The Nine Rasas are the nine basic emotions that are fundamental to all Indian aesthetics. Tonight the fusion of Indian and western words and music explores how the arts express feeling, with new works by John Mayer and William Radice directly inspired by Rasa. 

Emotions are common to all.  When art bonds with feeling, everyone can identify with it, regardless of culture or race.  Thus it is easy to hear music’s moods, even if the instruments or tone colours are foreign at first; appreciate a painting from another country; or find something relevant to oneself in books written hundreds of years ago.  Great art is universal.  It comes across as much in new fusions as established forms.  We hope this transpires today.

The music will start straight after the poem ‘Wonder’, and words and music will alternate.

1.

‘Rasa – Rasa is the dough…’ to the tune of ‘Musick for a while’ (John Dryden/Henry Purcell).  This is from the fourth and last part of William Radice’s Gifts: Poems 1992-1999 (Grevatt & Grevatt, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002) in which poems are written to fit favourite tunes.  The following note on ‘Rasa’ is given in a footnote:

‘The theory rests on a classical Sanskrit text, the Natyashastra of Bharata, probably composed during the fourth or fifth century AD, and generally regarded as divinely inspired.  It is a collection of rules and principles for the production of drama and the education of actors.  Its central idea is that the various elements of dramatic art, combining the visual and the auditory in a temporal process, are directed towards arousing in the audience a particular state of consciousness.  It proposes concepts, one rendered by the term rasa, which means at the concrete level “juice” or “flavour”, to indicate the intermediary between the artist’s intention as it is presented on the stage and the other concept, the condition called Harsha, which means “joy” or “exaltation”, arising in the spectator in response to rasa.  In later times, especially in the synthesis of Bharata’s text with his commentators composed by the great Kashmiri Shaiva theologian Abhinavagupta in the eleventh century AD, the original concepts of rasa and Harsha were combined, and the blend was named Rasa (which will be written, to distinguish it from particular rasas, with a capital R).  The theory recognized that this new Rasa  was universal and self-transcendent...’  Philip Rawson, Indian Sculpture (1966).

2.

Ravi Shankar – L’Aube Enchantée (‘The Enchanted Dawn’) for flute and harp.

L’Aube Enchantée, while for western instruments, is Indian in idiom.  The flute improvises on the todi raga, which represents the dawn, and also sadness, while the harp provide the drone and rhythmic accompaniment. 

3.    

‘Deception’ (Phanki) by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice in his Selected Poems of Tagore (Penguin, 1985, rev. 1987, 1993, 1994).  The poem is from Palataka (‘The Runaway’, 1918) and is in what Tagore called gadya-kabita (vers libre), with lines that vary in length ‘walking across the page’ to produce a characteristic shape. 

4.

Michael Jerome Davis – Lyrics (Purusha, Shanti, Vitarka) for flute and harp.

Purusha is ‘Person’ as in the Isa Upanishad: ‘O Sun, withdraw thy rays, reveal thy exceeding beauty to me and let me realize that the Person who is there is the One who I am’ (Tagore’s translation).  Shanti is ‘peace’.  Vitarka means ‘reasoning’, ‘conjecture’, ‘doubt’, ‘debate’.  The three movements, interestingly, progress from oneness and serenity through to doubt, argument and uneasy resolution in Vitarka’s reworking of the Purusha theme.  Jerome Davis writes:  ‘The flute imitates the vocal inflections of someone quite distressed and converses with an overly complacent harp.  Together, they reach a compromise (for there is no conclusion) in the altered theme of Purusha.’

 6.

John Mayer – Nava Rasas for flute and harp (premiere) / William Radice – Nine Rasas (the second part of Gifts, in which the book’s nine characters or personae are each given a distinctive rasa and rhythm). 

The poem ‘Wonder’ will be read complete; extracts only will be read from the other eight poems. 

John Mayer has changed the order of the rasas from the traditional one, in order to end not with ‘peace’ but with ‘anger’ - a comment on the world today. 

Adbhuta ‘wonder’.   Adam, a psychotherapist, speaks about the son of close friends, brain-damaged after an accident, and compares him to a boy he has read about in a German book.  German quotations from the book are used: ‘Wir brauchen dich, du musst gesund werden’ (We need you, you must get better) and ‘zum zweitenmal geboren’ (born a second time); and the word ‘Gemütlichkeit’ (cosiness).  Each line has a break in it before the last word, reflecting the damage.  

Hasya ‘laughter’ – describing Bert, a middle-aged man of very limited intelligence, and his response to seasons, flowers, animals, birds, colours, television etc.

Shringara ‘love’ – Richard recalls falling in love with his wife when they were students 

Shanta ‘calm’ – an elegy for Nicholas John, dramaturge with the English National Opera, who fell to his death in the Alps in 1996.  The speaker is Maggie, an elderly woman with a love of opera. 

Bibhatsa ‘disgust’ – Brendan, who suffers chronically from migraine, speaks. 

Vira ‘heroism’ – Joe, Maggie’s wife, muses during a sleepless night in their tiny ninth-floor London flat. 

Karuna ‘pathos’ – Jessica, Adam’s wife, speaks about pathos in music, and about the deaths of her mother and sister. 

Bhayanaka ‘fear’ – Eva, a painter, speaks of the fear she tries to capture in her paintings.  There is a reference to Theodore Zeldin’s book An Intimate History of Humanity (1994). 

Raudra ‘anger’ – Michael, who is enormously fat and loves ballet, speaks of his complex feelings of rage, love and grief on seeing Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.