clarence wijewardena | Sooriya Records

“REMEMBERING CLARENCE” – By Des Kelly

May 22, 2022 by shamilka

He was certainly one of the very best Singer/ Songwriters that Sri Lanka was proud to call their own.

Clarence Wijewardena wrote many songs, most of them, at the request of friends who, in turn, had friends wishing to record a “Clarence-song”.

This writer was already in Australia, when Clarence wrote a song entitled “Dilhani”, dedicated to the baby- daughter of yet another friend, no doubt. It wasn’t known to many folk that Clarence wrote his song-lyrics in a simple exercise book, that most Sri Lankans would remember as a relic of their School days. He wrote many songs, so there were many exercise books, and in addition, at the beginning of each song, being a Catholic, he would also write a special little prayer, asking God to help him complete the song. This was the simple God-fearing guy that I consider myself to be very unlucky, not to have met personally.

However, another famous female Singer by the name of Indrani Perera, with a band named the “Moonstones” had recorded “Dilhani” which I first heard in Melbourne in early 1963. It was a beautiful version of this great song which reminded me very much, of the Country I had just migrated from and made me quite emotional just listening to it.

I decided to use the beautiful music that Clarence had written, compose my own English lyrics and called the song ” My lovely Island Home” Before I recorded it, I wrote to Clarence Wijewardena and asked for his written permission to use his music, and was very happy when he wrote back, giving his permission & so I recorded my version, always giving him due credit for his music.

Clarence Wijewardena has since passed on, but his beautiful music will live on, forever, and my only regret is that I never did get the chance to meet him and shake his hand, congratulating him on so many songs that he had written. Unfortunately, all the exercise books containing his lyrics got burned in a house fire, but the memories and melodies linger on, Clarence. God bless you, my friend, and may you rest in peace with the same God whose help you called on, so often.

Desmond Kelly

(Editor-in-Chief).

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

70 දශකයේ යුග පෙරළිය – සිංහල පොප් සංගීතයේ මහා මෙහෙයුමිකරවාණන්ගේ වෙළඳ ළමා ගී තැටි නිර්මාණයේ රස මිහිර

December 27, 2020 by shamilka

clarence wijewardena, Prabath Rajasooriya

ක්‌ලැරන්ස්‌ ආතර් සෝමසිංහ විජේවර්ධන නම් ඔහු

සි ටි ප්‍රනාන්දු ගේ ගායනරටාව අධ්‍යයනය කරමින් 60 දශකයේ අතිශය ජනප්‍රිය බීට්‌ල්ස්‌ ගායක කන්ඩායම අනුකරණය කරමින් ඉංග්‍රිසි ගී රස විඳිමින් සිටි ලාංකිකයන්ගේ ඒ ආකාරයේ එකී රිද්මයේ ගී පිපාසාව සංසිදවූයේ ඔහුය

එයින් වේගරිද්ම සිංහල පොප් සංගීතයේ සුසංවාදී ශිල්පීය ක්‍රමය වඩාත් ඔප්නංවනු ලැබීමෙන් නොනැවතී ඊට එවකට පැවතී නවීන තාක්‍ෂණික ශිල්පිය ක්‍රම මුසුකරමින් එයින්ද නොනැවතී ලිඩ් ගිටාරය උපයෝගි කරමින් නවමු අත්හදාබැලීම් ගණනාවක්‌ සිදුකරනු ලැබීය

ඒ අතර

ලිඩ් ගිටාරය හා සිතාරය ප්‍රසංවාදී ක්‍රමවේදයේ භාවිතා කිරීම

සුරඟන වෙස්‌ වලා – සිංහල සාම්ප්‍රදායික බෙරපද ගිටාරයෙන් මතුකිරීම

වනදෙව්ලිය තුරුලේ – බොසනෝව නර්තන ශෛලියේ රිද්මය

මම එදා ගොසින් / මුහුදු රැල්ල ඔස්‌සේ / සිහිල් නුවන් යුග / සිහින පැතුමි විමනේ / සුමුදු මල් පිපුණු අතු කොණේ – එවක ලොව අති නවීන ඉලෙක්‌ට්‍රොනික උපකරණයක්‌ වූ වාහ් වාහ් පැඩලය යොදා සංගීත රටා නිර්මාණය

කුසුමලතා – බ්ලොක්‌ ගිටාර් තාක්‍ෂණය

වසන්තයේ මල් කැකුලයි (සිකුරුලිය – එචි ඩී ප්‍රේමරත්න 1973) පද 05 ක්‌ සහිත ස්‌ථායි කොටසක්‌ අඩංගුය ඩ්‍රම්ස්‌ වාදන – ශ්‍රි කාන්ත දසනායක (සුපර් ගොල්ඩන් චයිම්ස්‌)

