‘Performing Joyce’ was the name of the 2005 Bloomsday in Melbourne seminar. Jim Howard and Di Silber talked about the role of costume in creating Bloom, Lewis Fiander discussed adaptation and performance in his celebrated one-man show A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Professor Dick Corballis of Massey University in New Zealand spoke about the evolution of the haka page in the Wake. Rod Baker, Trish Shaw and I talked about the evolution of texts for their musical settings of two songs. This is my paper given, with Rod and Trish doing the singing, during the seminar in the State Library of Victoria, June 16 th 2005. The great Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini claimed that the words to songs were immaterial and skited that he could set anything to music, even a laundry list. The great Russian composers Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich only ever met once. Their entire conversation at an official Moscow function in 1962 went thus: Shostakovich pluck...