The Garden of Desire: Five Pseudo-Indian Love Lyrics by Graham Yates Sheet Music for Piano & Vocal at Sheet Music Direct

Product Details

Artist Graham Yates

Score Type

PDF, Included with PASS

Composer Graham Yates

Format Digital Sheet Music

Pages 18

Arrangement Piano & Vocal

Publisher Graham Yates

Level 4

Product ID 1686822

Genre Classical Contemporary Opera Chamber 21st Century

Instruments Piano Voice

Product Description

The British poet Adela Florence (née Cory) Nicolson, who wrote under the male pseudonym Laurence Hope and became known as Violet Nicholson, became a best-selling author in the early 1900s. She lived in India from 1881 and shared a love of native customs and food with her husband, Colonel Malcom Hassels Nicolson. She died by suicide in 1904 after battling depression all her life.

Garden of Kama was published in Britain in 1901 and in America as Indias Love Lyrics a year later. The original titles of some of the poems make it seem as though she was collecting the poems from locals rather than writing them herself (hence my choice of the word pseudo- Indian).

Kama can be translated as desire and so I interpreted the poems through that lens, which pushed me into a strange spiritual landscape that was sometimes warm with hopeful innocence and cold with calculating jadedness. The unease of the global Coronavirus pandemic and the craven, cynical events in response to the 2020 US presidential election were on my mind and certainly colored my writing style here.

This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.