Music Director | Sooriya Records

The Khemadasa Touch

November 18, 2016 by admin

Music Director, Premasiri Khemadasa, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

Sugathapala Senarath Yapa’s Hanthane Kathawa probably has the most poignant love song featured in any Sinhala film. “Sara Sonduru”, a duet between Victor Ratnayake and Nanda Malini (the lyrics to which were written by Yapa and Mahagama Sekara), reflects on the beauty of falling in love and the sorrow of losing it. It’s incorporated in a sequence of the protagonists (played by Tony Ranasinghe and Swarna Mallawarachchi) walking along the grounds of Peradeniya University, and moves on to the two of them by a small lake, the one looking into the other’s eyes, ending with these ominous lines:

කුණාටු මැද බොල් අහසේ
එබී බලන හඳ පලුවයි
පුරා හඳට ඉඩ සලසන
අනාගතය ඔබ පමණයි
සැලේ ම හද සැලේ සැලේ…

And yet, it’s not just the lyrics. There’s something about that song, which goes beyond the written word and which echoes the theme of fragile love. It’s not the conventional plaint or dirge but something else: the entire composition, to the best of my imperfect understanding of music, reverberates with the poignancy of love. When I listen to it today, I am reminded of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, and not just because of the words.

“Sara Sonduru” was composed by Premasiri Khemadasa. Khemadasa made us listen to music. He also helped us understand that it wasn’t merely about songs but could be something more, as he proved in his long, prodigious career. He ventured into unchartered territory, broke some norms, and yet never strayed from the land of his birth. He made us enjoy what he did. More importantly, he taught us a lesson: that to break out from tradition, you must be rooted in tradition.

And how rooted he was! He took in everything he heard – the sound of birds chirping and the waves of the sea and everything else that nature offered in this country – and transformed them into melodies we could listen to. His greatest contribution, for me, was in the realm of film music, for the simple reason that at a time when composers thought that the cinema and music could interact through the conventional three-minute song, he dared to think of an alternative. Sure, we had films that had themes of their own (variations of which were used to evoke emotion in whatever sequence), but it is Khemadasa who made us realise how music could be used to explain the many moods, gestures, nuances of feeling, and philosophical dimensions embedded in a work of art.

The cinema, Lenin is reported to have said, is the most important of the arts. Music, however, is the most universal. Khemadasa understood that. In his best work (from his first phase) – for the films of K. A. W. Perera and Lester James Peries – he employed it to lend meaning to a scene or sequence. He did not go for standalone songs for the simple reason that he would have found nothing useful in them: for him, a medium of art could be weaved into another only IF both related to each other.

That is why, when you listen such classics like M. S. Fernando’s Ron Rasa Berena (in Rana Giraw) or Eran Kanda Pem Handa (in Nedeyo) you get the feeling that while the hero and heroine are crooning at each other, what they’re singing contributes meaningfully to the larger narrative. That is also why he was more successful when he went beyond composing songs.

He first entered the cinema with Ariyadasa Peiris’ Sobana Sitha (in 1964), which was followed by a film which introduced him more properly to the industry, K. A. W. Perera’s Senasuma Kothanada (in 1966). He followed it up with T. Bhawanandan’s Manamalayo three years later, itself followed by two seminal milestones, one minor and the other a watershed.

Tissa Liyanasuriya’s Narilatha, arguably the first attempt by a filmmaker here to thematise adultery, was the first. It begins with a rarely heard classic: Lassana Thaleta, performed by Victor Ratnayake and synchronised with the rhythm of a moving train (Khemadasa’s ability to hone in on the context of a scene or sequence like this eventually became his signature).

Lester James Peries’ Golu Hadawatha was the second. The other day a TV channel screened it. As the credits rolled and as they announced, “Music by Premasiri Khemadasa,” the channel thought it fit to add its own two cents through a subtitle: “the most famous score from a Sinhala film.” That’s an extrapolation I agree, but it makes sense: Golu Hadawatha goes down as the first Sinhala film which based its entire narrative on a single musical theme, one that employed a flute to convey the idea of unrequited love.

But it’s not just that theme. There’s a sequence in the film where the protagonist (Sugath, played by Wickrema Bogoda) meets his former lover (Dammi, played by Anula Karunatilake) at a school carnival. You get the feeling Sugath goes there to meet her, and you get the feeling that he will. He goes and watches a moving carousel. As expected, he comes across her: laughing with her new found lover, oblivious to everyone around her.

