The William Blake Blog

Jacob de Haan’s “The Book of Urizen”

Jacob de Haan, a Dutch composer, produced a marvellous piece of work in 2006 based on Blake's The Book of Urizen, a performance of which last year at Cantat 2009 in Utrecht has just been brought to my attention.

De Haan's composition (called The Book of Urizen) is divided into three movements: The Vision (dealing with Urizen's projected vision of the universe and his rejection by the Eternals), The Creation (that is Urizen's creation of a fallen world and of mankind), and the Web (by which false religion is spread as a net or web across that world). The clips below shows extracts from the The Book of Urizen.

You can read more about de Haan and his various projects at http://www.jacobdehaan.com/.