New Project Sets James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to Music

May 7, 2015

Finnegan’s Wake In an effort to open up James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake to new interpretations, seventeen musicians contributed to an unabridged, musical version of the book, called Waywords and Meansigns.

The project was developed in order to “accommodate the Wake’s massive scope and range of possible readings,” reads the website, which claims that the popular audio version of the book by Patrick Healy “limits the listener to a single aural interpretation of the text.”

“By inviting seventeen different musicians, readers, and performers to record their own interpretations of the Wake, we hope to offer a version of Joyce’s work that is stimulating, accessible, and enjoyable to even the most casual of readers and listeners.”

Each musician or group was assigned to one of the seventeen chapters, and was given free rein regarding how they worked with their chapter. The requirements were only that the words “be audible, unabridged, and more or less in their original order.”

A second edition of Waywords and Meansigns will be released in the fall, and the project is looking for contributors.

But Waywords and Meansigns isn’t the only project increasing Wake’s accessibility through new mediums and the web. A Twitter account, @FW_WOTD, is tweeting the entire text, 140 characters at a time, and Stephen Crowe, a Seattle-based illustrator, is recreating Joyce’s book as a graphic novel.


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