[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":219},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-c-de-s-kulatilake":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":184,"description":185,"died":186,"era":187,"extension":188,"heroImage":189,"imageCredit":190,"imageLicense":191,"imageSource":192,"meta":193,"navigation":194,"notable":195,"path":196,"roles":197,"seo":201,"sources":202,"stem":217,"translated":194,"url":192,"__hash__":218},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fc-de-s-kulatilake.md","C. de S. Kulatilake",820,1926,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":175},"minimark",[11,20,23,28,31,34,37,41,44,83,86,98,102,121,140,143,147,158,165,169,172],[12,13,14,15,19],"p",{},"Once a week, a music teacher came to Dharmashoka College in Ambalangoda to take the school choir through the popular songs of the day. His name was Ananda Samarakoon. Among the boys learning from him was one who would later realise what had happened in that room: Samarakoon taught them ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Namo Namo Matha",", the song he had written himself, at a time when the state had not adopted it and nobody yet called it the national anthem. The boy learned Sri Lanka's anthem directly from its composer, before it was anyone's anthem.",[12,21,22],{},"That boy was Cyril de Silva Kulatilake, and he spent the rest of his life doing a version of the same thing at scale — getting to the source of a piece of music before the source disappeared.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"ambalangoda","Ambalangoda",[12,29,30],{},"He was born on 14 December 1926 at Polwatte, Ambalangoda, one of four children of a building contractor named P. H. Sarolis de Silva. Dharmashoka College brought out an early talent for the arts, and his first career was the obvious one for a young man of his generation with that gift: he became a government schoolteacher, teaching music and art.",[12,32,33],{},"Then he went to Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's university in Bengal — the same institution that shaped a whole line of Sri Lankan musicians. He came home to a lectureship at a teachers' college, and would have been remembered as a good teacher and nothing more, had a job at the national broadcaster not opened up.",[12,35,36],{},"His name is spelled several ways in print — Kulatilake, Kulatillake, Kulatilleke, Kulathilaka — sometimes differently in two paragraphs of the same article. It is one of the small reasons a genuinely important figure is hard to find in an English-language index.",[24,38,40],{"id":39},"the-research-unit","The research unit",[12,42,43],{},"Sri Lanka spent the two decades after independence arguing about what a national music should sound like. Committees met, syllabuses were rewritten, and W. B. Makuloluwa travelled the island writing down folk verses. What the argument lacked was evidence — recordings of what villagers actually sang, gathered in a systematic way rather than as anecdote.",[12,45,46,47,50,51,54,55,54,58,61,62,65,66,69,70,69,73,69,76,69,79,82],{},"The Department of Cultural Affairs backed Kulatilake to go and get it. He travelled from village to village recording folk songs and the music of ritual, studying the lives the songs came out of; Makuloluwa and the folk singer Rohana Beddage worked alongside him. He was drawn especially to ",[16,48,49],{},"shanthikarma",", the healing rituals — ",[16,52,53],{},"thovil",", ",[16,56,57],{},"bali",[16,59,60],{},"yaga",", and the great Kandyan ",[16,63,64],{},"kohomba kankariya"," — because the drumming there had survived intact in a way that concert music had not. What he heard convinced him that Sinhala song could be built from village melody and village instruments: the ",[16,67,68],{},"bera",", the ",[16,71,72],{},"rabana",[16,74,75],{},"dawula",[16,77,78],{},"thammattama",[16,80,81],{},"udakki",".",[12,84,85],{},"In 1972 he was appointed head of the music research unit of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, and the collecting became institutional. The SLBC now had a department whose job was to record and archive traditional music rather than merely broadcast it, and Kulatilake ran it. He was later a director of the corporation. Writing in the 1970s, the folk-music movement's own chroniclers described the unit's service as unmatched — a rare thing to say about a broadcasting department.",[12,87,88,89,93,94,97],{},"He also worked on the other side of the microphone. Sinhala song catalogues credit him with both words and music for ",[90,91,92],"strong",{},"දෑතට වළළු"," ",[16,95,96],{},"Dathata Walalu",", recorded by Neela Wickramasinghe: the researcher writing a broadcast song out of the material he had spent his life collecting.",[24,99,101],{"id":100},"putting-it-in-books","Putting it in books",[12,103,104,105,108,109,112,113,116,117,120],{},"Kulatilake's real monument is a shelf. In Sinhala he published ",[16,106,107],{},"Siṃhala Saṅgīta Paryēṣaṇa"," (1972), ",[16,110,111],{},"Dahaata Vannama"," (1982) on the eighteen vannam of Kandyan dance, and ",[16,114,115],{},"Śrī Laṅkā Itihāsayen Hamuvana Saṅgīta Bhāṇḍa"," (2000) on the musical instruments found in the island's history. His best-known work is ",[16,118,119],{},"Lankave Sangeetha Sambhavaya",", a study of the country's