That’s where Khemadasa and the editor, Sumitra Peiries, applied their magic. We see close-ups of Dhammi intercut with a slow zoom on Sugath’s pained yet expressionless face. We see Dhammi laughing, indifferent and blissfully so, contrasted with Sugath’s feeling of hurt and the carousel music, bringing out the counterpoint the one has to the other and, in the end, conveying tension and repressed emotion. When Sugath and Dhammi (with her lover) meet and when the latter leaves, the carousel music quickens: Sugath looks on, asks his friend to leave him, and wanders away.

Khemadasa could convey ideas like that. He did the same thing in Peries’ third and final film for Ceylon Theatres, Nidhanaya. He went as far as to compose his own waltz for it, used in the sequence of the two protagonists (Gamini Fonseka and Malini Fonseka) dancing with each other after being reconciled. The waltz conveys an almost otherworldly passion between them, because Gamini isn’t really dancing with Malini: he’s merely imagining it all.

These were certainly bold exercises in music, but the Khemadasa of the sixties and early seventies would soon give way to his next phase: one marked by films that were more direct and more political.

Those films were mostly directed by the foremost exponent of political cinema here, Dharmasena Pathiraja. Emboldened by their subject matter, Khemadasa went on experimenting. He went for opera and used it, extensively at times, in them: in Bambaru Avith, in Para Dige, and later in Pathiraja’s teledramas (especially Ella Laga Walawwa), he became more daring. He contextualised his work to suit the film: in Dharmasiri Bandaranaike’s Hansa Vilak, for instance, his score brings up the narrative’s interplay between fantasy and reality, blurring the line between the two until, in that confusing and unresolved ending, there’s no music at all: because the score made it so evident that it needn’t have been featured there.

In Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Dadayama, on the other hand, he refrained from featuring an extensive score: as Regi Siriwardena noted in his review, there probably were no more than 10 minutes of music in the entire film, because the only time it’s used we are deceptively made to think of the narrative in terms of the popular cinema. When the music ends however, we beg to differ: the interplay between imagination and reality tempts us into believing that the story we are watching can be rationalised by the myths and fantasies of popular fiction, when in fact the protagonist gets entrapped, gets confused by her blind devotion to her tormentor, and finally realises that the only way out is to destroy him and herself. Music would have jarred, and this the director and the composer understood all too well.

There were other contributions and films. We remember them all. In Janaka saha Manju, he made us fall in love with the protagonists with “Loke Jeevath Wannata” In Nedeyo, he made us think of life’s many blessings when Vijaya Nandasiri’s blind protagonist “sings” T. M. Jayaratne’s “Jeevithe Amadhara”. In Lester James Peries’ Kaliyugaya, he made us aware of the protagonist Alan, as he grows up and as he battles his family’s eroding moral conscience by detaching himself from his parents (Nanda and Piyal), through a simple yet powerful motif (played out in snatches from beginning to end). In Parakrama Niriella’s Siri Medura, he used Amarasiri Peiris to sing of the raging, unrefined passion in Anoja Weerasinghe’s character with “Minisa Marana Thunak.”

And in the teledramas and films of Jayantha Chandrasiri – in particular, Guerrilla Marketing – he transformed our jana shruti and jana gee into what can only be called exercises in fusion. He juggled East and West. He compromised. For some, that was an unforgivable aberration. For me and for the vast majority of music lovers in this country though, that was a meaningful contribution. In Chandrasiri’s films – idiosyncratic as they are and fuelled by an almost zealous desire to unearth the political – he achieved his zenith. It is in here, more than anywhere else, that he experimented and triumphed.

He would have been 79 this January and 80 the next. He died in 2008. He was 71 at the time. An age, I’d like to believe, at which he would have been able to look back and concede ground to his achievements, triumphs, and moments of glory.

For he gave us a cinema (yes, he did!) which achieved much more with the revolution he wrought in our music. He taught us, in his own special way, that deviations from the norm made sense only if you were rooted in tradition. He showed us, as Godard and Picasso did in their respective fields, that if you did away with convention altogether, what you achieved wasn’t a deviation but a twisted, meaningless contortion of reality.

Here’s what I think about what he did, hence. There’s something about a Khemadasa composition which stands out. It betrays, for a split second even, the idiosyncrasies of a man who went beyond the ragadhari tradition and embraced a more universal (yet no less “national”) form. Legend has it that the man could direct a scene or sequence of a film in line with his score. Legend has it also that he was, like Bernstein, erratic. Like all pioneers, one can add.

