Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 4. Literature, Art, Music and the Practice of Yoga
Painting, Music, Dance and Yoga

Music and Sadhana [2]

I don’t think I can say anything about your non-appreciation of [X’s] singing or rather your failure to feel it, for this is a matter of personality and its responses. [X] has put me the question as coming from you and I have made some kind of answer. His idea is that you have no appreciation of his music from the aesthetic point of view because it is new in its lines and you cling conservatively to the traditional music. If that is so, it is obviously a mental and aesthetic limitation. But what you say is that you admit his genius and the qualities of his singing — only you don’t feel what you seek in his music. That is a different matter. Your interpretation may then be the right one. In any case what is important for you is to develop your inner realisation till it can take up all the feeling and outer action — whether for your own singing or for a new appreciation of music in general that is the one line opened to you and the one thing needful.

8 September 1937