KevinHutchings.ca

Hear the Voice of the Bard! April 20th, 2007

“Songs of William Blake” has taken on a life of its own since Sahra Featherstone and I began working on it in October of 2005. Rather than being a single, self-contained work, the CD is part of a larger multi-media project that had its beginnings when I was invited to present a lecture and musical concert at Penn State University in Altoona, Pennsylvania, back in the autumn of 2005. In the show I put together for that occasion, which I entitled “Hear the Voice of the Bard!—William Blake and the Music of the Songs,” I sang a dozen songs from the album, showed slides of Blake’s artwork, and spoke about Blake’s musicianship and my own musical interpretations of his poems.

I have since presented modified versions of this show at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and at UNBC in Prince George. So far, my calendar for the current year includes a related talk entitled “Blake the Musician,” which I’ll be presenting in July at England’s York University as part of a conference celebrating Blake’s 250th birthday, plus a performance in October for the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which will be meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

- Kevin Hutchings