musical culture that won him the Presidential Award; the Sunday Observer dates that award to 1974, while Ceylon Today gives 1974 as the publication year and elsewhere in the same article says the book grew out of work done in 1965, 1967 and 1968. The accounts do not reconcile, and no bibliography settles them.",[12,122,123,124,127,128,131,132,135,136,139],{},"In English he wrote ",[16,125,126],{},"Metre, Melody and Rhythm in Sinhala Music"," (1976) and ",[16,129,130],{},"A Background to Sinhala Traditional Music of Sri Lanka"," (1976) — both published by the Sinhala Music Research Unit of Sri Lanka Broadcasting itself, which is to say he built the archive and then printed the analysis of it — and ",[16,133,134],{},"Ethnomusicology: Its Content and Growth, and Ethnomusicological Aspects of Sri Lanka"," (1991). Garrett Field's history of twentieth-century Sinhala song still cites ",[16,137,138],{},"Metre, Melody and Rhythm"," for the rhythmic structure of the vannam.",[12,141,142],{},"He was frank about why he wrote in two languages. Sinhala readers, he once said, wanted books of popular song lyrics, not books of music research; there was a real demand in Europe for Sri Lankan traditional music and for the old ola-leaf manuscripts, so he wrote for that reader instead.",[24,144,146],{"id":145},"cologne-berlin-and-the-lps","Cologne, Berlin, and the LPs",[12,148,149,150,153,154,157],{},"That decision took his work abroad. He wrote on the Samudraghosha metre and the ",[16,151,152],{},"seepada"," singing styles of Sri Lanka for the Free University of Berlin, and co-wrote a study of performer and music in the Sri Lankan ",[16,155,156],{},"kolam"," mask play with Professor Josef Kuckertz of the ethnomusicology unit at the University of Cologne. Kuckertz became his closest academic ally, and it was largely through that connection that Kulatilake acquired the full apparatus of the discipline.",[12,159,160,161,164],{},"He also produced records, which mattered more than papers for a tradition that lives in sound: LP discs of the ",[16,162,163],{},"Kohomba Kankariya"," and of a low-country ritual, and a general collection of Sri Lankan traditional music. A friend recalled him explaining, on a bus or in a corridor at the corporation, how a Kandyan drum pattern in four beats could be shifted onto a different pulse to fit the Naiyandi Vannama — the sort of observation that only comes from having heard a form played by the people who own it.",[24,166,168],{"id":167},"after","After",[12,170,171],{},"C. de S. Kulatilake died on 21 May 2005. He has no English Wikipedia article and no standard biography; the fullest accounts of his life are a newspaper tribute by a former colleague and a case study written up in 2022 by a researcher at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, which concludes that his lasting contribution was to give folk music a scientific basis and tie it to ethnomusicology as a discipline.",[12,173,174],{},"That is an accurate but bloodless way of describing what he did. A more useful way is this: a great deal of what Sri Lanka now knows about its own village singing is known because one man carried recording equipment into those villages while the singers were still alive, and then wrote down what he heard in a language other people could check.",{"title":176,"searchDepth":177,"depth":177,"links":178},"",2,[179,180,181,182,183],{"id":26,"depth":177,"text":27},{"id":39,"depth":177,"text":40},{"id":100,"depth":177,"text":101},{"id":145,"depth":177,"text":146},{"id":167,"depth":177,"text":168},"14 December 1926","Sri Lanka's first systematic ethnomusicologist, who took over the SLBC's music research unit in 1972, carried a tape recorder into the villages, and wrote down what Sinhala traditional singing actually is.","21 May 2005","1950s-1990s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fc-de-s-kulatilake.webp","Sunday Observer","Unverified — fallback source","http:\u002F\u002Farchives1.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2016\u002F12\u002F11\u002Fc-de-s-kulatilleke-pioneer-ethno-musicology-sri-lanka",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fc-de-s-kulatilake",[198,199,200],"Researcher","Broadcaster","Composer",{"title":5,"description":185},[203,205,208,211,214],{"title":204,"url":192},"C. De S. Kulatilleke: Pioneer of ethno musicology in Sri Lanka — Sunday Observer (Upali R. Gunawardena, 11 December 2016)",{"title":206,"url":207},"In search of distinctive Sri Lankan music: Cyril de Silva Kulatillake — University of the Visual and Performing Arts repository","http:\u002F\u002Frepository.lib.vpa.ac.lk\u002Fhandle\u002F123456789\u002F1845",{"title":209,"url":210},"C. de S. Kulatilake — Open Library author record","https:\u002F\u002Fopenlibrary.org\u002Fauthors\u002FOL567200A\u002FC._de_S._Kulatilake",{"title":212,"url":213},"History of our melody (Part II) — Ceylon Today, 4 March 2023","https:\u002F\u002Fceylontoday.lk\u002F2023\u002F03\u002F04\u002Fhistory-of-our-melody-part-ii\u002F",{"title":215,"url":216},"History of melody (Part III) — Ceylon Today, 11 March 2023","https:\u002F\u002Fceylontoday.lk\u002F2023\u002F03\u002F11\u002Fhistory-of-melody-part-iii\u002F","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fc-de-s-kulatilake","tmSc-8Rh1PSHvFGerJi0njumpt6u4UPUD_hWjsHR8wQ",1787999331343]