I suppose that’s the biggest legacy he can claim to. And I suppose we as a nation and as a people have profited by it. Big time.

UDAKDEV1@GMAIL.COM
By Uditha Devapriya

Sunil Shantha: You did not depart with your voice

November 18, 2016 by admin

Lyricist, Melody Writer, Music Director, Sunil Shantha, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Vocalist

About a month ago I sat down with a prominent composer and vocalist. He was a veteran and as with most veterans, he had a lot to talk about. So we talked. We ambled along the past, revisited certain milestones he’d gone through, and eventually came to a point where we exhausted any possibility for more ambling. We didn’t stop talking though. We instead went off to other topics and points, which he (being a veteran) knew intimately and was only too willing to wax eloquent on. Being the interviewer, I let him remember. And took down what he said.

The subject was music, obviously. So I asked him about the debate between what’s referred to as ape de (ours) and the Oriental tradition, the latter of which has clearly influenced the former for reasons not too difficult to discern. I’m no musicologist, but it doesn’t take a musicologist to figure out the “revolution” as such that compelled itself in the early sixties, when the then Radio Ceylon brought over experts from North India to assess, pass, and if necessary filter musicians who’d call the shots for the next few decades.

I then put across a question I’d been dying to ask the man. Here it is, word to word: “In the light of this cultural invasion, how would you assess those who were forcibly removed from Radio Ceylon or went on self-imposed exiles because their music was considered too ‘plebeian’ for the tastes of those refined outsiders?” The man was quick with his reply: “Well, no one can seriously contend that those outsiders, or their so-called ‘agents’ in here back then, did a disservice to the music industry.”

I mentioned some names. Firstly I mentioned Piyasiri Wijeratne. Piyasiri wasn’t an exile, but thanks to the “Raghadari Revolution” (as I like to call it) his voice drifted away until we forgot him. The musician was adamant with his verdict: “He didn’t have a great voice.” I then mentioned a singer who composed or sang or wrote more than 250 songs and hence, can’t be ranked alongside the more obscure Wijeratne: Sunil Shantha.

The man was slower to reply, but he had a verdict to deliver on him too: “He didn’t possess a great voice either. His melodies were simple and he was basically a ‘kantharu’ singer. People commend him for nourishing Sinhala music, but the truth of the matter is that he came from a tradition which subsisted on hymns and sermons in the Church. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that he was a Catholic, hardly a qualification for someone venerated for his contribution to folk music.” There was, as always, a hint of bigotry there (what’s not musical about kantharu after all, and what’s wrong in being a Catholic when it comes to contributing to our music?) but for me, his comment merits attention for another reason.

For years, decades, and more than a century, Sunil Shantha was ridiculed. He was marginalised and belittled. Some claimed that his vocal range was limited. Others claimed that his melodies were too simple. Few, very few in fact, saw in him the musical prodigy that he was. They either passed away soon or had their opinions rubbished by what I referred to in my article on Clarence Wijewardena as “bamunu critics.” I make no apologies for that term and I make no exceptions for anyone, be it a newcomer or a veteran from our music industry.

I believe it’s time to reassess the man. He deserves approbation. Not ridicule. As no less a figure than the late Tissa Abeysekara frequently noted, he was the first musician from here who aligned his melodies with the syllables, permutations, and essence of the Sinhala language. Yes, his melodies were simple, yes they were meant for the ear and not the academe, and yes they were aimed more at the aesthete than the musicologist. But in all seriousness, was there anything in what the man did that made him deserve his later exile from his career? The simple answer, no.

Sunil Shantha was born as Don Joseph John on April 14, 1915 in Dehiyagatha, Jaela. His parents were staunch Catholics but didn’t live long enough to see him grow up: he was not quite three months when he lost his father and not quite three years when he lost his mother. He was raised thereafter by his maternal grandmother and some uncles from her side of the family.

Don Joseph passed from his school, St Aloysius’ in Galle, and became the first in the island at his final exams. Around that time, in 1933, he was trained as a teacher at the Roman Catholic Teacher Training School in Maggona and began his career at Mount Calvary College in Hapugala, a school in which he eventually developed a formidable music culture. It’s probably a measure of how committed he was that, within the next six years, he was able to lead his students to three consecutive victories at the Southern Schools Music Competition.

