The Garden of Love

Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, widely known by his pop-inspired name Jacob TV, writes music of rich melodic inspiration. His aesthetic brings together a traditional love for the human voice and an interest in tonality alongside radical ideas about cross influence from visual art, electronics, and instrumental texture. In his oeuvre one will find a massive lyrical oratorio based on Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as boombox music that utilizes sampled audio recordings. Clearly, Jacob TV embraces contradictions, and he has been called the “Andy Warhol of New Music.”
Composed in 2002, The Garden of Love is based on a text by English mystical poet William Blake. It appears in the collection titled Songs of Experience (1794), which texts were intended to reflect the impact of Church oppression, industrialization, and perceived evils of modernization on mankind’s inborn innocence and freedom. The impact of Blake’s words is to offer an Edenic backdrop to Jacob TV’s avowedly postmodern aesthetic. More directly, in addition to live oboe, the composer uses sampled audio tracks of other instruments, birdcalls, and a spoken word reading of the poem that has been irreverently manipulated, cut apart, and transformed. The Garden of Love starts and ends with electronic whirrs, and the majority of the music follows a mechanical, staccato impulse seemingly at odds with the pastoral setting. This disconnect dramatizes the prevailing tension in Blake’s text, which treats the loss of innocence, the demise of youth’s freedom and joys.

(c) Jason Stell