ලිඩ් ගිටාර් වාදකයන් ගණනාවකගේ සහය ලබාගැනීමේ ක්‍රමවේදයේ පුරෝගමීත්වය / සාමිප්‍රදායික බෙර වාදන ගිටාරයෙන් ප්‍රතිනිර්මාණය (සුරඟන වෙස්‌ වලා / උඩරට නිලිය හැඩ වගේ)

———————————-
සුපර් ගෝල්ඩන් චයිම්ස්‌ ගායක / වාදක මන්ඩලය (1973-79 කලින් කල)

ඩ්‍රම්ස්‌ – ශ්‍රි කාන්ත දසනායක / නිමල් පෙරේරා

බේස්‌ ගිටාර් – රොහාන් ගුණවර්ධන / කොන්ඩ්‍රි ගුණරත්න / ලියසින් ද සිල්වා / සුනිල් මාලේවන / චන්ද්‍රාල් ෆොන්සේකා / පීටර් අල්මේදා / කුමාර් පීරිස්‌

කීබෝඩ් – රුක්‌ෂාන් පෙරේරා / සූරියකුමාර් වීරසිංහම්

—————————-

පුංචි පුංචි බෝනික්‌කෝ
සාප්පුවේ මම දැක්‌කෝ
නැගිටිනවා – ඇවිදිනවා – දෑස පියා ඇලවෙනවා

ගායනය – ලිලන්ති කරුණානායක
පද රචනය – කරුණාරත්න අබේසේකර?
සංගීතය – ක්‌ලැරන්ස්‌ විජේවර්ධන

————————————-

ඇතැමි කරුණු සඳහා මුලාශ්‍රය – රුක්‌ෂාන් කරුණනායක වෙබි පිටුව

ක්‌ලැරන්ස්‌ විජේවර්ධන රසික සමාජය

~සටහන් පෙළගැස්ම‍~

Prabath Rajasooriya

ලිපියේ දැනුම මිතුරන් සමගින් බෙදා ගන්න

ඔබගේ අදහස් ඉදිරිපත් කරන්න…

From art to kitsch, and between jana and janapriya

May 2, 2020 by shamilka

clarence wijewardena, Uditha Devapriya

In his landmark essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg discusses the evolution of art in terms of its separation into two broad cultures: the highbrow and the popular. The progression or regression (depending on how you see it) from the one to the other was facilitated by the transition from feudalism, with its repressive structures enabling a separation of art from the masses, to industrial capitalism, through which universal literacy was achieved to such an extent that those masses, until then deprived of participation in a society’s cultural sphere, became the shapers and makers of art forms (in particular, literature and music). Greenberg, who was a painter and an art critic himself, contends that this transition occurs owing to the tendency of a society to unravel itself once the religious, cultural, and various other morals and absolutes on which it is based begin to be questioned rather critically. By this, “one and the same civilisation produces simultaneously two such different things” – the high and the low.

While the essay has been discredited since, and scholars have pointed out certain inconsistencies therein, I am interested in some of Greenberg’s ideas because they pinpoint the bifurcation of aesthetics which we, in Sri Lanka, have been witnessing. The evolution of art, for Greenberg that is, follows two broad routes: from art (the academic, scholarly, upper class type, based on refined, sophisticated tastes) to avant-garde (the bohemian type, which separates art from the necessity of patrons and financiers) to its rear-guard, referred to as “kitsch” (a German word connoting the seamless fusion of commerce and art in modern, urban, industrial societies). Art and kitsch, highbrow and lowbrow, refined and vulgar: these are the terms we use to differentiate between these two aesthetic sensibilities, to an extent in Sri Lanka too. How can we apply Greenberg’s contentions, minus their flaws, to what transpired in this country, then? By considering the way the transition from the highbrow to the popular corresponded to the evolution of the kind of audience which, in here or elsewhere, pandered to these cultural forms.

