T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

T.M. jayarathne (fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

November 14, 2017 by admin

C. de S. Kulathilaka, K. A. W. Perera, Kandy, Premasiri Khemadasa, SLBC, T. M. Jayaratne, Uditha Devapriya

I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. I never bothered to check out his other work because, for me, he was at his best when he was crooning about love, be it young, requited, spurned, or revived. The themes these movies evoked, I felt, were most sincerely articulated by his voice. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that he had forayed into other productions, that he led other lives, and that like all such artistes from his time he couldn’t be compartmentalised. I met him about a month ago. Here’s an attempt at a sketch.

T. M. was born in the village of Dodanwala near Kandy in 1944. He was firstly sent to St Anthony’s College in Katugastota, where he forayed into Western music. “What we did for our music class was gather around our teacher and her piano and sing those usual childhood melodies, like ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ and ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.’ Not surprisingly, we became more inclined towards Western music.”

Of his elders at St Anthony’s, T. M. remembers the Rector, Reverend Father Rosati, with unmistakeable nostalgia. A graduate from the University of London, Father Rosati always sought to endear himself to the students. “We adored him. In fact you couldn’t escape him. He used to visit our classes and ask us questions. If we answered him correctly, he’d praise us and give us lozenges. After handing those lozenges, he’d smile at the others and say, ‘And for those who didn’t get the correct answer, please don’t get annoyed with me, I have some for you as well.’ That he was loved by us was only to be expected.”

T. M.’s father, a government servant, had been prone to those compulsory transfers which “afflict” such workers in general. Barely two years after T. M. was enrolled at St Anthony’s, for instance, he had been requested to leave for Nuwara Eliya. Since it meant finding another school for his son, he decided to travel alone. “He’d leave for work on Monday morning and come back on Friday evening to spend the weekend with us. He endured this routine for two years, after which he got another transfer, this time to Anuradhapura. He pushed for a delay. He got it delayed for two years.”

Once those two years were up, predictably, the transfer request was renewed. “We needed to act fast. There was an aunt of mine who lived in Kurunegala. Father got himself a transfer there. I was taken from St Anthony’s and put into Maliyadeva College.” He entered Grade Seven after the switch.

So how had things been at Maliyadeva? “It wasn’t easy to get used to the shift,” T. M. remembers, “In hindsight, I believe that was because of the kind of culture we had at St Anthony’s. Lessons were always conducted in English, though elsewhere we spoke in Sinhala. Maliyadeva was more indigenous, more sensitive to our culture. English was limited to one subject. I realised this was true even in the way music was taught. There were no nursery rhymes. Only ragas and Hindustani melodies.”

It’s probably a sign of the connoisseur in the man, but he doesn’t take this as a license to bemoan what had been taught at St Anthony’s. “We loved the melodies we grew up with there. If you think about it, there’s really no difference between the ‘Do Re Mi’ I had absorbed and the ‘Sa Ri Ga Ma’ I was absorbing now. I believe that helped me appreciate both the East and the West.” This, incidentally, had been supplemented by the senior music master at Maliyadeva, K. M. Dayapala.

Apparently Dayapala had encouraged him and his friends to sit for certain external music exams while pursuing their studies. T. M. remembers him as a persistent teacher who nevertheless strived to keep his students a cut above the rest. That explains why he pushed them to get through all three stages of that exam, conducted by the Gandharva Sabha and held in Kandy. They were all based on two categories: Vocal and Instrumental. With respect to the latter, Dayapala initiated young T. M. into the violin.

The exams ended. The results came. While the University entrance exams were around the corner, a gazette notification calling for applications from those who aspired to teach music was published. Dayapala requested his students to sit through the University entrance and apply immediately afterwards.

Father Rosati(fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

Having done just that, T. M. was called to and subsequently interviewed at the Education Department in Kollupitiya. Four weeks later, he was called again along with three women. “I thought that the others had been swept off and this was to select the cream of the crop. Daunted, I abandoned any hopes and illusions I had of becoming a teacher. Imagine how amazed and excited I was when the Director informed me that I had been appointed to a school in Colombo!” This was in 1966.

