Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

Vol. 58 no. 1: Summer 2024

Blake and Music, 2023

DOI
https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.364
Submitted
28 May 2024
Published
25 Jul. 2024

Abstract

As has been evident since the pandemic, settings of Blake’s poetry to music and songs inspired by his art more generally have been enjoying something of a golden age, with the number of individual tracks and albums increasing steadily each year. Following trends set during the pandemic, streaming services—​whether large companies such as Apple and Spotify, or smaller ones such as Bandcamp—​have lowered the barriers to entry for many composers and musicians. More than fifty percent of the works that we list for 2023 were self-released, and many others were published or released by independent labels. In addition, the range of countries represented continues to grow, with entries from Asia, South America, and eastern Europe alongside those from the UK, USA, and western Europe. Settings of Blake’s music have long appealed to composers in Russia and Brazil, for instance, but the relative ease with which artists can now present their music to a global audience makes it much easier to discover such compositions.