While under development, this site will hold a number of music score videos. All the scores are settings of poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). All photographs, pictures, and videos are mine unless otherwise stated. The scores have been retyped from the originals found in archives. I intend to post PDF copies of these scores in due course.

You may notice on some videos that there is perhaps too much notation. This is for the computer, not for humans, as, try as it might, the computer can’t yet summon up feeling and so needs to be led (as far as the technology allows me to) by the score. This heavy notation won’t appear on the PDFs. It should also be kept in mind that these songs are, naturally, meant to be sung, and a computer also can’t produce the sense of an evolving story that a good singer would naturally create as the music progresses. The videos are only intended to give a general flavour of the music. Undoubtedly, others might interpret the scores differently.

Michael Craske researches transgressive poetics, music, aesthetics, and perhaps transgressive anything at Queen Mary, University of London (though mainly Swinburne, Wagner, and T. S. Eliot). He was once involved in diplomacy, of a Middle Eastern kind…

Recent and future conference papers:

‘Poems and Ballads: 150th Anniversary Conference’, St John’s College, Cambridge, 29-30 July, 2016.

‘London Nineteenth-Century Postgraduate Conference IV’, Senate House, London, 10 September, 2016.

• ‘The Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads’

‘Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 2017’, the University of Birmingham, 28-30 June, 2017.

• ‘Sounding Victorian: A Consortium of Digital Resources – Sounding Swinburne’

‘Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections’, the British Association of Victorian Studies, Lincoln, 22-24 August, 2017.

• ‘ “Music that shone from the word”: Respectable Swinburne, the Royal College of Music, and the sound of decadence’

Permissions: Michael Craske gives you the permission to use the materials on this website under the creative commons-attribution-non-commercial 3.0 license. They may be shared, copied, distributed and transmitted for non-commercial purposes only, as long as your attribute the work.