Setting Joyce`s poetry and prose to music is an activity which has occupied composers not only since his death, but also during Joyce`s lifetime. By selecting a representative sample of settings of Joyce`s poetry and prose for discussion, this paper attempts to show how a setting of a text addresses some of the difficulties a reader encounters concerning its composition and interpretation, as well as how a musical setting might enrich literary understanding. Chamber Music has been chosen as the most generally representative poetry text, and settings in which Joyce had an active role in assessing (mainly those by Palmer) have been considered, as well as later ones unknown to him. Settings from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses (those of Finnegans Wake are beyond the scope of this paper) provide an opportunity for showing how Joyce`s experiments in prose parallel, or even anticipate, some of the procedures used in a musical language, and begin to question the identity of the text itself as literature. Besides addressing these more abstract issues, the paper is also intended as a chance to expose musical settings which are worthwhile in themselves, and which the author feels both reflect Joyce`s achievements in each literary genre and demonstrate his wide-ranging musical knowledge and interests.