"Song Offerings was Harvey’s first creative encounter with the work of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet whose thinking fascinatingly parallels his own. Harvey came to Tagore by way of W.B. Yeats, one of his principal literary enthusiasms since his time as a postgraduate student in Glasgow, when he would ‘wander the lonely glens with a volume of Yeats in hand, composing a setting before my return’. Exploring Tagore for himself as a result of Yeats’s advocacy, Harvey found the transition from the Celtic mythology to Hindu mysticism a natural one, though the Indian poet’s world-view was ‘much warmer, to do more with light and love, butterflies and flowers’. In particular, Harvey appreciated Tagore’s ‘images – so tender, so beautiful– of children and of love of a very innocent, pure nature. There are no Freudian undertones at all: I found that very appealing, very pure.’ He also perceived a link between Tagore’s accounts of his quest for spiritual fulfilment and the writings of St John of the Cross, already a profound influence on him." (Michael Downes) "The journey is followed in the music by a steady rise in the first Song, an upbeat to the other Songs, leading to C above middle C. From this focal place, which occurs at the beginning of the second Song, the music expands outwards either side. In the last (fourth) Song this is especially clear as the lulling strings gradually mirror symmetrically out to the highest and lowest possible notes, to dissolve in the edges of space." (Jonathan Harvey)