Adaptation and Transposition in Ulver’s Themes from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Abstract

This article is a survey of the specificity of the process of adopting William Blake’s ‘illuminated book’ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) by the Norwegian (heavy-)metal band Ulver. The illuminated plates of Blake inspired and also structured an album highly praised for its originality, that must be analyzed in the context of metal music and word/music adaptation. The paper also sketches, as Robert Walser suggested in 1993 (Running with the Devil), a view of metal music as discourse, by analyzing the signifying practices the album Themes from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998) is based on. The album initiated a new direction for Ulver, not only as ideological or lyrical perspective, but also musically. The avant-garde electronic and progressive metal with clean vocal style supported Blake’s idea that the sensual world can lead to the spiritual, and that the repression of desire destroys the spirit. As adaptation studies are now central to intermedia studies, it is necessary to take into account the adaptation issue as broad as possible. Michael J. Meyer emphasizes in Literature and Musical Adaptation the idea that every reading of the text is necessarily a misreading, and that our readings are made in the direction of our own interests. If so, then we could easily affirm that the reading that pop music does today is the reading that opera, for example, has done in the past, when Verdi or Berlioz read Shakespeare, as David Francis Urrows affirms. Influenced by Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of popular music, my point is that Ulver’s version of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not a mere adaptation, but a transposition, with specific meanings, as Alison Stone argues, and can be an alternative musical discourse as opposed to pop music.