 Speaks sets the poem to music in time, marked "Alla Marcia"; the key is E-flat major.This largely replaced six earlier musical settings of "Mandalay", by Gerard Cobb (1892), Arthur Thayer (1892), Henry Trevannion (1898), Walter Damrosch (1898), Walter Hedgcock (1899), and Arthur Whiting (1900); Percy Grainger composed another in 1898 but did not publish it.The total number of settings is now at least 24, spanning jazz, ragtime, swing, pop, folk, and country music; most of them use only the first two and the last two stanzas, with the chorus.