Perhaps what needs to be borne in mind before examining the applicability of this cultural phenomenon to Sri Lanka is that in Sri Lanka, there was, historically, no real bohemian culture. Bohemians were wanderers, vagrants, uncommitted rebels, who simultaneously distanced themselves from and attached themselves to the bourgeois lifestyles they vowed to get away from. In here though, the separation was between the coloniser and his subjects, namely, the vast majority of the countrymen. For the latter, art was neither highbrow nor kitsch; it was purely a means of communicating within themselves. Even the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, as Regi Siriwardena pointed out, was built with a utilitarian objective, since worship was as vital to the people of those days as going to a job is to us today. While art did exist, very little of it was consumed as objects of refinement to be studied from afar; there was, in other words, no proper extrinsic value to the artefacts we hold up and admire in museums today, only an intrinsic plasticity. With the advent of archaeology and restoration, traditional art forms became something to preserve. The champions of this mode of thinking were the born-again natives from the Anglican elite, like Devar Surya Sena.

Greenberg traces the aesthetic route from art to avant-garde, and at the hands of the bohemians, avant-garde reaches its peak. It follows that if there was no real bohemian culture in Sri Lanka, there was no intermediate stage between art and kitsch, or between the highbrow and the popular. In the Bengali Renaissance, particularly the novels of Bankim Chatterjee, we see the fusion of the West and East, which unearths a culture that can be at least vaguely referred to as avant-garde. Greenberg’s thesis is that such a culture thrives on a self-referential sensibility. According to him, the avant-garde artists “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in”, which means that what is central to the work of, say, a Chatterjee novel or a Picasso painting is its preoccupation with its forms and techniques: it returns to its own workings and externalises those workings in every line and contour. If these indeed were the hallmarks of the bohemian sensibility, we cannot claim that we reached that intermediate stage.

The transition from art to avant-garde is really the transition of one order to another. But the transition from avant-garde to kitsch is a reflection of changing landscapes and industrialisation. Colonial societies did not escape this wave of industrialisation, though they were asked to pay the price for European progress by handing over their resources at dirt cheap prices. Sarlis, the painter who depicted moments and excerpts from the lives of the Buddhas, was Sri Lanka’s equivalent of Ravi Varma: the painters of spirituality on carpets and temple walls and tapestries, through whom the faith of the majority became intertwined with the walls of their houses. This is the fusion at the heart of kitsch, and in such a fusion we come across (as Tissa Abeysekara noted in an essay) a pseudo-renaissance. But for the kitsch culture in Sri Lanka to unfold itself properly, it had to wait until three distinct epochs had passed: 1931, 1948, and 1956.

Art and avant-garde turn to kitsch the moment the masses, the majority, are empowered to be the shapers and makers of the culture of their society. Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution, even in societies which experience that revolution second hand and (as with us) have never gone beyond the landowning aristocracy that the coloniser selected, tutored, and in effect bred. Emancipation, in a metaphoric sense, was what the masses demanded, from the shackles of colonialism or at least the culture of illiteracy colonialism necessitated in their societies. In the West, industrialisation was followed by the establishment of what was called universal literacy. In Sri Lanka and India, literacy, though hardly obtainable (as Will Durrant has written, the British India Government spent eight cents per head per year on education at a time when they were spending 83 on the army), congealed into demands for the franchise, which we got in 1931. If literacy was the prerequisite for kitsch in the West, it was the prerequisite for freedom in our societies. But the franchise in itself was not enough: what was needed was independence (in 1948) and a complete if not partial moving away from the policies of the British Government (in 1956).

The majority needed to be assimilated to the societies had been estranged from, but the minute they aspired to be the shapers of their collective destinies, a fatal rupture resulted between two forms of culture: the formal and the folk. This process was necessitated more or less by the rural-urban exodus which the franchise, independence, and the historical eventuality compelled by 1956, free education, resulted in. As Greenberg notes, “the peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency.” But the formal culture they aspired to reach required tremendous reserves of leisure and privilege. The peasants simply could not afford that kind of leisure. Having been assimilated to the city, they could not return to the village either, because they had forsaken on their earlier way of life. As such, the “new urban masses” set up a pressure on the societies they were moved to, to provide them with a catalogue of art forms which they could enjoy. Subsequently it was this petty bourgeoisie which enabled the opening up of our art forms to outside (mainly Indian and Western) influences. On one hand, they enjoyed Sunil Shantha, Amaradeva, and Victor Ratnayake. On the other hand, they enjoyed baila, Rukmani Devi, and Clarence Wijewardena.

