Music, Gifts, Innocence and Experience

The choir is now well into rehearsals for The Gift of Music

Not for the first time, I am struck by the imagination, as well as the lateral thinking eccentricity, of the poet William Blake. His The Lamb inspired what I consider Sir John Tavener’s best choral piece. I will resist the temptation to go on about its technical brilliance as a composition, just say that its complex passages hint at the complexity of Blake’s thinking while the beguiling simplicity of the contrasting sections reflect the near naïvety which a swift glance might assign to the poem. Continue reading →