Abstract
In 2009, Reba Som wrote a biography of Rabindranath Tagore with music as the key theme to understand the man and his work.1 The fact that such a book was published only at this time remains remarkable because Tagore composed over 2,000 Bengali songs, known as Rabindra Sangit (literally, Rabindra Music). As he wrote in The Religion of Man (1931), he believed that music, “the most abstract of all the arts, just as mathematics is in the region of science,” was the purest and most unimpeded form of creative expression in existence.2 His celebrated Gitanjali (1912) was a collection of mostly songs, which he set to music, and he overall felt “that his greatest gift was for music, and it was this that he should try to communicate to the outside world.”3 Also he repeatedly used musical metaphors in his writings, and there is a connection between his music and his painting. Music, in other words, formed the very essence of Tagore’s artistic being. The goal of this chapter is twofold.
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Notes
Reba Som, Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song, including CD, New Delhi: Viking, 2009.
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© 2013 Bob van der Linden
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van der Linden, B. (2013). Rabindranath Tagore and Arnold Bake: Modernist Aesthetics and Cross-Cultural Communication in Bengali Folk Music. In: Music and Empire in Britain and India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311641_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311641_5
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