PhilPaine.com

Musi­cians have long been attract­ed to William Blake’s inter­con­nect­ed poems known as the Songs of Inno­cence and of Expe­ri­ence. Allen Gins­berg has assert­ed that a study of the rhyme and meter of the poems reveals that Blake intend­ed them to be sung. They cer­tain­ly have the feel­ing of Eng­lish tav­ern bal­lads strange­ly mutat­ed into moral and meta­phys­i­cal med­i­ta­tions. This mix­ture of seri­ous pur­pose and pop­u­lar form is exact­ly the stuff that best suits Amer­i­can com­pos­er William Bol­com. Bol­com is prob­a­bly the least stuffy of Amer­i­ca’s mod­ern com­posers — eas­i­ly com­pa­ra­ble to Charles Ives. His mas­sive musi­cal set­ting of the poems (three hours) employs an eclec­tic array of tech­niques [and inter­view­er notes “coun­try & west­ern, the blues, Broad­way, Russ­ian, Jew­ish, hints of Mahler, neo­clas­si­cism, atonal­i­ty, even a reg­gae anthem ded­i­cat­ed to Bob Mar­ley”]. But this is not just a grab-bag of ran­dom gim­micks. Every­thing works togeth­er, every­thing is there for a good rea­son. The work nev­er bores, nev­er wastes time, and is nev­er dri­ven by musi­cal “the­o­ry”. It’s dri­ven by the ideas of the poems. Bol­com comes much clos­er to their spir­it than, say Vaugh­an Williams, who suf­fused them with his own pas­toral piety, and defanged them. Though his work sounds noth­ing like that of the Cana­di­an com­pos­er Chris­tos Hatzis, Bol­com resem­bles him in com­bin­ing intense emo­tion, seri­ous intel­lect, and a rejec­tion of the crude dichoto­my between “pop­u­lar” and “art” music. I strong­ly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to the record­ing avail­able on the inex­pen­sive Nax­os label, which com­bines superb tech­ni­cal and per­for­mance stan­dards with a rea­son­able price — quite appro­pri­ate to the com­poser’s ethos.