Composer Evan Williams often juxtaposes multiple themes and emotions in his works, seamlessly threading together starkly contrasting ideas and musical styles with ease. He has been commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Fifth House Ensemble, and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Self-released on June 28, Evan’s new album Songs of Innocence | Songs of Experience includes 12 new tracks based on the work of William Blake, an 18th century poet best known for his collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Featuring vocalist Kate Wakefield, guitarist James Meade, and chamber ensemble All of the Above, the album demonstrates Evan’s ability to fuse elements of rock, pop, and jazz with a more traditional classical sound; it’s hard to listen without wanting to dance along, as the opening groove of “A Cradle Song” is both new and familiar. The work is presented in two parts, each with its own introduction reflecting on Blake’s original themes: the innocence of a child, and the experience of aging. Throughout the recording, the ensemble evokes moods and emotions that are fun, evocative, daring, and even subdued.
Evan also often incorporates social and political topics into his work, such as in his multimedia chamber opera Jonestown or his chamber work Bodies Upon the Gears, which highlights the political organizing of Mario Savio. His concerto for harpsichord and chamber ensemble, Dead White Man Music, will receive its international premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in January 2025. The concerto was written as a reflection on who your role models are when the famous people in your field look nothing like you.
We caught up with Evan and asked him five questions about the concerto, his new album, and the myth of the composer genius.
Evan Williams — Photo by Justin Fox Burks
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience combines lyrical poetry and colorful, hand-etched illustrations. How did you incorporate a sense of color and visual imagery into your settings of the text?
My settings alternate between being faithful mirrors of the text and the accompanying illustrations to completely subverting Blake’s meaning. In some songs, whenever Blake speaks about a pipe or a bird, you’ll hear either the piccolo or flute emulate these things. When he speaks about wisdom and experience, the music is solemn, or light music for sections about child-like innocence. But in “A Cradle Song,” clearly meant to be a lullaby with lyrics like “Sweet dreams, form a shade/O’er my lovely infant’s head!” I was reminded of Eurhythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” So this lullaby is set to a pulsing and somewhat foreboding groove and vocal line inspired by Eurhythmics, so it won’t be putting any children to sleep.
In “Spring,” the last Song of Innocence in my setting, I couldn’t help but hear sexual undertones in the last lines, “Little lamb,/Here I am;/Come and lick/My white neck;/Let me pull/Your soft wool;/Let me kiss/Your soft face;/Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.” So, I set them as a sultry piano ballad, which made a great segue into the Songs of Experience.
I can’t express how amazing it was to work with singer Kate Wakefield, who’s equally at home singing bel canto and musical theatre as she is with her rock band, Lung. She brings precisely the right color to each of the songs, and James Meade and the members of All of the Above are equally gifted at switching from intimate chamber styles to loud punk rock sections.
What was the creative process like choosing only thirteen of the fifty-four existing poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience?
Unlike William Bolcom’s masterful setting of all fifty-four poems, I knew I only wanted to use the poems that best spoke to me. At first, I wanted an even number of poems from the Songs of Innocence and from the Songs of Experience, respectively, but I fell in love with more of the Songs of Experience, and couldn’t help but use more of them. So the two parts are lopsided, with Part II being almost double the length of Part I. Blake created a lot of parallels between the two parts, and I tried to maintain as many of those as possible, but in the end, it came down to which poems I liked the most.
At first, I was unsure about the inclusion of the poems “Holy Thursday,” “Nurse’s Song,” and “The Tiger.” I originally saw them as childish, and not a good fit in my version of the Songs of Experience. But in the end, my take on the Songs of Experience turned out to be lighter and nostalgic, versus the passion of youth found in the Songs of Innocence. Also, in the case of “Holy Thursday,” I couldn’t help but see the parallels to our country’s recent treatment of migrants at the southern border to Blake’s words, “Is this a holy thing to see/In a rich and fruitful land,/Babes reduced to misery,/Fed with cold and usurous hand?”
In 2019 you published an article here on I Care If You Listen titled “The Myth of the Composer-Genius,” where you discussed the need for the music community to embrace the idea that composition is a learned-skill rather than an innate ability. Do you feel as though any progress has been towards embracing a more inclusive compositional mindset?
