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Thou Art the Sky
SATB/piano
Secular text in English by Rabindranath Tagore
Difficulty rating (1-5): 2.5 Duration 3:20 The Illinois ACDA chose "Thou Art the Sky" as the winner of its 2007 Choral Composition Contest. Premiered Feb 1, 2008 by The Rock Valley College Chamber Singers. directed by Paul LaPrade, at the Illinois 2008 MENC convention The text for this song is #67 in
Gitanjali (Song Offerings)
by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
Gitanjali’s simple yet deeply profound meditations on
God and Nature touched a nerve in pre-World War One Western
Europe and the
In my setting I have tried to musically
match the simplicity and directness of Tagore’s
meditation, and have also created a chant-like inner theme
to the piece by returning again and again to the line “O
thou beautiful”.
I hope to set more texts from Gitanjali in the future. Oxford publishes my
arrangement of another poem from
Gitanjli, When I bring to you Colour’d Toys,
composed by John Alden Carpenter and arranged by me for women’s voices and piano.
"I have carried [Gitanjali]... about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics---which are in the original, my Indian friends tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention---display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude. [Tagore expresses]...an innocence, a simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature makes the birds and the leaves seem as near to him as they are near to children, and the changes of the seasons great events as before our thoughts had arisen between them and us." TEXT
THOU art the sky and thou art the nest
as well.
O thou beautiful, there in the nest
it is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours.
There comes the morning with
But there, where spreads the the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest. infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word.
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| PAUL CAREY
composer / conductor All materials and information on this site © 2008 Paul Carey and respective music publishers No part of this site or its contents may be reproduced without written consent. 
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