Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Jason Whittaker. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2022.

Reviewed by Benjamin Wolf

This is a book about a single poem and a single song: William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem (“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green”), and Hubert Parry’s famous setting of it. This combination of words and music has been central to British (perhaps it is better to say English) cultural life since Parry’s composition was first performed in 1916. Although originally composed for “Fight for Right,” an organization that supported Britain’s war efforts, it was subsequently adopted by the women’s suffrage movement, the Women’s Institute, and by figures on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Jason Whittaker traces this history, and the possible cultural meanings of both Blake’s poem and Parry’s setting of it, over a two-hundred-year period, ending in the Britain of the 2011 royal wedding, the 2012 Olympic Games and the 2016 Brexit referendum. Where British musical history is concerned, this book takes a valuable place alongside others such as Andrew Blake’s The Land without Music or Hughes and Stradling’s more cynical The English Musical Renaissance 1840 – 1940. [1]

However, this is not only a book about British culture. It also discusses Blake’s life, his theology, his relationship to earlier poets (particularly Milton), and his canonization as one of Britain’s major Romantic poets. Discussion of Blake himself occurs in the early chapters of the book, which are also its strongest (unsurprising given that Whittaker is a Blake specialist). Whittaker places Blake within a predominantly Christian intellectual tradition whose proponents looked forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth, believing that the “New Jerusalem would be built in the country [England] by a godly people.” [2] This was the same intellectual tradition that gave birth to British Israelitism–the once-popular idea that the peoples of Western Europe were direct descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. [3] Blake’s own theology, though, was more complex and idiosyncratic than that of most of his contemporaries, and Whittaker provides a rich overview of his poetry and writings in order to arrive at an interpretation of Jerusalem that is consistent with Blake’s wider prophetic vision.

Whittaker’s purpose is partly to critique longstanding interpretations of Blake’s poem. However, he also demonstrates how Blake reworked Biblical (and Jewish) history to create an entirely new prophetic vision, a facet of his life that should interest anyone who studies the symbolic history of the city of Jerusalem, and of Biblical stories more generally, outside the strict confines of Jewish history. For Blake, the prehistory of man centered upon the fall and subsequent redemption of Albion, the “universal man.” [4] This mythical giant (whose name firmly associated him with the island of Great Britain) was the ancestor of the Druids who, in Blake’s world, included Abraham and Noah. For Blake, then, Albion was the ancestor of the Israelites, meaning that Jerusalem the ancient city owed its ultimate origins to the existence of a fallen British giant. Further, the establishment of true (Christian) religion in Britain would bring Jerusalem back to Albion’s homeland (and, by extension, its own homeland), an island that possessed a special status in the world. [5] 

Yet it was as a standalone poem, separated from this wider mythology, that Jerusalem became known in the nineteenth century. Whittaker therefore describes its emergence in anthologies of Romantic poetry (in essence, the process of canonization) and the events that led to its use for Parry’s composition. While others have described the history of Parry’s setting more concisely (for example Mark Chapman in his 2011 article for the Hymn Society of America), Whittaker explains how the combination of Blake’s words and Parry’s music came to inspire various forms of revolutionary or nationalistic activity. [6] With its calls for “mental fight” and the building of Jerusalem in “England’s green and pleasant land,” this poem could be attractive either because it implied a (possibly left-wing) yearning for a better future or because it implied a (possibly conservative) nostalgic nationalism tied up with images of the British countryside. His somewhat whirlwind survey (roughly seventy years in seventy pages) combines contextual history with discussion of specific performances, groups, and individuals, ranging from Clement Attlee to the British National Party, from the BBC Proms to Billy Bragg. 

