Bunhill Fields (a song for Blake)

A song for William Blake. Written as a response to Blake’s poem 'The Ecchoing Green', this short piece also responds to the particular atmosphere of Bunhill Fields - where time can seem strangely suspended.

The old burial ground survives in a state of benign neglect: weathered stones, trees, paths and fragments of other eras remain all around. At moments there is almost nothing to tell you quite when you are. Then somebody appears — a pensioner on a bench, a student passing through, a solitary figure, a dog walker, a mother with a baby, children playing — and the present suddenly reasserts itself.

There is something of Blake’s 'Ecchoing Green' in this continual movement between youth and age, present and memory, coming and going, the living and the dead. The piece tries to inhabit the slightly woozy, wavering shifts of time: as though different moments and eras might briefly be happening alongside one another.

Blake called so many of his poems Songs, Here, fragments of his world surface through the soundscape: bells, birds, voices, play, memory and the coming of evening. Woven into it, too, are traces of a chant by the eighteenth-century composer John Jones, associated with the massed singing of London’s charity children that so affected Blake — another faint echo passing between his London and ours.

The piece is made to be heard while walking the paths around the green within the burial ground, or pausing at one of its benches. Blake has two memorials within Bunhill Fields - the stone marking his actual burial site (fittingly on the green itself) and a memorial headstone at the corner of one of the entrances to the green.

In Bunhill Fields, one century never seems very far from another.