our music moves above the incident of daily life, and because of that it is marked by apparent detachment and real tenderness.
Our songs speak of the early dawn and the starry midnight sky of India; our music breathes of dripping rain, and the wordless ecstasy of the new spring as it reaches the utmost depth of the forests.…
The art of music has its own nature and special function.… Song begins where words end; the inexpressible is the domain of music.
In Hindustani music the words are usually insignificant, but in Bengal the influence of words has been too strong for the independence of pure music. He continues:
I have felt this again and again when composing songs. When I began to write a line, humming—
Do not hide in your heart, O Sakhi, your secret words,
then I saw that wherever the tune flew away with the
words, the words could not follow on foot. Then it
seemed to me as if the hidden word that I prayed to hear
was lost in the gloom of the forest, it melted into the
still whiteness of the full moonlight, it was veiled in the
blue distance of the horizon—as if it were the innermost
secret word of the whole land and sea and sky.
I heard when I was very young the song, "Who dressed
you like a foreigner?" and that one line of the song painted
such a strange picture in my mind that … I once tried
to compose a song myself under the spell of that line.