Not surprisingly, by 1939 his worth had been noticed, measured, and praised, and that year, he passed the intermediate level in the prestigious Gandharva Examination. Within the next six years his life moved quickly: he went to Shanthiniketan where the North Indian tradition was in sway and then proceeded to the Bhathkande, where the more plebeian, Bengali tradition fired his imagination intensely. He received his Visharada Degree from there in 1944, and by that time he’d had enough with what Professor Carlo Fonseka once wittily described as a very “unmusical name.” So off went Don Joseph John, and in came Sunil Shantha. He joined Radio Ceylon barely a year later, when Sri Lanka had gained independence. He was 30 at the time.

When he arrived in Sri Lanka, much had happened. Ananda Samarakoon had initiated a revolution of sorts to cleanse our music of any foreign accretions. He was not very successful at it. That was expected. After all, it was hard to shake off the raghadari tradition and it was hard to forge a musical idiom that could subsist for long without it.

True, Samarakoon had valiantly made an effort, and much of his work – like “Ennada Menike” and “Vile Malak Pipila” – testified to that. But for a complete and unhindered process of cleansing and purification, there needed to be an authority, someone strong enough to challenge the conventional wisdom and wield an idiom that was at once rooted in our land. To do that, he needed to align his melodies with our language.

Shantha began achieving this with the first ever song recorded for Radio Ceylon, “Olu Pipila.” It was an instant success, needless to say. At a time when both the well-to-do and the less well off found it fashionable to insert Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” at a marriage ceremony, Shantha’s simple and folksy tune gushed in wildly. Soon enough, whenever there was a wedding, that tune would almost always be played out.

And in a sense, his other songs caught on in much the same way. They became simpler and less frilled as the years went by – notice the difference between the likes of “Emba Ganga” and “Mal Mal Mal” and the likes of “Poda Dam Sisile” and “Ho Ga Ralla Binde” – probably reflecting his need for austerity, simplicity in a music tradition that combined language and melody.

But there were commonalities that brought them all together: like the poetry of the English Romantics and the more melodramatic ruminations of Tagore, they were meant for the aesthete. With their praise of village life, the waves of the sea, and the quiet dignity of the peasantry, they remind me of the later poetry of Wordsworth: simple, enchanting, essentially inbred, and without a doubt quaint.

Notice, for instance, the lyrics that open up “Mal Mal Mal”
මල් මල් මල් රතු රතඹල මල්
මල් මල් මල් නිල් මානෙල් මල්
මල් මල් මල් සුදු අරලිය මල්
මේ හැම හොඳ රුව ඇති මල්

Shantha gives the impression of being a witness to the beauty and sense of wonderment in these flowers. He lists them, one by one, ending each verse with a reminder that they are filled with just that: beauty and a sense of wonderment. In these songs, which to me represent his most fruitful period (until his fall from grace after the Raghadari Revolution), he becomes a witness and receptacle to the land of his birth: a witness, not player. He doesn’t bring out any message per se (though some of his work, such as “Walakulin Basa”, inspired development drives that sought to make use of our natural resources), and for this reason, he was like Keats and the later Wordsworth.

I don’t see any point in dwelling on what befell him later on. Compilers and historians have recorded all that and have condemned those who should be condemned. He didn’t deserve the fall he had to suffer and he didn’t have to suffer the indignity he had to bear up with until his death. Sure, no one would believe that he worked as a mere radio repairer today, but that’s because no one with any sense of decency would expect that a man who composed “Olu Nelum Neriya Rangala” and “Pruthugeesi Karaya” could be forced to stoop to such a level.

From those still living with us, I can think of only one person writing in English who seriously considers him as a worthy: Carlo Fonseka. Here’s what the good Professor once said: “Sunil Shantha belongs to the ‘ancient period’ of the history of modern Sinhala music. It is generally agreed to have dawned in the 1940s. It was during the brief period from about 1945 to 1950 that Sunil Shantha created the veritable torrent of songs that took the world of Sinhala music by storm.”

That “ancient period” of modern Sinhala music had to evolve. Evolution, however, shouldn’t be at the cost of rubbishing the past. What happened to Shantha was tragic and avoidable, going by that.

Yes, I find it difficult to believe that more than 35 years after he died and more than a century after he was born, there are still those who deride him on account of his religious background. No, I shan’t stir up a hornet’s nest here. All I will say is this: he could have been treated better. And if he had, he would have gone on composing, gone on writing, and gone on singing. We wouldn’t have been worse off because of that and we would have profited if he’d been allowed to go on.

He wasn’t. Consequently, we lost.

By Uditha Devapriya

music-director

The Khemadasa Touch

Sunil Shantha: You did not depart with your voice

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