What drew you to William Blake’s poetry?
“I have long been transfixed by the opening lines of William Blake’s extraordinary poem Auguries of Innocence. I decided to take those four lines and then see if I could create an hour-long piece that was, in a way, a journey deeper and deeper into that grain of sand. And hopefully find at the end of it that there is an essential magnificence that is as grand and beautiful as anything large or seemingly phenomenal. Even in the simple there is perfection.”
How do the electronics interact with the choral parts?
“The goal is to make this seamless, a constant dialogue between all the musicians on stage. I'm not thinking of it as electronics accompanying the choir and the strings and the piano. The vocalists are almost becoming effects units: they take what they're hearing in real-time and then they either granularise the sound - breaking it into little pieces to make clouds - or they hear the sounds and then sing them in reverse, or shift the pitch up or down - the way that you would with synthesizers and effects units.Hopefully it creates something that sounds both very ancient and very new at the same time.”
