in music and in nature
An year
long festivities, exhibitions and cultural programmes have been inaugurated in Bengal to mark the 150-th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Continueing with my posts of Tagore's Selected Letters, the great polymath who invented Bengal's own music idiom - 'Rabindra-sangeet'- compares the distinctive styles of Indian music and European music. The Letters are written while touring to his family-estates as a manager, living in his house-boat off the Padma river.
Shelidah (Bangladesh)
10 August 1894
Last night the river woke me with a violent bubbling that made the boat billow in the swell - probably the inrush of a freshet: a thing that happens almost daily in this season. As I sat listening I suddenly had the impression that the whole river was alive and highly agitated. Through the planks at my feet I could clearly sense the gamut of ceaseless movement below : tremors, quakes, upheave and downturn, as if I were taking the river's palpitating pulse. The disturbance must have been quite something to set the water racing so wildly.
An year
long festivities, exhibitions and cultural programmes have been inaugurated in Bengal to mark the 150-th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Continueing with my posts of Tagore's Selected Letters, the great polymath who invented Bengal's own music idiom - 'Rabindra-sangeet'- compares the distinctive styles of Indian music and European music. The Letters are written while touring to his family-estates as a manager, living in his house-boat off the Padma river.Shelidah (Bangladesh)
10 August 1894
Last night the river woke me with a violent bubbling that made the boat billow in the swell - probably the inrush of a freshet: a thing that happens almost daily in this season. As I sat listening I suddenly had the impression that the whole river was alive and highly agitated. Through the planks at my feet I could clearly sense the gamut of ceaseless movement below : tremors, quakes, upheave and downturn, as if I were taking the river's palpitating pulse. The disturbance must have been quite something to set the water racing so wildly.
For a long time I sat on a bench beside the window. Outside was a hazy light that made the excited river look even madder. The sky was spotted with clouds. The reflection of a particularly bright star glimmered on the waters like a gash of agony. Both banks were dim and drowsy with slumber but between them surged an insomniac restlessness.
The day-world calls to mind European music with its various concords and discords, orchestrated into a great, purposeful ensemble. And the night-world is like the sphere of Indian music with its unadulterated melody, sombre and poignant. Both move us, though they are in striking contrast. And why should they disturb us ? Pairs of opposites lie at the very root of creation : king and queen, night and day, unity and disunity, the eternal and the evolving.
We Indians are under the rule of night; we are besotted with the eternal, the One. Our melodies are intended for the solitary individual; European music is for the multitude. Our music removes us from the domain of everyday joys and sorrows to a region devoid of company, as aloof as the universe ; the music of Europe revels in the perpetual oscillations of the human condition.
The day-world calls to mind European music with its various concords and discords, orchestrated into a great, purposeful ensemble. And the night-world is like the sphere of Indian music with its unadulterated melody, sombre and poignant. Both move us, though they are in striking contrast. And why should they disturb us ? Pairs of opposites lie at the very root of creation : king and queen, night and day, unity and disunity, the eternal and the evolving.
We Indians are under the rule of night; we are besotted with the eternal, the One. Our melodies are intended for the solitary individual; European music is for the multitude. Our music removes us from the domain of everyday joys and sorrows to a region devoid of company, as aloof as the universe ; the music of Europe revels in the perpetual oscillations of the human condition.
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