Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Wednesday May 30, 2007
A journey through the mystical, marvellous world of William Blake.
Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey
Violet Archer: Two Songs
Malcolm Arnold: Five Blake Songs
Colin Eatock: Tears of Gold
Craig Galbraith: The Tyger
Gordon Jacob: Songs of Innocence
Godfrey Ridout: Seasons
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Ten Blake Songs
William Blake figures in the popular imagination as a poet, mystic, visionary, artist, and engraver, but rarely as a musician. Two of his collections, however, were entitled “songs” – the Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) – and he is said to have composed melodies for many of his lyrics, and to have sung them for his friends and supporters: A.S. Mathews reported “...I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit”. Unfortunately, no music of Blake’s has survived. Since his death, and especially in the past century or so, countless composers have been inspired by Blake’s fresh lyricism and visionary imagination, from Parry’s anthemic setting of Jerusalem to the chanting of Allan Ginsberg and the meditations of progressive rock musicians. This programme presents a small but representative fraction of this repertoire, by British and Canadian composers of the 20th century.
Blake was born in London in 1757, and spent almost all his life in the city. His family were modestly successful and somewhat unconventional – interested, for example, in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. They encouraged his obvious artistic gifts, and seem not to have been particularly disturbed by the early evidence of his mystical tendencies: from his youth onward, he experienced visions of angels and carried on conversations with figures from history and scripture. He trained as an engraver, and worked in printing and publishing all his life, never achieving material success, but contriving, through modest living and the support of friends, to avoid debt. He was assisted in his drawing and engraving by his wife, Catherine Boucher; they seem to have lived in great harmony, although she is once said to have remarked “I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise”. When he died in 1827, Blake is said to have burst out singing with joy at the heavenly glories which he saw before him.
Blake’s radical understanding of human imagination and consciousness is not easily summarized, but the oft-quoted aphorism from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell gives some sense of its breadth: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. He outlined the task of the visionary poet in Auguries of Innocence as
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
Obstacles to this freedom, in Blake’s view, included conventional religion, restrictive laws, social and economic inequity, and the dreadful consequences of the industrial revolution, all of which he inveighed against in his longer poems. While the great revival of interest in Blake was to wait until the 20th century, he was to some extent an influence on writers of the English romantic and pre-Raphaelite movements. Wordsworth wrote, for example, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott”.
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Violet Archer (1913-2000) - Two Songs, for voice and clarinet (1958)
Archer sets two of Blake’s lyrics for the spare texture of solo voice and clarinet. In The Lamb, from “Songs of Innocence”, the vocal and instrumental lines echo and interweave, setting the text in straightforward and mostly diatonic shapes. The Fly, from “Songs of Experience”, uses the clarinet to establish a sense of almost ceaseless movement in the brief opening section. The song moves from duple metre to triple and back, as the poet reflects on the shared mortality of all created life, and resolves his questions in carefree simplicity.
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Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006) – Five William Blake Songs, for voice and strings, op. 66 (1959)
This set of songs was composed in 1959, and originally conceived for string orchestra; this evening’s performance features an adaptation for string quartet. Arnold chose lyrics to frame a day: the invocation To Morning to begin, and To the Evening Star to conclude; in between are three lyrics which, rather uncharacteristically for Blake, focus on romantic love. Shimmering harmonics and pianissimo chords summon the dawn, rising to a peak as the light breaks upon the hills, and rapidly subsiding again. The second song, Memory, hither come, begins with a restless forward movement, its phrases beginning off the downbeat of the triple metre. As the text becomes more languid, and then more melancholy, both the vocal melody and the accompanying figures become more expansive. How sweet I roamed begins with a deceptively pastoral melody which is then chromatically transformed as the lover is led into Phoebus’ net. The original tune returns, with minor-mode inflections, and the movement winds itself into tonal stasis. My silks and fine array, in the first stanza, uses a drooping chromatic figure in voice and strings to depict the despair of unrequited love; the middle stanza breaks almost ecstatically upward before losing its momentum and returning to the opening material for the final portion of the text. The final movement gradually washes out chromatic complexities, with figures which evoke those of the opening movement without actually echoing them.
