page_title: Songs of Innocence and Experience (Allen Ginsberg album)
section_title: Writing and recording
hierarchical_section_title: Songs of Innocence and Experience (Allen Ginsberg album) / Writing and recording
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a typical Qawwali style harmonium made in Lahore Pakistan. Features two banks of German Jubilate Harmonium reeds in Bass/Male configuration, a right upper action octave coupler that is permanently engaged and no air stops. Typical simple model with very strong and loud great quality tone.
context_page_description: Songs of Innocence and Experience is an album by American beat poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, recorded in 1969. For the recording, Ginsberg sang pieces from 18th-century English poet William Blake's illustrated poetry collection of the same name and set them to a folk-based instrumental idiom, featuring simple melodies and accompaniment performed with a host of jazz musicians. Among the album's contributors were trumpeter Don Cherry, arranger/pianist Bob Dorough, multi-instrumentalist Jon Sholle, drummer Elvin Jones, and Peter Orlovsky – Ginsberg's life-partner and fellow poet – who contributed vocals and helped produce the recording with British underground writer Barry Miles.
  The album is one of the most famous attempts at setting lyrics from Blake's Songs collection to music. Ginsberg, having studied the rhyme and meter of the poems, believed they were originally intended to be sung and that a Blakean musical performance could roughly be replicated. The themes explored in Blake's poems – childhood and abuse, organized religion, institutionalization, and poverty – connected with Ginsberg spiritually.
context_section_description: After leaving Chicago, Ginsberg went to upstate New York, where he had bought a farm as a retreat with money earned from his poetry readings. There, he experimented setting Blake's poems to music on a pump organ. He told Publishers Weekly in June 1969 that he was learning to notate music while working on the Blake settings. That same month, he began recording the album at Apostolic Studios in New York City's Lower Manhattan. British underground writer and businessman Barry Miles was enlisted to produce the recording, and Ginsberg helped set him up at the legendary Hotel Chelsea, paying for and negotiating a favorable rent from its manager Stanley Bard, who knew and respected the poet. By this time, Ginsberg had composed some of the music he would use as settings for Blake's poems.
  In studio, Ginsberg sang and played harmonium, piano, and finger cymbals for Songs of Innocence and Experience. The harmonium, played before by Ginsberg at numerous poetry readings, was borrowed from his life-partner and fellow poet Peter Orlovsky, who had received the instrument as a souvenir from Benares during the pair's visit to India in the early 1960s. Orlovsky also contributed vocals to the recording and assisted Miles with its production.
  Ginsberg was accompanied by a host of jazz musicians during the recording sessions, including trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Herman Wright, guitarist Jon Sholle, French horn player Julius Watkins, and arranger/vocalist/pianist Bob Dorough. Drummer Elvin Jones was enlisted to play on the album's final track, "The Grey Monk". Ginsberg also invited bassist Charles Mingus to perform on the album, but Mingus declined. According to Miles, the recording also featured saxophonist Archie Shepp, although he is not named in the album credits.
  The album's recording produced 19 tracks, nine of which were recorded during the sessions held from June to July 1969. According to several scholarly sources, Songs of Innocence and Experience was completed later that year in December.
caption: A harmonium similar to Ginsberg's
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