Raise the Self by the Self

John Schlenck was born in Indianapolis and graduated at the age of 21 from the Eastman School. He then moved to New York City where he soon discovered his affinity with Indian thought and joined the Vedanta Society of New York. Serving as its music director since 1961, Schlenck has composed many songs and a number of larger works with Vedantic and other spiritual texts. Hindu texts have inspired Western composers from at least the time of Gustav Holst - Hymns from the Rig Veda (1908-1912) - and John Alden Carpenter - Gitanjali (Song Offerings) (1914), based on the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry. The entire libretto of Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha (1980) was taken from the Bhagavad Gita, in the original Sanskrit. Likewise John Schlenck's Raise the Self by the Self, composed in 1986, is set to a text adapted from the Bhagavad Gita by William A. Conrad, Erik Johns and John Schlenck and Life of All Lives composed in 2000 is based on a text from the Bhagavad Gita translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.