William Blake‘s famous poem, The Lamb, has been set many times to music. Most of these settings evoke a beautiful pastorale scene, much like what we heard yesterday. You know – green field, sheep bouncing around, flowers, happy little trees springing up in the background.

That’s all nice, but while the poem talks about ovines, it’s not exactly pastorale – it’s a little on the cryptic / mystical side. And then there’s Blake, who had religious visions and his own independent set of Christian-based beliefs, and hated the Church of England. This poem is not a Sunday-school rhyme for kids to recite. That’s why the winner of the “best setting of this poem award” goes to John Tavener.

If the next paragraph is confusing, don’t worry; you don’t need to understand it to enjoy the music. 🙂

Just like Blake’s poem, Tavener’s music has a simple exterior and a complex interior. It opens with a single voice melody which only uses four pitches. The second voice joins, singing the same melody, but inverted – so when voice 1 goes up a major third, voice 2 goes down a major third. The effect is a “mirror image” of the melody, and it’s haunting, especially as the texture is so transparent – there is no noisy accompaniment to cover up the strange sound. After this, a new musical phrase is introduced, now employing retrograde motion – the melody is split in half, and sings 7 notes forward, then reverses and sings 7 notes backwards. Then, naturally, voice 2 enters, singing the same phrase with retrograde motion, inverted to a mirror-image of voice 1.

Is your head spinning? Here, maybe this awesome graphic will help.

or maybe not …

The music continues with more of this mirror-image effects, just enough edge to make you listen closely, but not so much as to make you turn away. Finally, the last part of the poem is stated in very simple, traditional harmony, using a minimum number of pitches and harmony. And it’s chilling.

Like my March 1 post, today and tomorrow’s music is related to gods and planets.

Today, Jupiter the planet. Well, kind of. Gustav Holst‘s famous suite for orchestra, The Planets, is titled after the heavenly bodies, but the individual movements are subtitled in a manner that makes the orbiting spheres seem more like deities. But don’t be confused; instead, enjoy one of the hilarious things about being human – our ability to reconcile two contradicting ideas. And if nothing else, you gotta love the music.

Jupiter (the planet) doesn’t seem jolly to me, nor does it seem capable of that gorgeous English march in the middle section of this piece. The planet always struck me as very sinister – the Snidely Whiplash of the solar system.

Frederick Delius was born in England, and is considered an English composer, though he spent most of his life elsewhere. In his young adult years, he was forced to move to Florida to work in the orange business, but his heart wasn’t in it. He moved to (where else?) Leipzig to study, where he befriended the Norwegian composers we listened to this week: Edvard Grieg and Christian Sinding. He later moved to Paris, and remained on the continent for the rest of his life, only moving back to England during World War I.

The English are known for their love of nature, and this pastorale tone poem by Delius particularly smacks of Vaughan Williams‘ nature-inspired works. Delius writes musical bird calls (it’s fairly easy to recognize the call of the cuckoo), and also quotes a Norwegian folk melody as a way of “tipping his hat” to his Scandinavian friends.