I think it’s too difficult to tell yet. There has been a lot of really positive change where arts organizations are actively questioning who’s not in the room, and what they can do to get them there and have a stake in the preservation of this artform, but there still seems to be a ghettoization of works by anyone other than the dead masters. At an orchestra concert, you’ll see a work by a non-male or non-white composer as the opener or maybe even the concerto, but the symphony, the meat and potatoes of the concert, as it were, is still by a dead white man. Or perhaps you’ll get a concert of all-Black composers in February, or all-women in March. There are many composers who have something unique and interesting to add to the long-form symphonic tradition, and I hope orchestras start to realize that.
That said, many choral, wind band, and chamber concerts I attend don’t have this problem. I’m not sure if these organizations are more nimble and open to change, or more democratic in their repertoire selection, but I’ve seen so many refreshing concerts that had few or even no “warhorses” of the repertoire, and I’ve enjoyed them much more than the concerts filled with music that you can hear on hundreds of recordings.
Your harpsichord concerto, Dead White Man Music, is another personal reflection where you ask yourself, “What music am I called to write, and who should be my role models?” Have you come closer to answering either of those questions since you wrote the piece?
Writing DWMM helped me embrace the classic improv philosophy of “yes, and…” For that piece, the answer was yes Bach, and also Julius Eastman and Nina Simone. For my recent A Little Mass for Christmas written for countertenor Reginald Mobley and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, it was yes Gregorian chant, and also gospel, rock, and of course, more Bach. In Songs of Innocence | Songs of Experience, there’s folk, punk rock, traditional African styles, jazz, musical theatre, and I even created an EDM remix of one of the songs as a bonus track for the album release.
DWMM was the culmination of a journey started in my graduate ethnomusicology seminar, where I had to unlearn the conditioning that Western art music was a “higher” form of art than other musical traditions. From then on, I stopped trying to assimilate into the contemporary classical community and instead focus on being myself and letting my music reflect that. Interestingly enough, that’s when the community started to notice and appreciate what I was doing, starting with my piece GRIME, featured on this site in 2014.
Evan Williams — Photo by Amurica Photo
I’ve also have been really blown away by the embrace of DWMM. Many online trolls have commented that I only wrote this as a “woke” dog-whistle, making it intentionally provocative for the sake of notoriety. In truth, I wrote it because I needed to write it, for no one other than myself. I actually assumed the premiere in NYC with Daniel Walden and Urban Playground would be the first and last performance of the work. Who would want to play a 30-minute concerto for amplified harpsichord, which was not only difficult for the soloist, but the ensemble as well? I’ve been absolutely shocked by the performances of the work around the country, and soon, internationally by the London Philharmonic Orchestra this coming January.
Artificial intelligence and large language models are quickly changing our society and how music can be made. As someone who incorporates technology into their work, have you considered adopting AI as a composer and professor?
This is something that has been on my mind a lot as of late, both as a composer and teacher. I was recently a finalist for the Atlanta Opera’s 96-Hour Opera project. The five librettist/composer teams had one prompt to write a ten-minute scene, one asking us to envision a post-apocalyptic future where a human had to pass on the important aspects of humanity to an android to carry forward. I think we all found some way to find hope in the future of artificial intelligence, especially as a time capsule for our society.
However, as a teacher, I have very mixed feelings about AI. I’ve seen great use of AI for note-taking, comprehension, and streamlining, but I’ve also seen a good deal of plagiarism and misinformation from students using these resources. It’s getting harder to convince them what is and what isn’t a reliable source.
I’m open to using AI in my electronic music. In pieces like if/else or Teach Yourself to Fly from this Pale Blue Dot, I use randomized effects and sound playback that responds to the input of the live player, or vice-versa. This all done through basic Boolean logic, i.e. if x then y, if else z. There’s no intelligence there, no agency on behalf of the computer. It would be interesting to see how an intelligent machine could respond in these circumstances, making the computer an actual performer. However, I am not actively pursuing this in my current compositional practice.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit the “At ACF” section or composersforum.org.
