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Articles

Vol. 57 no. 1: Summer 2023

Blake and Music, 2022

DOI
https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.339
Submitted
14 July 2023
Published
26 Jul. 2023

Abstract

If 2021 saw a considerable addition to the corpus of Blake settings and tracks inspired by his poetry, 2022 witnessed something of an explosion, with almost a hundred releases recorded from this year alone. As has been evident for some time, this rapid acceleration is due to the growth of streaming services, with almost every track in the listings below being offered by Amazon, Apple, Spotify or—​increasingly popular with artists—​Bandcamp. As the barriers to entry decline, more and more independent artists are making their music available. This, of course, is true of all music, but it is significant that Blake’s hold on the musical imagination is growing (and not just in terms of new versions of old favorites, such as “Jerusalem” or “The Tyger”).