Different directions
Alternatives to Parry Parry’s score was not the first to set Blake’s stanzas from Milton: A Poem in Two Books to music, as Walford Davies wrote a four-part arrangement in 1908. It was performed at the Morecambe Festival that year, but has not been recorded.
A number of classical settings were composed in the decades following Parry’s death, including versions by Bernard Garte (1946), Virgil Thomson (c1953), William Russell Smith (1974) and James Collignon (1983) that show a different range of approaches – Collignon’s setting is a marching tune for voice and piano, while Smith’s is for an unaccompanied chorus of mixed voices.
In 2005, Bob Davenport gave Blake’s words the folk-music treatment on his album The Common Stone, while some of the more innovative versions can be found in pop music, where a contrast of genres comes into play. The rapper MC Nobody caused a stir in 2009 with his irreverent performance, while Chris Wood’s 2013 version and the recording by Soft Cell’s Marc Almond with saxophonist John Harle, featured on their 2014 album The Tyburn Tree, offers a particularly elaborate alternative.