On September 7 that year, he was posted to Hewawitharana Maha Vidyalaya Rajagiriya, where he taught for the next 26 years. Coincidentally, he was appointed the same day Victor Ratnayake (Aththalapitiya Maha Vidyalaya in Bandarawela), Sanath Nandasiri (Uhana Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Mervin Perera (Kohombara Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Shelton Perera (Sri Pada Maha Vidyalaya in Hatton), and Sarath Dassanayake (Niwaththakachethiya Maha Vidyalaya in Anuradhapura) were. “Back then I only knew Victor Ratnayake. All our careers converged frequently thereafter, not surprisingly.”

While wading through his job, T. M. would get involved with various stage dramas and concerts which supplemented his income (about 200 rupees). “I would get up to 20 rupees a show,” he smiles, “Not much by today’s standards, but a lot back then considering that my rent was 55 rupees a month!” Those shows, moreover, got him into a vivida prasangaya organised by the Teachers Training College in Maharagama, where he was compelled to perform in place of a singer who hadn’t turned up.

The organiser of that prasangaya, C. de S. Kulathilaka, was subsequently appointed as the Head of the Folk Music Research Unit at the SLBC. He had been impressed with T. M.’s voice, so soon afterwards he took him into the Unit to “perform” refined, accompanied versions of various folk songs he was tasked with recording from across the country. “One of the songs I performed, ‘Badda Watata Sudu Mora Mal’, was heard by a man who called the SLBC, asked after me, and learnt that I taught at a school which neighboured his house. I started working with him soon after.”

That man, who’d end up as his most frequent collaborator, was Premasiri Khemadasa, whose association with T. M. deserves an entire chapter. Spatial constraints prevent me from delving any further, however, so I think it best to get a summing up of arguably our most versatile composer from the 20th century.

“He got me into film music. My first film song with him was for Lester James Peries’ Desa Nisa (‘La Hiru Dahasak’), followed by K. A. W. Perera’s Nedeyo and Janaka saha Manju, the latter of which got me a Presidential Award as the Best Playback Singer for ‘Ko Ma Pathu.’ I ended up with a horde of directors from both the commercial and non-commercial sectors, among them Dharmasena Pathiraja.”

What of Khemadasa the man? “He was quite mercurial. If he wanted something out of you and you didn’t deliver, he could get belligerent. He often was, and he often lost his temper, but he’d immediately cool down and pat your back. With a horde of violinists tutored in Western classical music, among them Eileen Prins and Douglas Ferdinands, he revolutionised Sinhala music as we know it. In this he wasn’t trying to ‘Westernise’ us: he didn’t care if we had to ‘import’ bricks from England, as long as it helped us build the Dalada Maligawa properly. He was a marvel to work under and work with, to be honest.”

So what of T. M.’s career as a teacher? “I was briefly employed as an Assistant Director in the Aesthetics Division of the Ministry of Education when W. J. M. Lokubandara was in charge of the subject. After some time, however, I got tired. So after Lokubandara was succeeded by Richard Pathirana, I tendered my resignation and sought employment as a teacher at Sacred Heart College in Rajagiriya, less than a kilometre from my earlier school. I taught for five years there, and then retired.”

Looking back, it’s quite evident that the man’s career has been prolific. When I put to him that his time would have been qualitatively different to ours in terms of the interrelationships between the composer, the lyricist, and the performer, he agrees and says, “Back then there was a sense of unity. Quality had to be in top form. Today you have digitalised the process: if you get your recording wrong, you can always rely on software to correct it. What gets ‘absented’ there is spontaneity. And sincerity.”

Speaking for myself, I agree. Perhaps it’s a testament to T. M. Jayaratne that he has given us what he could, the way he could, sensitively, sincerely, and spontaneously. He has not been unsuccessful, I know.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 6 2017

By Uditha Devapriya

For Clarence Wijewardena: Soaking it all in

November 6, 2017 by admin

clarence wijewardena, Premasiri Khemadasa, Sinhala Pop, Uditha Devapriya

Young people revel in being philistines not because their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles don’t understand them (to be sure, they don’t), but because they want to show that they care, that they understand what their elders want them to understand. Some of the greatest art was born out of that kind of philistinism. And some of that philistine art has survived widespread censure. But the philistinism of the past was conditioned by an important fact. That fact was, simply, that young people knew what they were up against and had an underlying motive to please and to enthral.

