work by the Edgar Allan Poe Festival in 2020. Odusseia made an appearance there too—this time as a thirty-minute orchestral work.

Sometimes the work you’re supposed to write isn’t the work you think you’re supposed to write. Sometimes you sit down to compose a short art song about the Silk Road and end up sending Homer and James Joyce to a pub in Dublin for fifteen minutes. You just have to trust the Sirens when they call.

To view the original version of Odusseia, from Padova, use this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaZsReH3YA

~ Liam