Program Note:   

I’ve returned repeatedly for inspiration over the past three decades to a handful of poets. This song set collects a handful of my encounters with William Blake. An Infant’s Sorrow (1986) views childbirth from the baby’s perspective—pain, fear, helplessness—the human condition in its nascent form. The first setting of this poem was made in 1986. Cradle Song (2016) views the baby from the mother’s perspective and tracks the “inevitable harvesting” of innocence lost and experience gained. The anapestic dimeter of The Sick Rose (2014) has inspired me to make three settings of this poem over the past thirty years. The Little Boy Lost (1989) presents the young man as a post-adolescent, febrile, and now immersed in life’s hurly-burly and the increasingly frantic struggle with faith. Follows another musicalization of An Infant’s Sorrow. I imagine the infant now to be a young man recalling the circumstances of his own birth. The perspective different, the music shall have necessarily evolved with him. In Love and Harmony (2016), the boy has experienced carnal desire and intuits that the transcendence following the fall (the turtledove) requires the feeding also of spiritual desire. Robust, “juicy” harmonies create a sensually generous context for Blake’s words. The thirteen-minute set closes with a new setting (based on a setting first made in 1986) of The Lilly. The boy is now a man; the very adult poem concerns itself with perfect love. But the Lilly’s association with death reminds us not just of la petite mort, but that perfection is sterile, and that life is anything but perfect. Accordingly, the music is somewhat terse, but has lift.