The young of today are complacent, smug, passionate, and to an extent they at least try to please us. But the art they churn out can hardly be called art. They have the talent and the raw craftsmanship but they don’t have what it takes to convert that into something meaningful, something artistically fulfilling. When was the last time we heard a song which didn’t croon about love, be it imagined, lost, regained, lost again, or lost forever? When was the last time we saw a film which thrived without those Antonioni-inspired profundities that are so symbolically banal that when they actually didn’t mean anything, they are interpreted to mean something?

The problem with these cultural revolutionists is that they try to transform their common experiences into works of art they THINK we’ll take to. (For the record, of course, we don’t.) They feel so strongly that their experiences are enough, that their sense of daring will magically do the rest of the work. Depending on how you view it, this can be a sign of their laziness or convictions, and if it is the latter, those convictions of theirs aren’t really enough to convince us. Now my point here is that for any art to prosper, in any society, and for the popular to cohabit with the arty, the performer must be aware of and alive to his society. That’s what enriched our purveyors of pop culture: the H. D. Premaratne of Sikuruliya and Apeksha and the man who composed the music for both those movies, Clarence Wijewardena.

The two most discernible and easily identifiable points about a Clarence Wijewardena composition are that, one, it tells a story or at least has a story behind it, and two, it empowered a particular social milieu, middle class and demarcated as the petit bourgeoisie. Ajith Samaranayake in a tribute to Camillus Perera surmised that this bourgeoisie (or lumpen proletariat) had evolved into a special subclass on their own terms. It was that subclass which provided grist to Clarence’s work, which sought to bring together the sarala gee tradition of Amaradeva and the baila-calypso tradition of Wally Bastians, Desmond Kelly, Neville Fernando, and C. T. Fernando.

Clarence spoke or rather wrote and made others sing about the foibles of ordinary individuals, the Mangos and the Kalu Maamas who found life so mundane that they just had to make it interesting, if not colourful. This was reflected in even the instruments that the Moonstones, his first band, operated on: like the Beatles, they included the sitar alongside the guitar. Elsewhere Khemadasa was doing roughly the same thing, compounding the guitar and the piano with the sitar, the tabla, the violin.

Khemadasa took it upon himself to interpret Western chords and melodies to a discerning local audience. But that discerning audience was also discriminating, and belonged to the crowd which was fixated on the classically romantic. Clarence was not a romantic in any classical sense: his task was to refine, to readapt, and to interpret a form of music (baila and calypso) which had been disparaged by the same milieu that produced it. In doing that he wasn’t limited by the parameters of that genre, of course: neither the 6/8 beat that baila thrived on nor the deft interplay of words reflected in its lyrics. Added to this was another point, as important, as relevant.

The “low key” pop quality of much of Clarence’s work (regardless of whether they were written by him) was not really low key the way baila was. As I noted in my tribute to Anton Jones, baila lyrics celebrated a certain kind of freedom that subsisted on a happy-go-lucky, careless lifestyle. In “Mama Enne Dubayi Rate Indala” M. S. Fernando epitomises this attitude of carelessness rather well. You don’t come across that freewheeling carelessness in Clarence’s work, if at all because while they celebrated a freewheeling lifestyle, that didn’t thrive on a self-indulgent ethic.

His most suggestive, if not provocative, songs – like Mango Kalu Nande and Mame Kalu Mame – only hint at such an ethic. In this he was probably reflecting the milieu of those who doted on these songs, tempered by a middle class worldview, conservative, at times even puritanical, yet aspiring for more than what they had. They were not the kind of people that moralists would have deplored, but the kind that hinged uncomfortably on such a milieu. Ignored and neglected by nearly every artist here, they would eventually become Clarence’s biggest audience. That almost all of them hailed from the same locales which nurtured baila – Moratuwa, Negombo, Chilaw – was to be expected. They were overtly enraptured by baila, yet covertly disdainful of its celebration of self-indulgence; consequently, they were relieved at a man who reconciled the best elements of that genre with the qualities which they, as a collective, embodied. I fervently believe that was Clarence’s biggest strength.

