For anyone who has been involved in Blake studies in the past thirty years or so - particularly in the UK but not restricted to that location - Keri Davies has long been a name to be reckoned with. Former Vice-President of the Blake Society, Keri has transformed our understanding of such elements as the early collectors of Blake's work and his mother's involvement with the Moravian Church and how that could have influenced his own views on religion. On a more personal note, Keri is also the person who probably knows most about musical settings of Blake, and whose discoveries have often been a spur and influence on my own work.
He (less regularly than I would like!) provides insights into these discoveries at his blog, Index Rerum, and the following is itself a brief index of musical things that can be found there. While I'm concentrating here on Blake and music, there are plenty of other articles on Blake that always repay the perusal.
The first four pieces - dealing with settings of Blake to music by Benjamin Britten, Cornelius Cardew, Adrian Leverkühn and John Sykes - are adapted from articles first published on Zoamorphosis.com. Each of them are extensive listings of musical adaptations and settings of Blake's poetry that were missed from or dealt with cursorily in Donald Fitch's Blake Set to Music (1990). In each post, Keri demonstrates his intimate knowledge of each composer and also draws attention to a tendency which is sometimes evident in scholars dealing with the reception of Blake (and a trap into which I may have fallen more than once): it is not enough to be familiar with Blake's work when dealing with issues of the poet's reception, as this work also requires knowledge of and empathy towards the later subjects who adapt Blake. All four pieces (as with any work by Keri) are worth reading, but I would draw special attention to the piece on Leverkühn: this German composer did not actually exist, but in some respects - as the central protagonist of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus - is the most important figure in the twentieth-century adoption of Blake into European music. Leverkühn, had he actually written, would have been one of the first European composers to set Blake's poetry to music, and Mann's extensive work on musicology prior to writing the novel informed his depiction of the diabolical artist brilliantly, a depiction that is wonderfully dissected by Keri here.
Blake set to music in Europe is an excellent list of the primary classical European composers who have set Blake's poetry to music, with the opportunity to follow up that listing with their works and analysis of their compositions (a little of which I have done). This listing was then followed in 2014 by another excellent account of a single artist, Walter Zimmerman, whose Songs of Innocence and Experience and Ecchoing Green have been influenced by Blake, as Keri writes, in "a profound way". At the other end of the scale, his blog includes two Blakespotting pieces in popular music recorded by Sting and The Pet Shop Boys.
In 2016, the Index Rerum included two pieces, the first of which - on Ralph Vaughan Williams - I consider an essential read for anyone interested in Blake and music. (As well as being erudite and scholarly, this piece is also great for Keri's sideswipes at those infatuated by Williams as part of a cult of Englishness.) The second, shorter piece is on a prolific but much less-well known composer, Catherine Adelaide Ranken who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing a great deal of material inspired by poets such as Swinburne, Shelley and, of course, Blake.
There are two more musical-related pieces from 2017. The first details Keri's incredible discovery of the very first poem of Blake to be set to music, an adaptation of "The Chimney Sweeper" by T. L. Hately in 1863. This was followed by an extremely useful biographical and bibliographical note on Donald Fitch, the most important scholar (as yet) to have worked on Blake's settings and whose 1990 catalogue, Blake Set to Music, remains indispensable. Finally (thus far), 2018 saw two interrelated pieces on The Fugs - the first an account of Blake's influence on Ed Sanders and The Fugs (a presentation of which I was lucky enough to see in Manchester), the second a discography of their work.
An alphabetical list of work on Blake and music is below, but the Index Rerum is always worth visiting for insights on one of the most important scholars to have worked on Blake studies in recent decades.