However, this second part of the book covers too much ground too quickly. Musicologists are also likely to find it unsatisfactory, since Whittaker does very little to analyze the appeal of the sound of Parry’s composition, without which Blake’s poem would never have become so popular. He devotes only one paragraph to a discussion of Parry’s compositional technique, focussing on the “triumphal” key of D major, on the special placement of one famous high note and on how Parry “regularly moves the melody between the dominant fifth chord (A major) and the tonic (D major).” [7] Yet tonic-dominant movement is the least interesting aspect of Parry’s harmonic language. By contrast, it is instructive to watch David Owen Norris’s analysis of Parry’s Jerusalem on the 2013 documentary The Prince and the Composer (presented by the then Prince Charles). [8] Unlike Whittaker, Norris focuses on the role of both dissonance (particularly the exposed bass dissonance on the second beat of the introduction) and the use of pentatonic scale patterns in the melody. Norris could also have considered the fluidity of Parry’s harmonic language, which was influenced by German composers of the nineteenth century. While there are some important dominant-tonic cadences in Jerusalem, particularly at the end, Parry also pulls away from strong cadences, and introduces unexpected moments of harmonic change that singers may perceive even without understanding the underlying harmony (for example the shift to E minor on the words “Countenance Divine”).

Whittaker is also overly concerned with analyzing the appeal of Blake’s text, whose ambiguous lyrics are certainly attractive but are not the only explanation of the centrality of Parry’s song to English culture. By coincidence, I read this book at the same time as Julia Hollander’s beguiling Why We Sing. [9] The cultural centrality of Jerusalem partly rests upon things that she discusses, particularly the physiology of singing and the appeal of communal music-making (something that is also of interest from both a broader, and a Jewish, perspective). Whittaker, though, does not discuss this. He also relies too much on an extensive discography, as he has hunted down both mainstream and obscure recordings of Jerusalem, as well as films that used Parry’s song in their soundtrack. Unquestionably these are valuable cultural resources, and they do point to the cultural attitudes expressed by people who perform Jerusalem. However, the book is too short to provide in-depth analyses of these resources, while Whittaker cannot supplement them with sources that really explain why people choose to sing Jerusalem. These sources (perhaps interviews or oral histories) may not exist, but the use of brief analyses of films and recordings is not enough to replace them, at least if he wishes to write a completely convincing history of the cultural place of Jerusalem in England.

Finally, despite the book’s many strengths, there is a surprising lack of breadth in its theoretical engagement, particularly from the perspective of the sociology of music. This lack is surprising given Whittaker’s position as co-editor of Springer’s series on Pop Music, Culture and Identity. There are many things that Whittaker could have explored, some of which are part of popular music studies (of which, in some sense, Jerusalem is an example). This could have included discussion of the social role of ambiguous lyrics. Whittaker could also have considered Parry’s song in the context of musical affect, exploring how musical structures inspire emotional responses. He could also have discussed the broader sociology and social purpose of anthems, of which Jerusalem is one example, instead of simply listing examples of how it is used for cultural or sporting events. Doing this would have placed Jerusalem in the same socio-historical milieu as other anthems such as Land of Hope and Glory or, from both an Italian and (in some sense) Jewish perspective, Verdi’s Coro dei Schiavi Ebrei from Nabucco. Though Whittaker may have felt that two hundred pages was sufficient length for a discussion of one poem and one song, these gaps mean that he has written a good and very useful work of cultural history, but he has not done as much as he could have to integrate Jerusalem into the wider sociology of music or musical culture.

Benjamin Wolf, Senior Lecturer in Music, Regent’s University London

[1] Andrew Blake, The Land Without Music; Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840 – 1940, Constructing a National Music (2nd edition) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

[2] Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 6.

[3] Whittaker, Jerusalem, 7.

[4] Ibid., 35.

[5] Ibid., 36-40.

[6] Mark Chapman, “William Blake, Hubert Parry, and the Singing of Jerusalem,” The Hymn 62(2): 41-51.

[7] Whittaker, Jerusalem, 88-89.

[8] The Prince and the Composer: A Film about Hubert Parry by HRH The Prince of Wales, BBC4m, February 08, 2013.

[9] Julia Hollander, Why We Sing (London: Atlantic Books, 2023).