Rokus de Groot, composer and musicologist, conducts research on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in the field of the interaction between different cultural traditions (Western and non-Western), and in the perspective of present-day (re) conceptualisations of past religious and spiritual traditions. He was trained at the University of Amsterdam (Frank Harrison, Ton de Leeuw) and at the University of Utrecht (Paul Op de Coul, Jos Kunst). As a musician he received training from Willem Vogel (organ) and Ernst Heins (Central-Javanese court gamelan). He holds the chair of musicology at the University of Amsterdam.

At present, with a team of researchers, he is working on the project ‘New Music and the Turn to Religion’, which is part of the national research program, The Future of the Religious Past.

He was co-organizer of international conferences at which the subject of music and spirituality was a central issue of discussion like Music, Poetry and Devotion (Utrecht 1998), New Music and Spirituality (Amsterdam 1999), The Arts and Ideas of Rabindranath Tagore (Amsterdam 2001), and Redefining Musical Identities (Amsterdam 2002). For the Tagore conference he wrote the composition Hide and Seek, for mezzo soprano, baritone and piano, on a text from Gitanjali. He has conducted field research in Scotland (1971) and North India (1992, 1997), in the latter case on present-day interpretations of the legacy of the 16th-century mystic poetess Mirabai. Together with Indologist Dick Plukker, he published a book about this Indian mystic, Verliefd op de Donkere (In love with the Dark One, 1998), and composed song cycles on her poetry.

Recently he investigated the role of Rabindranath Tagore in Dutch cultural life since the mid-1910s, studying Dutch musical settings of his poetry. In his compositions, Rokus de Groot explores the expressivity of melodic contours.

Song of songs: The life and love of Mirabai
The first concept of a project to connect South-Indian classical dance traditions (devadasi and bharata natyam) with contemporary western music and dance goes back to 1990. At that time, Saskia Kersenboom’s proposal to develop an intercultural experiment in music and dance on the basis of Carnatic compositional logic of the padavarnam.

The composition of Song of Songs is based on the compositional structure of the Carnatic padavarnam. Great varnams like 'Mohamana' (bhaiaravi) or 'Samiyai alaittu vati' (kamas) that were taught to Saskia Kersenboom by Nandini Ramani in Balasaraswati Bani, serve as example and constant inspiration. However, this inspirational force is completely implicit in Song of songs. No attempt has been made to a 'look alike' or fusion of styles. The structural layers and the performance dynamics of varnam inform the compositional process and final product on a deep level.

Padavarnams organise, focus and direct the artistic flow and audience attention by a very ingenious contrast between the 'abstract' and the 'figurative'. In doing so, dancing indeed resembles the art of 'painting' and the term varnam (‘colour’) therefore comes as no surprise. The abstract teermanams indeed frame the figurative abhinaya portion as if they were a 'passepartout' around a colourful painting. In the second half of the varnam, these two approaches are offered in linear succession, to be merged in the tattu-mettu rhythmical underlining of the sahitya and abhinaya. We can find these principles in many of the modern painters like Kandinsky (contrast abstract/figurative), Chagall (manodharma figurations) and Miro (rhythmical underlining by the use of black borders). In Song of Songs, a lyrical poem by the painter Marc Chagall that accompanies his stained glass paintings of the biblical ‘Song of Songs’ has been chosen.