ABSTRACT
Between 1934 and 1937 Bake stayed in the Western hemisphere. In London, he worked with Arthur Henry Fox Strangways, that other pioneer in South Asian ethnomusicology, on a full translation of Sangita Darpan. Over the years, Strangways’ classic The Music of Hindostan (1914) decisively influenced Arnold’s thinking and now the two became true friends. Their ideas about Indian music, including their attraction to the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, are examined comparatively. In 1935, Bake published Twenty-Six Songs of Rabindranath Tagore and this chapter also includes an in-depth discussion of Tagore’s ‘modernist’ songs. Between November 1935 and May 1936, the Bakes gave around fifty lecture-recitals about Indian music at various institutions in the United States, including at New York, Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Berkeley Universities. In 1937, Bake was awarded a Spalding Senior Research Fellowship at Oxford University’s Brasenose College to carry out a survey of Indian religious songs and music.