The fatal rupture – between folk and formal – caused by this social phenomenon was an inevitable consequence of the social mobility resulting from universal literacy (in the form of free education). Moreover, between Amaradeva and Clarence there was and is, to a certain extent, a separation, which while not unbridgeable remains, by default, distinct from one another. If we are to follow Greenberg and impute terms to these two streams of one sensibility, then we have to demarcate them as “jana” (highbrow) and “janapriya” (lowbrow). In both instances what was wiped out, or belittled, was the indigenous culture; the same culture which survives today, though barely, through the joint efforts of Sahan Ranwala and the Ranwala Balakaya as well as its followers and students (some of whom, like Chanuka Moragoda, have graduated to the janapriya sensibility through YouTube and other channels in social media). Obviously, one essay isn’t enough to dwell on the problems that this particular rupture has caused within our cultural firmament. Examining a problem presupposes a succinct explication of that problem. Before examining it, therefore, I will lay it down as follows. The fact is that while the janapriya culture has evolved, and continues to evolve today, from baila on your radio to Sanuka Wickramasinghe on YouTube, the jana culture, which includes among its vast canon Amaradeva and Premasiri Khemadasa, has stalled somewhere. Now that I’ve laid down the problem, I’ll examine it next week. For now however, I’m done.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 17 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

Share this knowledge with your friends…

How do you feel about this article…

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

For Clarence Wijewardena, who never left

November 10, 2016 by admin

clarence wijewardena, Sinhala Pop, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

He was a vocalist and a composer. He sang and he scored. He also wrote. His melodies survive reassessments when it comes to applauding him. The man, not surprisingly therefore, wielded different sensibilities and abilities. And in the end, music lovers in this country understood, despite the few who called him out for all the wrong, slanderous reasons, that what he gave went beyond just being revolutionary. His songs became landmarks, true. But none of them were ever uprooted from the land of his birth.

How can one assess him, though? Epitaphs for the dead are written by those who knew them intimately, after all. Consequently, the best answer to that I can give is that his contribution to our music industry made him known to both the young and the old, both those who were born during his time and those who came to be after he’d long gone by. His work, in other words, were beloved by all and detested by a few, and consequently, he is as alive to us as he was in his day.

I remember Annesley Malawana, in a television interview, referring to himself as a “jack of all trades and master of none.” He was being modest there. The truth is, those who entered the music industry in his day were, in more ways than one, masters in nearly every discipline. They knew how to write, how to score, and how to voice both. Annesley was a master in that sense. The same can be said of this week’s star, who worked with him: Clarence Wijewardena.

Clarence didn’t stop at the radio cut. He went for melodies and compositions that didn’t only draw attention to their words, but made us aware of the rich, vibrant work and research that had gone into them. They were simple (and thankfully so), but that didn’t stop us from noticing how effortlessly they’d been conceived.

No wonder that those songs stayed with us long after we’d first listened to them. In terms of orchestration and melody, they were as simple as they could have been. Clarence, one can hence conjecture, wasn’t satisfied with turning his work into academic treatises. He wanted a crowd and he desired an audience. That audience hasn’t died down. Not even today and not by a long shot.

He was born in 1943 in Haputale. His family later moved to Ratnapura. His father was an estate medical practitioner: perhaps allured by the field he was in, he would doubtless have encouraged his son to pursue a career in the estate industry. The lure of music however would have been too strong to resist, and while in his 20s he gave it up and began carving himself as a composer.

Clarence wasn’t alone in his quest. He formed his first band in 1965, getting together with Annesley (who became the lead singer) and Sunil Malawana (who took up the bass guitar). Sri Sangabo Corea, their manager, baptised them as “The Moonstones.”

In later years Corea would say this of the band: “it was just two people coming together with a common objective.” That objective wasn’t just to break into the local music industry (that could have been achieved without much difficulty, given that the sky was the proverbial limit for newcomers back then) but to create a precedent. A precedent which could only have been created, not (only) by a singer but by a bold composer. That composer had to be Clarence.

And so it was.

This was in the early sixties. By 1970 The Moonstones was over: with its fusion-oriented approach to music (Clarence emulated the Beatles by taking a sitar for a band that predominantly worked on Western chords and orchestration), it had instilled enough popularity in its members for them to strike out on their own. Fittingly, that same year Clarence held a concert titled “Breakaway From Moonstones” in Moratuwa, after which he became his own man for some time. That didn’t mean it was a complete breakaway, of course: the team got together again, took in some newcomers, and found an able and proficient manager in Sri Lanka’s record label pioneer, Gerald Wickremasooriya. They renamed their band: Golden Chimes.

The man wasn’t destined to be a standalone composer forever, though. The seventies was clearly a prodigious period for the cinema and in particular parallel cinema: which made use of both avant-garde and commercial aspects to the medium, and which managed to churned out directors who would achieve the impossible: wed the box-office with the critic. The foremost exponent of parallel cinema here, therefore, wasn’t long in coming.

That foremost exponent had a name: H. D. Premaratne.

