Composer William Bolcom's famously broad tastes include a passion for the poetry of English transcendentalist poet William Blake; like many before and since, Bolcom decided to set Blake's mystical visions to music. Few composers, however, have made it a lifelong project. As a teenager, Bolcom first picked up the poet's work and became inspired to compose, putting away his finished settings into a large envelope. Twenty-five years later the envelope was full of 46 songs blending styles ranging from the popular (rock and reggae) to folk (ballad and dance forms) to modern classical. The three-hour result, Songs of Innocence and Experience, premiered in Stuttgart on January 8, 1984, has become perhaps Bolcom's most famous and most acclaimed composition, having since received several performances in the world's major musical centers. To see it as a summa of his life's work, however, as some have, is to underestimate his efforts since then. Nevertheless, the work is perhaps the composer's most successful effort in breaking boundaries of genre with powerful, illustrative music that can more accurately be assessed as an amalgam of styles than as a series of studies in different areas.

Orchestrated between 1981 and 1982, the work calls for nearly three hundred performers, including an orchestra, chorus, children's chorus, madrigal group, and rock band. Soloists required include not only tenor, baritone, soprano, contralto, and mezzo-soprano, but also boy soprano, coloratura soprano, country singer, and rock singer as well.

Songs are grouped into symphony-like movements. The first third of the work is the "Songs of Innocence"; the first of its three movements begins with a spirited tenor "Introduction." Other highlights include Blake's famous "The Lamb," set here as a chromatic, string-accompanied soprano solo. The movement concludes with the rock singer's "The Little Black Boy," a touching plea for tolerance. The second part includes the madrigal group's "Laughing Song" and the Brittenesque tenor solo "Spring." The final part of the "Songs of Innocence" begins with a "Nocturne" for percussion, and includes a dissonant, highly-charged "The Little Boy Lost," which yields to the soothing rock ballad "The Little Boy Found."

The "Songs of Experience" comprise the final two thirds. After a brief first movement, the second includes a rhythmic, parlando choral setting of Blake's famous "The Tyger." In the third movement, Bolcom betrays his penchant for popular song with a foxtrot setting of "The Little Vagabond," which gives way to a pathos-filled "Holy Thursday" for soprano. The final third, also in three movements, includes the joyful "The Lilly" for tenor and chorus, a voluptuous "The Garden of Love," and a Messiaen-like "Vocalise." The work concludes with an intensely dramatic final movement, which culminates in the grandiose finale "A Divine Image."

Neither an opera nor an oratorio, Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience nevertheless possesses a strong dramatic quality, as both poet and composer wrestle with fundamental questions of human nature throughout what might best be termed a "song cycle." Bolcom himself summed up the thrust of his "musical illumination" of Blake's poetry as "in truth, there is joy."

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