When I was a child, I used to often sit and look at my parents’ rather lovely sideboard (it’s still in the family: my daughter has it now). The shapes in the shiny veneer on the doors fascinated me and it made me think of a picture I’d seen, by William Blake, of the gates of hell – titled ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. Luckily, I don’t think this childhood experience had any adverse influence on my future development, but the visionary paintings, and poems, of William Blake certainly stuck in my mind.
The Tiger (originally Tyger) is one of Blake’s best-known poems, and right from the start it conjures up a vivid image:
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poem goes on to wonder why the same God that created the gentle lamb could also have made the frightening tiger. It’s about the coexistence of good and evil, symbolized by the lamb and the tiger, while expressing wonder at the tiger’s ferocious power. I think that, as a child, the poem spoke to me of that excitement, that power, and a night-time journey in which the tiger’s eyes blazed out frighteningly – and that is still the predominant image of the poem for me now. The somewhat anodyne ‘Lamb’ (‘Little Lamb, who made thee?’) felt rather pale by comparison.
‘Fearful symmetry’ is another phrase that sticks in the mind – and my somewhat perverse response to this image was to set most of the song in the clearly unsymmetrical 7/8 metre. As a basically rather symmetrical person, who loves neatness and balance, I think I saw ‘fearful’ symmetry as a kind of opposite – a hellish rather than a heavenly order of things.
Anyway, the result of all this was a very rhythmic and slightly unpredictable setting, with a quite dissonant piano part which introduces an element of mystery and fear into the largely modal and diatonic melody line. And even the 7/8 rhythm becomes somewhat predictable as the six verses develop, and the word ‘symmetry’ gets transmuted into a thrice-repeated 3/4 time (a ‘fearful Trinity’??) in the final bars.
The Tiger is in the Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs, and I’ve recently made a scrolling score here, using voice synthesis software called Cantamus which is a bit scary itself, but very useful. I had fun writing the song and I hope you enjoy hearing it too!