In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between Blake and music, notably from the reception point of view. Between the 1960s and 1980s the focus was on musical and poetic works which had influenced Blake’s own songs—such as George Sampson’s The Century of Divine Songs (1943), Martha England’s Hymns Unbidden (1966) and B. H. Fairchild’s Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake—but since the publication of Donald Fitch's extensive catalogue, Blake Set to Music (1990), discussions have gradually shifted to the field of reception studies and concentrated on responses to his work by musicians and composers.
In the realm of classical music, a number of dissertations on the topic have been produced in the past 20 years and most of them articulate poetry and music through a forensic examination of the scores, such as A Study in Songs Comparative Analyses of 20th Century Settings of William Blake's ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ (2017), A Performer's Guide to Virgil Thomson’s Five Songs from William Blake (2004) and A Comprehensive Case Study on the Ten Blake Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams (2009). Taking a different path, Jason Whittaker's book Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness (2022), concentrates on the context of the production and offers a comprehensive history of reception for the hymn Jerusalem and its appropriation (and misappropriation) by multifarious social and political groups throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. And whilst Parry raised Blake’s famous stanzas to the status of anthem, some 50 years later the composer Benjamin Britten converted his poetry into one of the greatest vocal works of the 20th century. It was about time for a study on Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.
Britten and Thinking through the Cycles
Well-known for his deep interest in and engagement with literature, in the course of his successful career Britten set 360 poems to music, outnumbering his Lieder heroes Schumann and Schubert. In his book Britten's Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs (2023), music theorist Gordon Cameron Sly examines in detail the cycles The Holy Sonnets of John Donne Op. 35 (1943), Winter Words Op. 52 (1953) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Op. 74 (1965). His main line of argument is that they constitute one of the very few examples of “true” cycles out of fifteen poetry collections set to music by Britten. And they were chosen precisely because they are the Britten’s only cycles focused on a single author. A cycle, according to Sly, is far more sophisticated than the definition offered by The Oxford Dictionary of Music, which states it is “a term to describe any such work in which the movements are connected by some musical theme or themes common to all” (Oxford Companion to Music, p.331).
For Sly, as obvious as it may sound, a cycle must be cyclical. It demands a well-defined architectural structure, or more precisely, an overarching design. He believes this structure confers a sense of interconnectedness and interdependency between the poems or texts assembled. This cohesion is also explored by Sly on a more subjective level in his analysis of the themes and content of the cycles in relation to Britten’s own philosophical and personal views over the years. Such well-defined structure, he argues, is to a great extent derivative from Schumann’s song cycles that deeply influenced Britten. Sly departs from previous studies on Britten that identify cohesive principles found in some of Britten’s earlier works and played a crucial role in shaping the musical form of his cycles, such as “framing”, “non-contiguous continuities” and “nested formal structures” (p.2-3). Sly’s argument implies more subjective intra- and interconnections, believing that the cycles offer insights on aspects of Britten’s own personal transformations and philosophical views over the years.
Britten's Blake
Although all three cycles are closely linked by such features, in his chapter dedicated to Blake’s cycle, Sly draws attention to some substantial differences between Britten’s Songs and Proverbs and the other two cycles. For a start, Blake’s poems and aphorisms were selected by his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, something which could easily weaken Sly’s argument on the intimate connection between the poems and Britten’s subjectivity. However, in order to circumvent it, Sly reminds us of Britten’s long-lasting interest on Blake (he was only 16 when he first set Blake to music) and places emphasis on the meaningfulness of his compositional choices. Another dissimilarity concerns the tonal scheme. Compared to the other two cycles, Sly observes that the songs from Blake’s cycle are less tonally connected. As a means to reinforce the commonalities of the individual pieces and preserve their cohesion, Britten resorts to an inventive strategy: he interposes the proverbs between the songs as recitative excerpts with a sequencing of four note progressions (tetrachords), which produces a substantial degree of symmetry and creates a sense of stylistic unity. This intimate interrelatedness between non-adjacent sections constitutes a successful example of “non-contiguous continuities”, and according to the author, “it enacts the freedom and spontaneous energy that Blake saw as essential to meaningful human experience” (p.156)
Music and Literature
Sly never seems to neglect the literary dimension when he discusses at length the minutest details of the scores. He skillfully explores the underlying and unifying themes of the poems and proverbs and is able to establish convincing correlations and parallels between the structure of Britten’s music and Blake’s poetry within a cyclic dynamic. His book, however, may come across as too dense and inscrutable for an audience not particularly versed in bars and crochets, which I imagine is the case for the vast majority of literature scholars. Although interdisciplinarity is considered the byword in today’s academia, it can be challenging to deal with a material which requires a certain knowledge (or fluency) in a specific language or idiom.
This book is richly illustrated with scores which demonstrate Sly’s reasoning, but one can hardly see the solid and clear musical designs Sly points out if one doesn’t have a clue of what the position of the noteheads on the pentagram mean. While Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs represents an unquestionable contribution to the reception studies of Blake in music, it is definitely a much more accessible book for a musician interested in literary studies than vice-versa.
Bibliography
BERKEBILE, J. "A Study in Songs: Comparative Analyses of 20th Century Settings of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience": Selections from Vaughan Williams's "Ten Blake Songs", Britten's "Songs and Proverbs of William Blake", and Rochberg's "Blake Songs: For Soprano and Chamber Ensemble". Graduate Dissertation. West Virginia University, 2017.
CRACCHIOLO, M. A. A Comprehensive Case Study on the Ten Blake Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams: From "Infant Joy" to "London". Doctoral Dissertation. Florida State University, 2009.
ENGLAND, M.; SPARROW, J. Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers. New York: The New York Public Library, 1966.
FAIRCHILD, B. H. Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form and Image in the Poetry of William Blake. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980.
FITCH, D. Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
FORD, B. (ed.) Benjamin Britten's Poets: An Anthology of the Poems He Set to Music. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996.
LATHAM, A. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
SAMPSON, G. "The Century of Divine Songs", Warburton Lecture on English Poetry, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XXIX, 1943.
WHITAKER, J. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
WHITFIELD, A. D. A Performer's Guide to Virgil Thomson's Five Songs from William Blake". Doctoral Dissertation. Louisiana State University, 2004.