Finnegans Wake: Here Comes Everybody is the opening concert in a cycle of works adapting James Joyce’s great modernist novel for the musical stage, performed by Roger Redgate and Ensemble Exposé.

Created by composer and author Alastair White, the cycle is conceived as a thirteen-year project leading to the book’s centenary in 2039. Finnegans Wake is regarded as the world’s most controversial text — to some, unreadable, to others, a masterpiece. How do you adapt a book that resists all definition? Finnegans Wake: Here Comes Everybody is the beginning of such an experience: one that forgoes fixed form and definition, that cannot be contained within a single iteration or instance, and which unfolds in years rather than minutes.

This first instalment — a one-hour reimagining of an operatic overture — is performed by veteran avant-gardists Roger Redgate and Ensemble Éxposé, a group recognised for championing the most challenging of contemporary music since its formation in 1984. Alastair White’s work has been described “a whole new exciting genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), and this ensemble of distinguished soloists bring his reimagining of Joyce’s rhythmic, fluid language to life in musical technicolour.

White explains how “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 that 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.”

Produced by the Irish curator Gemma A. Williams, the project is supported by DCCI Ireland and created in partnership with the London Irish Centre.

Ensemble Exposé was formed in 1984 by the composers Richard Barrett, Roger Redgate and Michael Finnissy. The group has given extensive concerts and broadcasts throughout Europe and has appeared at many of the major festivals on new music in France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy and Sweden as well as appearing at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The ensemble records regularly for the BBC and has broadcast on Radio France, Dutch Radio, Hessische Rundfunks, RAI (Italy) and Swedish Radio. It has been featured on BBC TV’s Omnibus and was a resident ensemble at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1986, 1988, 1990 (when on each occasion prizes for both performance and composition were awarded to several of its members) and the International Bartok Festival and Seminar in Szombathely, Hungary. In 1995 the ensemble received a project grant from the London Arts Board for a series of concerts featuring the music of the American composer and improviser Anthony Braxton. Recordings include work by Michael Finnissy, Fabrice Fitch, Edwin Roxburgh, Roger Redgate and Brian Ferneyhough.

Roger Redgate studied conducting at the Royal College of Music with Edwin Roxburgh, specialising in contemporary repertoire. He has worked with many of today’s leading composers including Clarence Barlow, Richard Barrett, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Jonathan Harvey, Sam Hayden, and Kaija Saariaho. From 1986-94 he was resident conductor at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and was also conductor in residence for the International Bartok Festival and Seminar in Szombathely, Hungary. He has been conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Exposé since 1984, with whom he has recorded CDs of music by Paul Archbold, Joe Cutler, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Fabrice Fitch, David Gorton and Edwin Roxburgh. He has performed at many of todays leading festivals for new music  and has broadcast for the BBC, Radio France, Hessische Rundfunks, RAI (Italy) and Swedish Radio .

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.