The Lotus, from "Song Offerings" (2020)

The composer writes: Rabindranath Tagore's Song Offerings are the poet's own English-language translations of his Bengali-language Gitanjali. While Tagore's translations are not exactly literal, they present to the Western world a window into the tradition of Hindu devotional poetry. (Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for literature for the collection.) In the four excerpts I chose to set to music, love and beauty are recurring themes, richly elaborated with images from nature. But as with many of the poems in Gitanjali, the "love" and "beauty" can be interpreted as either worldly or spiritual. The fourth movement, "The Lotus," may be performed as a stand-alone concert work.