It’s a curious interplay of love and hate, of sarcasm and infatuation, which is to be found in many of his songs. But while his early work celebrated this at times contradictory fusion of opposites, his later work, in the seventies and eighties, sought to do away with it. Like most artists who mellowed, matured, and grew wiser with the years, Clarence seemed here to have wanted to assert life as it was, without that streak of self-indulgence. To me, this is what explains the eventide quality of his later work – Atha Ran Wiman, Piyamba Yanawa Ma Akasaye, Sihina Lovak Dutuwa Mathakayi – eventide because when you listen to them, you feel as though they were composed just so to be sung at twilight, at dusk, when you look back on the day which went by and wanted to be happy at the fact that you achieved something, anything, in that day.

In the end he took an entire career to celebrate what we, his greatest admirers, had been celebrating every day. He became alive to that eventide welter of life, in which all our sorrows and defeats and conquests congealed into a dusk which we all went to, forgetting enmities and realising that we were all in it, to win or to lose, together.

මේ ලොවින් එ‍හා සිටන්
ඈත ලෝකයෙන් ඇවිත්

In short, the composer got us to look forward to another tomorrow by closing in on today, when earlier he got us to remain transfixed on a seemingly eternal today.

ඔබේ සුරතල් මුහුණ බලන්නට මම හරි ආසයි
ඔබේ බොළඳ කතා අසන්නට මට හරි ආසය

And in the end, his work, his songs, kept us alive not just to today and tomorrow, but to yesterday. The same yesterday he adorned and yes, resurrected. For us.

Stanley Peiris and the music of the middle

February 24, 2017 by admin

ajantha ranasinghe, clarence wijewardena, Gerald Wickremesooriya, Premasiri Khemadasa, Stanley Peiris, Sunil Shantha, the moonstones, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Vijaya Corea

Music is the most collaborative of all art-forms, after the cinema. Songs in particular require collaboration, to the extent that authorship is impossible to ascribe. On the other hand, however, this does not and will not deny the individual artiste a personal signature. Talent can’t be collectivised, this much we should know. That is why there are names associated with music and that is why some forms of music, to a considerable extent at least, are gauged on the basis of how their contemporary exponents echo the masters of the past.

I love these masters. They taught me how to live. And to love. Amaradeva never fails to enthral me. Khemadasa enthrals me even more (owing to my admiration for the man’s penchant for Western orchestration). Somadasa Elvitigala and Shelton Premaratne, the former dead and the latter domiciled in Australia, enchant me too, a pity since both were marginalised in their time. Sunil Shantha continues to be sung everywhere, teaching us the beauties of a land that undercut him. H. M. Jayawardena and Gunadasa Kapuge have taught me more about humanity and the resilience of the human spirit than any political tract. These people didn’t just compose tunes. They ensured that whatever they composed added meaning to our lives.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there were other composers. They also imparted meaning to their compositions. The only difference, however, was that they pandered to a different sensibility, nurturing a different audience. Like Clarence Wijewardena. The Moonstones. Los Caballeros. The Gypsies. Marians. Right down to Daddy. They too told (and continue to tell) stories in their songs, stories which deserve more than a cursory perusal. But if we are to compare them with those other names, I’d be inclined to say that they were responsible for simplifying music. With deference to Marx, I’d even be inclined to say that they brought music to the urban petite bourgeoisie here.

Stanley Peiris, who died in 2002 and would have been 75 were he alive, fell into this category. He composed more than 6,000 songs, hefty in a context where musicians today try to score points with a fraction of that amount. He was not an exponent of high music or low music. He was an exponent of popular music. Some of his tunes survive because, like those other composers one can classify him with, he appealed to a cross-section of his society. That cross-section has continued to balloon exponentially in the years following his death. No wonder his work remains popular.

He was born in Kandy and was educated at St Anthony’s College in Katugastota. He studied music at the Kandy MGC Institute and worked for a while at the Sri Lankan Navy, eventually becoming a Signal Officer. During this time, the Moonstones had more or less empowered the pop music industry in the country, a landmark given that pop music had hitherto been limited to calypso bands that came out of nowhere and disappeared. Emboldened by this, no doubt, Stanley decided to strike his own path, forming his own group (Fortunes) and specialising in instrumental music.

The Moonstones would shortly be uplifted by Vijaya Corea, who made the waves in our radio and music industries in the fifties and sixties. In 1969, the band had travelled to Kandy to perform at a dinner dance. Corea was to compere that dance. Stanley and his brother, Rangith, began their gig for the evening and went on, until late that night, with their saxophones. They had enthralled the compere so much that the man, wasting no time, told the duo to come to Colombo and not be limited to Kandy. When he himself went back to Colombo, he contacted Gerald Wickremesooriya. He asked the latter to accommodate Fortunes and, if possible, make them famous.

