[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":205},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-devar-surya-sena":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":161,"description":162,"died":163,"era":164,"extension":165,"heroImage":166,"imageCredit":167,"imageLicense":168,"imageSource":169,"meta":170,"navigation":171,"notable":171,"path":172,"roles":173,"seo":178,"sources":179,"stem":203,"translated":171,"url":182,"__hash__":204},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fdevar-surya-sena.md","Devar Surya Sena",null,1899,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":152},"minimark",[11,20,23,28,31,34,37,41,48,51,58,62,96,99,106,110,120,123,127,142,149],[12,13,14,15,19],"p",{},"At eight o'clock on the evening of 8 December 1950, a Ceylonese barrister and his wife walked onto the stage of the Coolidge Auditorium inside the Library of Congress in Washington and sang village songs from an island most of the audience could not have placed on a map. The programme, printed for the occasion, divided the evening into four parts: Sinhalese descriptive songs, Sinhalese folk and traditional songs, parallel folk songs, and folk songs of India and Pakistan. The accompaniment was harp, rebec, piano, ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"rabana"," and hand cymbals — an orchestra that existed nowhere on earth except on that stage. Two reels of tape, an invitation, a guest list, a recording log and the autographed programmes went into the Library's Archive of Folk Song, where they remain.",[12,21,22],{},"The singer was Devar Surya Sena. He had been born Herbert Charles Jacob Pieris, and almost everything about his life was an argument with that name.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"the-son-of-sir-james","The son of Sir James",[12,29,30],{},"He was born on 29 March 1899, the son of Sir James Peiris — legislator and the first Ceylonese to preside over the Ceylon Legislative Council. The family was wealthy, Christian, and thoroughly anglicised in its naming, its schooling and its ambitions, even as Sir James worked for greater self-government. Accounts of how the boy reached England differ. One says the whole family sailed there in 1908; another says he was sent to boarding school in England from the age of twelve. Either way he was educated far from home — preparatory school at St Paul's, Hammersmith, then Tonbridge School in Kent, then Cambridge, where he took an MA between 1919 and 1923. Music followed him through all of it. He sang in the Tonbridge school choir and orchestra, won a choral scholarship, sang in the choir of St John's, and took the ARCM in solo singing from the Royal College of Music in London. He was, by one account, the first Asian to win Cambridge's Winchester Reading Prize.",[12,32,33],{},"He also read for the Bar. On 25 September 1923 he married Winifred de Silva, eldest daughter of the Galle physician Dr Charles de Silva, in London; it was said to be the first Ceylonese society wedding held in England. He returned to Ceylon in 1924 and was sworn in as an Advocate of the Supreme Court.",[12,35,36],{},"In 1927 he stopped. He had decided that a career measured in fees was not the life he wanted, and he gave up the Bar for music. Then he changed his name to Devar Surya Sena, and Winifred changed hers to Nelun Devi. He began wearing Indian dress. A contemporary put it bluntly: he was de-Westernising himself, deliberately and in public, the way a man might change his handwriting.",[24,38,40],{"id":39},"walking-into-the-villages","Walking into the villages",[12,42,43,44,47],{},"What he did next has no real precedent in Ceylon. He and Nelun Devi began travelling the island looking for people who still sang the old songs, and writing down what they heard: harvesting and reaping songs, carters' and fishermen's songs, the ",[16,45,46],{},"vannam"," — sung poetry built on the movements of elephant, lion, hawk, cobra, monkey and hare — lullabies, love songs, and the songs children sang at play.",[12,49,50],{},"He then took these into rooms where they had never been heard. In 1928, by his own account, he gave a Colombo recital whose first half was European operatic repertoire and whose second half was the music of Ceylon — the \"first time in history\", he wrote, that Ceylonese music had been performed in such a setting. (The Daily FT's account instead dates his first such concert to the Royal College hall in 1929.) The elite audience, Sinhalese and European alike, had genuinely not heard this music before. That was the point.",[12,52,53,54,57],{},"The same year he sang before the Duchess of York in London: English songs, a Sinhala ",[16,55,56],{},"nadagam"," song, and a Nepalese folk song, \"Rani banai ma\". Between 1930 and 1932 he studied in India — Lucknow's college of Hindustani music, the Sanghit Sangha in Calcutta, nine months at Tagore's Santiniketan, then fifteen months collecting Indian folk song. He transcribed a set of Tagore's Bengali songs into Western notation, Bengali words in phonetic script and English translations facing, and considered it among the best things he ever made.",[24,59,61],{"id":60},"ceylon-on-five-lines","Ceylon, on five lines",[12,63,64,65,68,69,72,73,77,78,81,82,77,85,88,89,77,92,95],{},"The recordings are the part that survives. Sinhalese children's songs were issued on His Master's Voice in the 1930s, and in 1946 HMV invited him to their studio at Hayes in Middlesex to record Sinhala folk song properly. The sides from that period include the boatman's