UNABLETO SEE OR FEEL ANYTHING BEYONDTHE SONG
Gamini Akmeemana
Singer and composer Victor Ratanayake was interviewed by a Sinhala newspaper soon after the penultimate performance of his Sa concert in Ju- ly. The interviewer asked him an important question during this interview, and that was: “Aren’t we able to grasp instrumental music or ‘pada rachana virahitha sangee- thaya’ (i.e. music without lyrics as opposed to songs).
Victor’s reply to this question is equally interesting. His reply is worth quoting in its entirety (translation is mine).
“We can’t say that it can’t be grasped. I’m not saying this because Mr. Khemadasa is no longer among the living. He was never able to do this (performing orchestral music) abroad. If the direction he took in music was correct, and if we felt it correctly, why didn’t it reach a higher pedestal? There are people here as well as abroad who have listened to both my songs and his music. While my (song) concerts have been organised abroad, no one has ever organised an orchestral, or symphonic, work by Khemadasa out of this country. Why is it that his works such as Muhuda, Killer, Pirinivan Mangalya and Agni don’t get performed abroad? That doesn’t mean that they aren’t successful works. But I think people don’t feel such works to be ‘ours.’ I think the demand by people is for works which reflect their lifestyles.”
This answer is very illuminating for two reasons – one, it shows why Victor Ratnayake never progressed beyond the Sa Concert. Two, it shows us the mindset which keeps our musicians, as well as the audience, forever at the level of the song and unable to progress towards a ‘pada rachanaya virahitha sangeethaya.’
As much as I admire Victor Ratnayake and his path-breaking achievements in song, I feel that he got trapped in what is essentially a failure of vision, to see beyond the success of his songs (within the context of the Sa Concert, films, and elsewhere) to more complex orchestral music or a musical. Incidentally, Premasiri Khemadasa too, produced an extensive body of film music as composer for over 125 films(both song and instrumental, or ‘pada sahitha’ and ‘pada virahitha’) and was as successful as Victor in the sphere of hit songs (take, for example, his songs in films such as ‘Duleeka’ and ‘Wasana’) and, if we take his instrumental music in Golu Hadawatha, Nidhanaya, Bambaru Ewith, Thunveni Yamaya and Hansa Wilak, he emerges as the more successful film music composer of the two.
While not all of his complex experiments at writing ‘symphonic’ or orchestral music wasn’t successful, the reason why these aren’t performed abroad can be traced to the audience rather than the composer. The problem is that our music lovers are enamoured with the song and can’t grasp more complex works. Their problem is exactly what Victor had after Sa – they are unable to see, or ‘feel,’ anything beyond the song.
Victor laid his finger at the core of the problem when he asked whether we have ‘felt’ Khemadasa’s music correctly. The emphasis all along has been on feeling. Certainly, music has as much to do with feeling as literature or any other form of art, but there is too, a thinking process involved, and it is in the larger orchestral works that a composer’s thinking process becomes apparent and more accessible. That’s why Beethoven is called a ‘thinking composer’ even though his works such as the Pastoral and the Ninth symphonies and the Moonlight Sonata are very moving and can bring out feeling even in people who do not have any idea of the dynamics of Western classical music.
Khemadasa was the first Lankan musician to create a body of musical compositions where this thinking process comes into play. Starting as a film music composer expected to turn out hit songs, he evolved steadily to a point where he could boldly write larger works where the listener’s easy accessibility to feeling becomes constricted as the music becomes structurally more complex. Others, such as Somadasa Alvitigala in the theme music of Sath Samudura and W. D. Amaradeva in Kara Diya have attempted this, but they remain solitary experiments. In any case, Alwitigala’s “Sinidu Sudu Muthu Thalawe,” though melodically brilliant, rhythmically complex and orchestrated with great élan, is essentially a film song, not an attempt to write music on the scale of Khemadasa’s later works. Victor, too, never evolved beyond Sa.
Was this because of a fear of cultural alienation as well as loss of popularity if the ‘feeling’ (the umbilical cord Ivan Turgenev spoke of when speaking of literature) was not focused on and relentlessly pursued? This could well be the case. The problem is that our audiences never evolved beyond the simple structure of the song. One could do admirable experiments within that format, as Victor did with the song “Thotupola Aine,” but that is still a question of not progressing beyond Square One. Khemadasa took a bold step forward and created a new audience for himself. As to why Lankans abroad do not want more of that now, we need to continue this discussion into the future.