w19247
| Title | Five Tagore Songs |
| Contributors |
Derek Ball (composer) Rabindranath Tagore (author) Gabriel Rosenstock (translator) |
| Composition date | 2011 2011 |
| Duration (mins) | 10 |
| Category | accompanied choral |
| Instrumentation | SATB Pf |
| Commissioned by | |
| Key signature | |
| First line | |
| First performed | |
| Notes | 1. Éanlaith strae an tsamhraidh 2. Compántas fhånaithe beaga 3. Nuair a bheidh sreanga uile 4. Santaím Inis na Laoithe 5. Lá geal gréine |
| Programme Note | Rabindranath Tagore was a hugely prolific writer who in 1913 was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature . As well as being a poet, novelist and playwright he was a composer and painter. His travels in the west led to his gaining an enthusiastic following world-wide, while at home he was influential in the movement for Indian independence. In the year which marked the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth, the poet Gabriel Rosenstock set about translating some of his work from English (that being in turn a translation from Tagore's native Bengali) into Irish. The work he chose was Stray Birds, a large series of tiny poetical aphorisms. I and the painter Ian Joyce collaborated with Gabriel on a multimedia work using these aphorisms, and some of them were turned into songs. I next decided to rethink some of these songs - 5 of them - for choir and piano. (The original was for singer, table and strings.) That proved easy except for one thing: writing for a Glasgow choir, I thought it might be unfair to insist on the use of the Irish language, and yet the English version did not fit at all. Of course, Irish has quite a different grammatical and idiomatic structure from English, so to use the existing English version would have meant a recomposition. Instead, I decided to "back-translate" into English, making a new version which used the rhythmic structure of the Irish song while at the same time attempting to remain true to Tagore's vision. But what a journey the text has made: Bengali to English to Irish and back to English! This score contains just the English re-translation for each of the songs, but it exists in Gabriel Rosenstock's Irish version too. The style is plainly influenced by Indian music, although I can't decide whether it owes more to classical raga, traditional Baul singing, or Bollywood! |
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