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Colin Eatock (1958- ) – Tears of Gold, for voice, cello, and harpsichord (2000)
Toronto composer Colin Eatock set five of Blake’s Songs of Innocence in 2000. The introduction, a setting of The Piper, is built on the figure first stated in the cello opening, and rarely departs from the tonality thus established, further emphasized in sections of harpsichord ostinato. The Shepherd also builds on a opening motif, but develops it more extensively; the alternation of duple and triple metres, very natural to the text, nevertheless imparts a quality of unhurried movement. The Echoing Green is all about movement and sound – the rhythmic vitality of games and the sounds of nature and village in springtime. In The Blossom, voice and accompaniment allude diffidently to birdsong, and gentle undulating figures maintain a sense of quiet. The fragment Night is the most complex movement of the work, both textually and musically. It moves from evening’s stillness to the fear of death and the glorious peace of the afterlife, and the melodic line shifts between declamatory recitative and a more arioso treatment.
Craig Galbraith (1975 - ) – The Tyger, for mezzo soprano, string trio and clarinet (2007)
Tyger, Tyger was commissioned by Talisker Players, with the assistance of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. This is its world premiere. The composer describes the process of writing the piece:
Blake’s "The Tyger" reveals a depth of thought beyond its initially simple appearance. His intent was deliberately nebulous, and it was from this character that I took some musical inspiration. The poem's odd juxtapositions place things where they don't belong, and this dichotomy is represented musically by intensely simple and beautiful passages and complex, frantic sections. In the middle of the work, busy quasi-carnival passages diminish the importance of individual notes, which become almost irrelevant within the gesture of the music. However, for the opening and closing verse (which Blake himself repeated) I chose simple whole-note chords, where I've asked the players to treat each individual note as a gem in itself.
This peaceful music was also inspired by the birth of my first son this spring, during which we had serious medical complications. I had written about half of the work before we were thrown into the midst of his medical drama (he is now fully recovered), and when it came time to finish writing, I had a new perspective on Blake's words, and the real-life juxtapositions that we all experience day to day. So, the final passage continues out of the last line of text, as if the music contains the final words which Blake did not write. Each note a gem, which unfolds to reveal the next. Having nearly lost our son in his first few days, we find that every step we take with him now is a gem newly revealed.
Gordon Jacob (1895-1984) – Songs of Innocence, for voice and string trio (1921)
Jacobs’ songs, originally for voice and piano, are heard this evening in a transcription for voice and string trio. The three lyrics are pastoral, and Jacobs’ largely diatonic treatment reflects this mood in a characteristically English style. The Lamb and The Shepherd flow easily through the text, with voice and accompaniment answering one another without any overt “drama”. The jovial Laughing Song appears simple and artless, almost – but not quite – like a popular folk-song setting of the period.
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Godfrey Ridout (1918-1984) – The Seasons, for voice and piano quintet (1980)
The Seasons was written for Ridout’s cousin, the tenor James McLean. The piece was planned to include four of Blake’s poems on the seasons, but Autumn was never written, and the cycle stands as a three-movement work. The poems are from “Poetical Sketches”, published in 1783 (before the “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”); their style is somewhat more grandiose and less pared-down than that of the later lyrics, with each season personified and richly described. Ridout’s settings match the heroic manner of the text, with the strings accompanying the voice and impelling the passage of time, and the piano alternately joining in the thicker “orchestral” textures and punctuating the vocal line. In Spring the excitement of anticipation, summed up in the threefold repetition “O Spring”, settles briefly into a discipline of waiting, only to give way to triumphant joy and the return of the opening material; Summer begins and continues with fire and movement, overcome by torpor only in the final few measures; Winter is both icy and forceful.
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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) – Ten Blake Songs, for voice and oboe (1957)
The Ten Blake Songs were written when Vaughan Williams was eighty-six, and their apparent simplicity – even austerity – is the product of great compositional confidence and maturity. They were composed for a documentary film about the graphic works of Blake, in which they were used alternately with extracts from Vaughan Williams’ orchestral piece Job, and dedicated to Wilfred Brown and the oboist Janet Craxton. London, The Shepherd, and The Divine Image are set for voice alone, but in the other movements the voice and oboe are equal interlocutors, rarely sharing material exactly, but complementing each other and the text in flexibly interwoven lines. The lyrics alternate between optimism and pessimism, and Vaughan Williams’ contrasting of the two would seem almost banal were it not achieved with variety and lightness of touch: A Poison Tree, London, and Cruelty has a Human Heart employ intensely chromatic inflections of the vocal and instrumental melody, while Infant Joy, The Piper, The Lamb, The Shepherd, Ah! Sun-flower, and The Divine Image are delicately modal. Eternity closes the set with an ambivalent reflection on the nature of love and beauty, and the shift in sense is subtly echoed by a shift in tonal colouring.
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