IonSound Project of Pittsburgh
BLAKE SONGS
- An Infant's Sorrow
- A Cradle Song
- The Sick Rose
- Infant Sorrow, Again
- Love and Harmony
- The Lilly
“BLAKE SONGS is a major new cycle comprised of songs composed between 1986 and 2016, compiled and arranged into a set with instrumental accompaniment. I am very excited to be composing a new work for IonSound, and particularly delighted to be crafting a new vocal work for Robert Frankenberry, a longtime treasured collaborator. The fifteen-minute work is scored for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.”
Tenor Robert Frankenberry
About IonSound
IonSound Project comprises flutist Peggy Yoo, clarinetist Kathleen Costello, violinist Laura Motchalov, cellist Elisa Kohanski, and pianists Rob Frankenberry and Jack Kurutz. IonSound seeks to add to Pittsburgh's cultural life by programming innovative concerts, commissioning works of new music, collaborating with artists in a variety of disciplines, and exploring the boundaries between concert and popular music. The members represent some of the most in-demand young musicians in the Pittsburgh area. Collectively, they perform with such ensembles as the Pittsburgh Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Pittsburgh Opera, Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, Wheeling Symphony, Erie Philharmonic, and have also appeared with the Pittsburgh Philharmonic, Columbus Symphony, Charleston Symphony, Akron Symphony, and the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Program Note
I had just finished making a new setting of William Blake’s poem An Infant’s Sorrow as a conduit for expressing the emotions inspired by the occasion of my elder son’s eighth birthday when Robert Frankenberry asked whether I might have some songs that his Pittsburgh ensemble IonSound Project might be able to premiere. Immediately I thought that a set of Blake poems exploring a young man’s transit from the innocence of youth through young adulthood would be possible, since my thinking was running in that direction and, to be blunt, Blake’s poems tend to be blissfully short—something composers appreciate. The songs may be sung by either a man or a woman, but the narrative that I had in mind tracks a young man’s maturation.
The result is Blake Songs, which collects settings I have made of his poetry over the span of three decades. Drawn from the great “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” An Infant’s Sorrow 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.
I followed that with a brand new Cradle Song, which views the baby from the mother’s perspective, and tracks the “inevitable harvesting” of innocence lost and experience gained. One of the things parenthood has taught me is that childhood is an extremely complicated, profoundly emotional time in one’s life—far more operatic in the event than I recall it as having been.
The anapestic dimeter of The Sick Rose has inspired me to make three settings of it over the past thirty years. For this cycle I chose the one that I composed in 2014. Experience is a doorway, the transit from innocence to decadence requires moving through that doorway. Who knows what, exactly, Blake is referring to, except that it is clear that virtue is lost due to corruption, however verdant: Nature teaches us also to let things die.
The Little Boy Lost captures the young man as a post-adolescent, febrile, and now immersed in life’s hurly-burly and the increasingly frantic struggle with faith.
I follow The Little Boy Lost with the other setting of An Infant’s Sorrow—this one from 1989. 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.
Next, I chose to set Love and Harmony. 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 in this brand new setting.
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 anything but perfect. Accordingly, the music is somewhat terse, but has lift.