I believe Premaratne was the ideal director for Clarence. And not for nothing. While the cinema had changed, certain critical mentalities hadn’t. For those who wrote from ivory towers and couldn’t see anything below, the likes of Premaratne and Clarence were nothing more than quirks, to be cleaned away. They were no more than populists who pandered to the common denominator, who (apparently) couldn’t contribute works of art that could withstand time. Clarence especially felt the brunt of this misconceived attitude: he could have found an able director even before Premaratne, but (based what I have been told) those directors were discouraged by the ivory tower Brahmins to not take someone of his calibre. The reason? Because he was “ruining our music.”

“Ruining” is a strong word. So strong that it compels justification. The truth of the matter was that Clarence experimented. He gave his most dazzling work in the sixties and seventies. Listen to them today – “Malata Bambareku Se” (which won praise from no less a figure than Amaradeva), “Wana Dewu Liya” (the first Brazilian-styled “bassa nova” song composed here), “Mage Palpatha”, and “Renin Piyabanna Akasaye” – and you will understand why they are loved even today: with their enviable fusion of West and East, and their almost iconoclastic, bold chords, they were meant to be grasped at once. In other words, the main reason why they became popular wasn’t their lyrics, but their orchestration.

That was why, tragically enough, he was accused (by commission or omission) of ruining and contorting our music. A ridiculous complaint, because he brought the West to our country without forsaking his roots. He went for (among others) the bera padaya and proved that with effort and research, you could redefine tradition to suit what was contemporary. There’s a polite term for that: fusion. But that hardly captures the versatility behind what Clarence did.

Which is why he needed to enter the film industry. H. D. Premaratne may have seen the kind of rebel he wanted in the man. And so, for his debut Sikuruliya, Clarence was taken. I believe Sikuruliya became more popular, and hence acclaim-worthy, because of its score: filled as it is by melodies that interweave the popular and the traditional (“Wasanthaye Mal Kekulai”, to give one example, wasn’t the conventional village damsel song resorted to by filmmakers before, but had a refreshing, pop quality to it), it ensured box-office dividends for Premaratne.

And when those dividends came, Clarence was again taken in, for his next film Apeksha. He became bolder and simpler there: “Okanda Wela” is a pure club song, free of frill and composed for probably the only person who could sing it well, Angeline Goonethilake. They say Premaratne had the magic touch: he never lost money in whatever film he directed. Well, I suppose composers are as magical in that sense as directors, which probably explains that other musician who scored it well with the cinema around the same time, Premasiri Khemadasa. Premaratne coincidentally would move on to Khemadasa with Parithyagaya and Deveni Gamana.

Clarence continued to score our films and sing in them. Khemadasa used his voice for K. A. W. Perera’s Janaka saha Manju, while Amaradeva (in an act which proved that, despite what some “bamunu critics” said, the young and the old could cooperate) agreed to sing his “Sasara Gewa.”

Spurred on by his experiments, and given that our country was entering a more open, free economy, several companies and public corporations used him for all those catchy melodies that adorned their brands: Bata, Edna, Keells, and the National Development Lotteries Board. In the meantime, he dissembled Super Golden Chimes (in 1979) and got together with new faces (including Rookantha Goonetilake and Raju Bandara) to form a new band, “Madhara” (in 1985).

Clarence met his end in 1996, at the age of 53. That was 20 years ago. He would have been 73 today. Had he lived.

What if he had? He would have gone on composing, writing, and singing. He would have, I’d like to think, guided the “New Wave” that swept our music industry in the early 2000s and ensured that it didn’t get uprooted. He wouldn’t have been able to stop the commercialisation of our medium but he would have articulated strong views against it. He would have been the best authority to criticise that spate of commercialisation, for he himself had tread cautiously on the thin line between business and art and knew, being the shrewd artiste he always was, how to keep his footing.

My friend Muzar Lye spoke of him the other day: “He didn’t ruin our music. When you listen to some of his songs, you feel that his music was more ‘national’ than that of his contemporaries, even though he brought in the electric guitar and Western orchestration. And while his career as a composer outpaced his career as a vocalist, he had a voice capable of opening up to almost every genre, from classical to baila. Not many singers can claim that ability.”

My friend isn’t alone with what he said. Others continue to make similar assessments and draw conclusions about this remarkable musician. Had he lived, he would have moved on. We don’t know.

What we know, of course, is what he gave us. That survives death. And remains with us. For now, and forever.

UDAKDEV1@GMAIL.COM
Uditha Devapriya

clarence-wijewardena