[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":149},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-d-d-gunasena":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":125,"description":126,"died":127,"era":128,"extension":129,"heroImage":130,"imageCredit":131,"imageLicense":132,"imageSource":133,"meta":134,"navigation":135,"notable":136,"path":137,"roles":138,"seo":142,"sources":143,"stem":147,"translated":135,"url":146,"__hash__":148},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fd-d-gunasena.md","D. D. Gunasena",374,1947,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":117},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,29,33,36,44,60,64,67,70,93,97,100,103,110],[12,13,14],"p",{},"There were instruments all over the house in Kolonnawa — a harmonium, tabla, a dolki, a mandolin, a sitar — and the youngest boy was not allowed to touch any of them. His father, D. D. Wilbert, played. His older brothers played. Tower Hall artistes used the house to rehearse in before concerts, so on some evenings there were more musicians in the front room than furniture. The boy waited until the house was empty and taught himself.",[12,16,17],{},"That is the origin story of D. D. Gunasena, and after seventy years of Sinhala recorded music it remains almost the only story about him that anybody has written down.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"the-harmonium-at-rehearsals","The harmonium at rehearsals",[12,24,25],{},"He was born in 1947, went to Kolonnawa Maha Vidyalaya and then to Sri Sangaraja Maha Vidyalaya in Maradana, and — unusually for a musician of his standing — acquired almost none of his musical education at school. What he had instead was the rehearsal traffic through his own front room.",[12,27,28],{},"The way in was the harmonium. When a skilled player failed to turn up, the teenager sat in, and the singers he accompanied in those early-1960s rehearsals amount to a roll-call of the Tower Hall and gramophone generations: Mohideen Baig, Dharmadasa Walpola, Latha Walpola, Eddie Jayamanne, Sujatha Perera, H. R. Jothipala, Rupasinghe Master, Vivienne Boralessa. He took up the violin properly under L. K. J. Wickremasinghe, and later studied Western music with Douglas Ferdinando. He holds a music diploma from the Bhatkhande university in Lucknow.",[19,30,32],{"id":31},"_1971","1971",[12,34,35],{},"The year that changed things was 1971, and it changed them twice over.",[12,37,38,39,43],{},"He was taken into the SLBC orchestra as a casual violinist — the grade below a permanent seat, which is how most working session players entered the corporation — and from there into the ",[40,41,42],"em",{},"sarala gee"," audition sessions under music directors including Mohamed Sally and Shelton Premaratne. That is the door through which a violinist met everybody: M. K. Rocksamy, Somadasa Elvitigala, P. L. A. Somapala, Premasiri Khemadasa, R. A. Chandrasena.",[12,45,46,47,51,52,55,56,59],{},"The same year Khemadasa asked him to sing. The song was ",[48,49,50],"strong",{},"සොඳුර මට සමුදෙන්න"," ",[40,53,54],{},"Sondura Mata Samudenna",", \"beloved, give me leave to go,\" with lyrics by Saman Chandranath Weerasinghe, recorded for Khemadasa's ",[40,57,58],{},"Prabuddha Gee",". It has been recorded since by other singers and it is still on the air. A man remembered as an instrumentalist has one of his most durable credits as a voice.",[19,61,63],{"id":62},"the-violin-you-have-heard-and-cannot-name","The violin you have heard and cannot name",[12,65,66],{},"The list of music directors who booked him is the substance of the career, and it covers essentially the whole modern period of Sinhala song: Shelton Premaratne, Mohamed Sally, P. L. A. Somapala, Lionel Algama, Sanath Nandasiri, Sarath Dassanayake, Stanley Peiris, Clarence Wijewardena, Sisira Senaratne, W. B. Makuloluwa, Victor Rathnayake, Rohana Weerasinghe. Art song, film song, guitar-band pop and folk-revival research recordings all ran through the same handful of session players, and he was one of them.",[12,68,69],{},"He was also Amaradeva's touring violinist. Concert trips took him to England, Italy, France, Norway, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Maldives, the Gulf and Australia, most of them in that role. There were television engagements in Lucknow in 1980 and in Nagpur in 1985 with Sujatha Attanayake, and a 1990 series with Amaradeva, Wijeratne Ranatunga and Rohana Weerasinghe.",[12,71,72,73,76,77,80,81,84,85,88,89,92],{},"Under his own name he mounted a Hindi-song concert, ",[40,74,75],{},"Suhani Raat",", in 1999, and a solo violin recital called ",[40,78,79],{},"Nirmani"," in 2000, which played the Tower Hall, the John de Silva theatre and the Ananda College hall in Colombo and was afterwards staged in Sydney and Melbourne. In the 2000s he moved into music direction, scoring the films ",[40,82,83],{},"Roo Re"," and ",[40,86,87],{},"Akunu Pahara"," and writing for television drama; a song of his for the teledrama ",[40,90,91],{},"Arungal"," took both an OCIC award and a Sumathi award in 2009, and a State award for services to music followed in 2010.",[19,94,96],{"id":95},"what-is-not-documented","What is not documented",[12,98,99],{},"Almost everything else.",[12,101,102],{},"D. D. Gunasena has no Wikipedia article in English or in Sinhala. There is no discography, no interview archive, no filmography with his name in the credits — session players are not credited on Sinhala record sleeves, which is exactly the problem. The Sri Lankan lyric databases carry precisely one song under his name: the Khemadasa recording of 1971.",[12,104,105,106,109],{},"What this article is built from is a single newspaper profile published in the ",[40,107,108],{},"Sunday Times"," in 2020, written by a contributor in Brisbane. It is warm, admiring and loosely edited; it dates his entry into the SLBC orchestra to 1971 and his first rehearsal-room work to the early 1960s, and it prints several musicians' names in forms that do not match their usual spellings. Nothing in it is contradicted by any other source, because there is no other source.",[12,111,112,113,116],{},"That is worth stating rather than papering over. If you have listened to Sinhala song from the 1970s onward, you have heard this violin repeatedly. Whether you have heard it on any ",[40,114,115],{},"particular"," record cannot presently be established from anything on paper.",{"title":118,"searchDepth":119,"depth":119,"links":120},"",2,[121,122,123,124],{"id":21,"depth":119,"text":22},{"id":31,"depth":119,"text":32},{"id":62,"depth":119,"text":63},{"id":95,"depth":119,"text":96},"1947","The session violinist heard on decades of Sinhala recordings and on Amaradeva's overseas tours, who learned the instrument in secret at home because he was not allowed to touch it.",null,"1960s-2010s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fd-d-gunasena.webp","aswanna.blogspot.com","Unverified — fallback source","http:\u002F\u002Faswanna.blogspot.com\u002F2012\u002F06\u002Fblog-post_12.html",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fd-d-gunasena",[139,140,141],"Musician","Singer","Music Director",{"title":5,"description":126},[144],{"title":145,"url":146},"Sunil Thenabadu, 'DD Gunasena: much sought-after violin exponent' — Sunday Times, 2 August 2020","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F200802\u002Fmagazine\u002Fdd-gunasena-much-sought-after-violin-exponent-410923.html","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fd-d-gunasena","ayjHwy5sHAeIxv9rsjuWmOhY-v0Ilyz-q9mG_J998IQ",1787999331437]