John Cage was interested in James Joyce's work from the forties onwards, focusing on his coded and relatively inaccessible Finnegan's Wake in particular. He set a passage from the Wake, The wonderful widow of eighteen Springs, to music as early as 1942. Then in the seventies and eighties came his five Writings through Finnegans Wake. To a certain extent he was writing his way through this Joycean work using various literary methods. The result was five sound-poem texts that John Cage frequently performed himself all over the world. Muoyce is his fifth and last of the Wake.