shanemagee.com inspiration circulation

"When I was four or five years old, my sister started teaching me songs.", Sri Chinmoy recalls about his early introduction to music. "Then, when I was in my adolescence, God blessed me with a good singing voice. I learned hundreds of songs and composed a few as well." These 'few songs' he speaks of were composed at a time when he was making rapid strides in his meditative prowess, and they speak of this new and beautiful reality of vastness that the young Chinmoy found himself immersed in at this time. Indeed, some of Sri Chinmoy's songs dating from this time - when the composer had not even turned fifteen years old - are cherished by his students as their favourites out of all the songs he has sung over the years.

Like his earlier compatriot, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Chinmoy's poetic and musical output are often intertwined, and have developed in parallel with each other. Just as upon his arrival in the West Sri Chinmoy found his poetry moving to a shorter aphorism form, so Sri Chinmoy also found himself writing shorter songs in much greater quantities. These mantric songs, some of them as short as two lines in length, are written to be sung again and again, giving the heart ample space to immerse itself in the 'soul' of the song. As Prachar Stegemann, Australian composer and arranger of many of Sri Chinmoy's songs, puts it: "His songs are drawn from the wellspring of light, power and delight found in the inmost recesses of every heart. So in a real sense, they are ours even before they are composed. One might say that Sri Chinmoy simply borrows the songs from our deeper Self, to share with our many human selves."

Almost two-thirds of Sri Chinmoy's ouevre - over 13,000 songs - is in his native Bengali, a language descended from the Sanskrit of the ancient seers, and also the Pali language used by the Buddha in his teachings of compassion; it is also the language of teaching and song hallowed by many of the great spiritual masters of more recent times, such as Sri Chaitanya, Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Yukteshwar. Like its ancestor, Sanskrit, it is therefore capable of expressing a wide variety of landscapes of the heart which is not so easy in the mind-oriented English language.

"In most cases there is no comparison between my Bengali songs and my English songs.", says the composer. "Because of my Bengali incarnation, I find it easier to express some things in Bengali. The Bengali words come immediately from my heart, whereas the English words still come from my mind. In Bengali everything comes spontaneously, but when I use English, the mind is always there. Because English is a borrowed language for me, when I use English, sometimes a borrowed feeling comes. But the feelings I express in Bengali are never borrowed; they are my own." Many of Sri Chinmoy's English songs start out as poems or aphorisms which are set to music, whereas with his Bengali creations mostly take birth directly in song form. One striking exception to this rule occured when Sri Chinmoy set the 54-stanza Bengali poem Dyulok chariye nara narayan which he composed in August 1945 to music exactly 50 years later.

• ‹ previous
• 7 of 46
• next ›