Here is William Bolcom’s
program note for his Songs of Innocence
and of Experience (1984):
Ever since I was seventeen,
when the reading of William Blake was to make a profound difference to my life,
I have wanted to set the entire Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music.
Several songs were actually completed in 1956; The Sick Rose, and the opening,
revised, of the Songs of Innocence, are survivors of
that time, and the work remained in my mind until 1973, when I moved to
The final ordering of the
Songs left by Blake, as will be seen, is quite different from the one I had
become used to in my earliest reading. In the 1880s William Muir, an artist
greatly involved with the revival of interest in Blake’s engravings and
paintings, actually printed some of the poet’s works from the original copper
plates. He then (as Blake with his wife Catherine had done) handcoloured them,
although, to my mind, not as interestingly or vividly as had Blake himself. In
Muir’s edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1888) I found by chance in
the appendix an ordering of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(reproduced in what looks very much like Blake’s own hand); Blake had
presumably left this for his wife should anyone have wanted a further printing
of the Songs, which had been one of the few of his engraved works that had had
any sale. (Evidently no one asked Catherine Blake for a copy.)
This ordering, new to me,
gave me what I needed in trying to find an overall shape to the work: a series
of arches, in both subject and emotion, that marked the piece off into nine
clear movements, each inhabiting a certain spiritual climate and progressing
ever further in Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. With slight
changes I have used Blake’s last ordering in my piece. I had always wanted to
end the evening with The Divine Image, which Blake had engraved and then
rejected for the Experience cycle, and I revised the order of the last part to
accommodate the poem.
The Blakean principle of
contraries — “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” (The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell) — would also dominate my approach
to the work, particularly in matters of style. Current Blake research
has tended to confirm what I had assumed from the first, that
at every point Blake used his whole culture, past and present, highflown and
vernacular, as sources for his many poetic styles. Throughout the entire Songs
of Innocence and of Experience, exercises in elegant Drydenesque diction are
placed cheek by jowl with ballads that could have come from one of the
“songsters” of his day (small, popular books or pamphlets of words set to
well-known tunes, in the manner of John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera). It is as if
many people from all walks of life were speaking, each in a different way. The
apparent disharmony of each clash and juxtaposition eventually produces a
deeper and more universal harmony, once the whole cycle is absorbed. All I did
was to use the same stylistic point of departure as Blake in my musical
settings.
If any one work of mine has
been the chief source and progenitor of the others, I would have to say that
this is it. My fascination with the synthesis of the most unlikely stylistic
elements dates from my knowledge and application of Blake’s principle of
contraries, and I have spent most of my artistic life in pursuit of this higher
synthesis. In this work, through my settings, I have tried my best to make
everything clear; I have used music in the same way Blake used line and colour,
in order to illuminate the poems.
To me, William Blake is the
most urgent of poets. What he says is as immediate as ever, but particularly to
us: he came from an epoch of social change as total as ours. With clear and
unjudging vision Blake saw where the human race was heading; it could be argued
that the Songs of Innocence and of Experience may be the most lucid explanation
we have of what forces have brought us to where we are now. If there is any
solution to our unending crisis, it is only through acceptance and
understanding of our own nature, and if I have caused a more careful listening
to Blake’s message, then my work over a span of 25 years will not have been in
vain.
(1984)
You will find convenient texts of all the Songs of Innocence at: http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/collections/songs_of_innocence.html and of Songs of Experience at: http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/blake_ind.html