The title of Broad Street Triptych (2008) reflects the not only the street where Blake wrote, illustrated, and published his poetry collection Songs of Innocence and Experience, but also the tripartite arrangement of the poetry on the page and the religiosity of the work. In the collection presented here, Blake chose to explore three types of love: the lustful and jealous, the overly intellectual and artificial, and the divine.

In the first poem, The Rose-Tree, the narrator is confronted by a beautiful maiden who offers herself to him; he then refuses and informs his wife, only to be rewarded for his honesty with a frosty reception. In the second panel, Ah! Sun-flower, Blake tells us of the sunflower, whose face is constantly turned towards the heavens but whose structure is forever rooted to the ground. He then introduces us to a reckless man and a virtuous maiden, both of whom envy the sunflower’s aspiration to transcend its existance, yet fall short of its devotion. In the third poem, The Lilly, we are given three examples to consider: the first two being the “modest Rose” and the “humble Sheep” who, upon approach, provide us with a less than welcoming reception, and the pure, white Lilly – symbolic of the divine – which shows us what love is without affectation.

Musically, Blake’s themes and images are reflected through numerical and pitch relationships throughout the work. In The Rose-Tree, where Blake speaks of jealous love, two identical and symmetrical pitch structures sharing two invarient tones are heard. For Ah! Sun-flower, the argument centers on the temporal cyclicity of nature and man’s imperfect attempts to duplicate it. I have chosen to represent this idea by providing two hexachords that are identical in their intervallic structure but not in their spelling which then undergo a series of transformations that are, just as the original chords, similar but not identical to one another. In The Lilly, the voice and piano begin with separate sonorities until they finally unite on the word “Love,” where the seminal septachord for the entire work is at last revealed. Just as in Blake’s self-referential icongraphy, the selection of a seven-object collection is illustrative of the perfection of the divine love. This work was composed for soprano Meganne Masko and pianist John C. Griffin in May of 2008.

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