Legend has it that Gerald wasn’t too enamoured of Corea’s proposal, but legend also has it that, thanks to Corea’s ability to persuade, he got the duo to come and perform for him. So one morning, at Gerald’s residence in Kollupitiya, Stanley, Rangith, and the rest of the boys in Fortunes went on from one item to another. History doesn’t tell us what Gerald would have thought. History does, however, tell us that he smiled at Corea, looked at Stanley and Rangith, and nodded at them. Fortunes was in, and with it Stanley too. Later, when Stanley partly abandoned his saxophone (which stayed with him, until his last days) and opted for a career in composing, rather than performing, music, he would look back and admit that if it wasn’t for Vijaya Corea, there would probably never have been a Stanley Peiris.

6,000-plus songs, as I mentioned before, is a hefty amount. With them, he got to meet and associate with a great many vocalists and lyricists, each different to the other by a considerable margin. He gave Chandrika Siriwardena her two most memorable songs, “Igillila Yanna Yan” and “Ran Tharawako”. He gave form to Ajantha Ranasinghe’s reminiscences about a nameless woman he’d seen in the city and got Amaradeva to sing “Tharu Arundathi”. He got together with Sunil Ariyaratne and Nanda Malini and got the latter to sing about the true spirit of Christmas with “Jesu Swami Daruwane”. And of course, he gave us a near-perfect fusion of romance and silliness and got Raj Seneviratne to sing “Sili Sili Seethala Alle”. There are a hundred other songs I have grown to love, but now’s not the time to list them all.

Was there something that brought all these together? Probably. Khemadasa’s signature became evident with the violin: he managed to get us hooked with even his lesser work, which he gave us regularly and despairingly so in the eighties, by resorting to that instrument. Stanley resorted likewise to the guitar, which remains treasured by the very same audience he won to his side.

In arguably his most rebellious song, the much vilified but scantily assessed “Seegiri Geeyak” (which got him working with Sunil Ariyaratne again), he conjures up with the guitar the very image of the Seegiri Apsarawo, alive and animated, as they dance to Nirosha Virajini’s fervent wish for her lover to carve a sandakada pahana in her heart. “What is the meaning of that song?” a prominent lyricist once asked me, to which he supplied his own answer: “Meaning is relative. So is music. If we question the meaning that the lyricist and the composer wanted to bring out, we are implying that we know better. We do not.” Aptly put, I’m compelled to concede.

Stanley didn’t go solo, of course. He scored some films: Saranga in 1981, Baisikale in 1982, and Soora Saradiel in 1986. He taught at his own school. Among his students was Rookantha Gunathilake, who with Mahinda Bandara and Keerthi Pasqual would form the band Galaxy under Stanley’s guidance. He guided other vocalists and composers, prime among them Dinesh Subasinghe. Among his later collaborators, who’ve graduated since, one can count Rohana Bogoda, Raju Bandara, and Nelu Adhikari. They all remember him today as self-effacing, kind, gentle, and never self-centred. A veritable portrait of a veritable artiste, I should think.

On October 13, 2002 Stanley Peiris succumbed to cancer. He was helped even in his final days by his students, who organised a musical show at the BMICH to raise funds for him. At the time of his death, the pop music industry in Sri Lanka was fast being inhabited by pretenders and amateurs, those who resorted to the same hackneyed themes in a bid to simplify their art even more. In the end, tragically but inevitably, we fell into a crevice, in which we remain stuck and in which we prefer to remain stuck.

What Stanley did, which the likes of Clarence began before him, was to bring music closer to the urban middle-class Sri Lankan. I think it was the inimitable A. J. Gunawardana who titled his tribute to P. L. A. Sompala as “The music of the middle”. That would have been an apt heading for Stanley’s epitaph and for the kind of music he composed. On the other hand, though, what his descendants did (which they continue to do) was create an artificial common denominator so as to evade the burden and energy entailed in composing, writing, and singing songs which were original and spoke of experiences felt and lived through. We should regret, this I believe.

By Uditha Devapriya

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

premasiri-khemadasa