The Mind Creative March 2014
The Goan Quintet with Anthony Gonsalves is seen second from left
His dream was fulfilled in 1958 when he funded and launched a 110
piece orchestra called “The Indian Symphony Orchestra” with India’s
legendary voices Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey as the frontline
singers. Gonsalves maintained that this was not an experiment in fusion
but a symphonic form of ragas with orchestration and choir. He later
said that he did this for the love of music and to demonstrate the
richness of traditional Indian classical music.
The Indian Symphony Orchestra was received with a lot of enthusiasm
but the interest soon died down. According to musicologist Rajan
Parrikar, “An episode in 1959 was to injure Anthony‘s psyche, one from
which he never quite recovered. The then-Minister of Information and
Broadcasting, B.V. Keskar, in a display of bigotry, refused to let
Anthony compose a score for an animation film because Keskar held the
barbaric view that “Indian Christians should not even be provided with
jobs.”
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