The Ensemble Sospeso crosses paths with the poet William Blake during our Thursday and Friday, March 14 and 15, 2002 performances of The New Math, Louis Andriessen's multimedia collaboration with film director Hal Hartley. Andriessen sets Blake's poem The Book of Thel for this work that combines live music, an electronic score, and film.

Blake was born in London in 1757. At the age of fifteen, he quit schooling to begin working as an apprentice to an engraver. He married Catherine Boucher (whom he taught to read and write) in 1782, and a year later, with the help of some artist friends, he published his first book of verse, Poetical Sketches. This brilliant debut includes poems written at the age of twelve.

He started a print shop in 1784, after the death of his father, and began self-publishing volumes combining his own poetry and illustrations with a new printing technique he created called relief etching. In an astonishing period of creativity between 1789 and 1794 he produced masterworks including Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Songs of Innocence and Experience. One of his final works, Jerusalem, consists of Blake’s longest poem and his richest illustrations. As an artist and illustrator Blake is one of Europe’s most original creators, and as a poet he is the earliest and one of the greatest Romantics; as a figure that produced and combined these forms, he is virtually unique.

The Book of Thel is Blake’s first mystical writing, and it marks Blake’s first use of unrhymed lines of fourteen syllables, a form of which he eventually made extensive use. Thel interviews a series of creatures—a lily, a cloud, a worm, and a piece of clay—who are at peace with their transience as part of the natural cycle of death and rebirth; but their contentment with mortality only increases Thel’s anxiety. Her final approach to her own grave—the text Andriessen sets in The New Math(s)—illustrates both the human failure to accept mortality and the failure of nature to satisfy human existence.

Three of Blake’s copies of The Book of Thel are in New York: two in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and one at the Public Library on Fifth Avenue.