Myra Russel collection of musical settings of James Joyce

1909-1993

Myra Teicher Russel (1920-2005) was a professor and authority on the works of James Joyce. She returned to school later in life, completed her graduate work at Sarah Lawrence College, and taught literature at Elizabeth Seton College (later Iona College) for many years. Her area of interest within Joyce studies was music set to the poems of the author. In the early 1980s, Russel rediscovered the manuscript for Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer's Chamber Music (1909) at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Chamber Music (1907), a volume of thirty-six poems, was Joyce's first published book and it has inspired many composers. Joyce particularly admired Palmer's settings of the poems, which he saw in manuscript through correspondence with the composer. He encouraged Palmer to publish the work, but the score did not appear in print until Russel produced her own edition, Chamber Music: The Lost Song Settings (1993), accompanied by a recording of the songs by the tenor, Robert White (Joyce never heard Palmer's score in performance). An active figure on the conference circuit, Russel often arranged programs that featured music set to the works of Joyce, wrote several scholarly articles, and was a longtime member of the James Joyce Society of New York.