Blake and Music, 2018

Last year’s listing of settings of William Blake to music was relatively extensive. This was because of the addition of a considerable number of popular music settings that had been overlooked by Donald Fitch in his Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake and the later “Blake Set to Music: Supplement 2001” in Blake 35.2 (fall 2001), and by Ashanka Kumari in “Adding to Blake Set to Music” in Blake 49.4 (spring 2016). This year’s list adds settings that I had missed from the one drawn up for 2017—the majority, both popular and classical, were published or recorded from 2010 onwards—and of course includes settings that were released in 2018. As before, it avoids songs that mention Blake only tangentially or provide short quotations, but it does incorporate those, such as Michael Price’s Tender Symmetry, that draw heavily on Blake’s art and poetry.