FINNEGANS WAKE 100 is a series of works leading to the centenary of the book’s publication in 1939 — designed by the Scottish composer Alastair White and his creative partner and wife, Tipperary-born curator Gemma A. Williams.

White’s work has been hailed as “a whole new exciting genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), and this latest project seeks to capture the joyful, multidimensional beauty of Joyce’s text through an approach that treats it as a surface rather than a depth. Each event offers the opportunity to engage directly with this creative process and experience both Joyce and opera not as finished products — but as living, evolving forms.  

Central to the adaptation’s approach is a radical re-reading of Finnegans Wake and the modernist canon: that authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway continue to be misread through romantic and post-modern analyses which see them as depths rather than surfaces. The project contends that — like the sparse prose of Hills Like White Elephants — Finnegans Wake has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to “decode” it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; Finnegans Wake is not a cipher. It is only itself.

A Scottish composer and writer, Alastair White’s work is characterised by a lyrical complexity which has been described as “ambitious, iconoclastic” (The Stage) and an attempt “to challenge long-held assumptions about the material world and to illuminate the performative nature of matter itself” (Opera Today). Notable projects include the fashion-opera cycle of WEAR, ROBE, WOAD and RUNE (“excellent” — BBC Music Magazine, “spellbinding” — Boulezian) and #CAPITAL, the first opera to be performed in the metaverse (“an impressive Gesamtkunstwerk [which] shows all that the future will make possible” — Schön Magazine). Recipient of the Tait Memorial Trust Award, and shortlisted twice for a Scottish Award for New Music (in 2019 and 2020) a Creative Edinburgh Award (2019), an Ivan Juritz Prize (2023), and The Stage Awards (2024), his music is available on several full-length releases from Métier and Navona, and his scores are published by UMP.

Gemma A. Williams is a curator and writer. Her journalism covers news coming from and into China across the areas of luxury, fashion, tech and fragrance. Her publication ‘Fashion China’ (Thames & Hudson, 2015) was the first title to offer an overview of the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese fashion designers. She has covered the APAC region for The Business of Fashion and was the editorial director of Jing Daily. She contributes to Vogue Business, South China Morning Post and The Business of Fashion as well as Forbes. She has a masters in Fashion Curation and currently acts as the China curator at A Shaded View of Fashion Film Festival and sits on the Curatorial Panel for DCCI.