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Seventy-one Songs of Gitanjali

Samir Kumar  Gupta

Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali Gitanjali (Song Offerings) has 157 songs, of which he himself set eighty-one songs to tune and Santideb Ghosh of Santiniketan had composed tune of one songs, ‘Hey more durbhaga desh’. The remaining songs were so far tuneless unless we take into consideration of three songs that were sung as prayer songs in the schools of East Bengal i.e., Bangladesh, one other song that was recorded not from Santiniketan but as a basic song.

Miley Mishey is a cultural concern of which Soumyen Adhkari is a music consultant. At the beginning of the present millennium, Miley Mishey decided to bring out CD recital of the whole work of the Bengali Gitanjali and also its English translation by Joe Winter. To avoid monotony of rendition, we decided to use orchestral music playing the first few bars of the songs. We encountered difficulty with seventy-one songs which were not set to tune. I had no option but to compose tune to be played as prelude. Whilst engaged in that work I was amazed to find that tune for the whole of those seventy-one songs could be composed without any difficulty. It must be fully understood that tunes for those seventy-one songs were not composed with any prior intention. Soumyen and I rehearsed those songs, fine-tuning only when felt necessary. It took something like ten months to complete the work. Then Gautam Baran Adhikari,a member of Miley Mishey and a Rabindrasangeet singer wrote the Bengali notation of the songs, which we published in 2006 and again in 2009 (second edition). The recitals in Bengali and English were recorded earlier for presentation in CDs in 2002. In the following years all the seventy-one songs were recorded in CDs, sung by various well-known artists including Soumyen Adhikari and Gautam Baran Adhikari. Samir Kumar Gupta

MILEY MISHEY, 18/1 V I P ROAD, KOLKATA-700054, PH:033-23559446, samir2888@gmail.com