song ",[16,66,67],{},"Malay Malay Oya Namala",", the lullaby ",[16,70,71],{},"Doyi Doyi Doyi",", more children's songs, and a coupling of the ",[74,75,76],"strong",{},"ගජගා වන්නම"," ",[16,79,80],{},"Gajaga Vannama"," (elephant) and ",[74,83,84],{},"උකුසා වන්නම",[16,86,87],{},"Ukusa Vannama"," (hawk). A handful of them, along with ",[74,90,91],{},"බමර කෝකිල නාද සපිරි",[16,93,94],{},"Bambara kokila nada sapiri"," and the Ambanwila Nilame's lullaby, can be heard on the Internet Archive today.",[12,97,98],{},"In 1949 the Indian musicologist S. N. Ratanjankar, brought in to grade Ceylon's musicians for the radio, placed him in the top rank: Garrett Field's history of Sinhala song records that Ratanjankar awarded an A grade that year to five musicians — Lionel Edirisinghe, Ananda Samarakoon, Deva Surya Sena, Sunil Santha and S. Amarasinghe. Sources disagree about his OBE: the profile that circulated after his death gives 1949, while a 2024 Daily FT article says he was decorated in 1953 by Queen Elizabeth II. The honour is certain; the year is not.",[12,100,101,102,105],{},"The choices behind those records are the whole argument of his life. He was competent on Ceylonese instruments, but he also recorded folk melodies over piano and violin, and wrote them onto a Western five-line stave that has no way to notate the bends, slides and untempered intervals a village singer would take for granted. A record collector writing about ",[16,103,104],{},"Malay Malay Oya"," two generations later put the problem fairly: blurring the line between Ceylonese and Western music was plainly a tactic for engaging European listeners, and \"authenticity\" is itself a fashion. Something was flattened in the transcription. Something else — a large body of song that nobody else was writing down — was saved by it.",[24,107,109],{"id":108},"sinhala-words-in-a-christian-service","Sinhala words in a Christian service",[12,111,112,113,115,116,119],{},"He was a Christian, and he turned the same instinct on his own church. With his cousin Lakdasa de Mel, then a priest at Christ Church, Baddegama, and later Bishop and Metropolitan, he set the Anglican liturgy to Sinhala folk tunes. His Communion Service was first performed in 1932; the majestic ",[16,114,80],{}," theme carried the Sanctus, and ",[16,117,118],{},"sivpada"," tunes carried the Agnus Dei. The full Sinhala liturgy was completed in 1959, the year he served as music editor of a Sinhala hymnal of 168 hymns covering the whole Christian year, with the melodies notated. Both men were Oxbridge-educated and both were nationalists, and the project had a plain aim: to persuade the island's westward-facing Christians to value a culture they had inherited and mostly ignored.",[12,121,122],{},"One hymn came from further back. W. S. Senior, who had coached him in Greek and Latin before Cambridge, handed him a poem — \"O Father, thou hast promised the isles shall wait for thee\" — and told him that one day he would write a tune for it. He did. The Communion Service is still sung: in November 2015 a congregation at St Andrew's Scots Kirk, Kollupitiya, heard it performed in Sinhala, Tamil and English in a single service.",[24,124,126],{"id":125},"gitanjali","Gitanjali",[12,128,129,130,133,134,137,138,141],{},"In 1966 he was appointed vice-chairman of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation, the institution that by then decided which Sri Lankan musicians the country got to hear. He kept writing: ",[16,131,132],{},"Songs of Ceylon",", issued from 1956 and consisting mostly of unaccompanied melodies with Sinhala words and transliteration; ",[16,135,136],{},"Lanka Gitavaliya"," in 1966; and in 1978 an autobiography with a title that says everything, ",[16,139,140],{},"Of Sri Lanka I Sing",", whose last chapter is given to Nelun Devi, dead of cancer a few years earlier.",[12,143,144,145,148],{},"He died on 11 November 1981 at his home, Gitanjali, in Alwis Place, Colombo 3. In accordance with his wishes the house and its contents went to a trust for education, music and the fine arts, and became the Devar Surya Sena Arts Centre. In 2008 the trust published ",[16,146,147],{},"Music of Sri Lanka",", a compilation of his writing with a short CD attached — an account of the work he and Nelun Devi had begun in 1928.",[12,150,151],{},"He has no Wikipedia article in English or Sinhala, which is its own kind of comment. What he left is a shelf of notation and a box of tape in Washington: an island's songs written down in a foreign alphabet by a man who had to give himself a new name before he could hear them.",{"title":153,"searchDepth":154,"depth":154,"links":155},"",2,[156,157,158,159,160],{"id":26,"depth":154,"text":27},{"id":39,"depth":154,"text":40},{"id":60,"depth":154,"text":61},{"id":108,"depth":154,"text":109},{"id":125,"depth":154,"text":126},"29 March 1899","Born Herbert Charles Jacob Pieris and trained as a Cambridge barrister, he gave up the Bar to walk into Sri Lankan villages, collect folk songs and vannam, and write them down in Western staff notation.","11 November 1981","1920s-1970s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fdevar-surya-sena.webp","Ape Kattiya (apekattiya.wordpress.com)","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fapekattiya.wordpress.com\u002F1977\u002F09\u002F29\u002Fdevar-surya-sena\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fdevar-surya-sena",[174,175,176,177],"Singer","Researcher","Composer","Broadcaster",{"title":5,"description":162},[180,183,186,189,191,194,197,200],{"title":181,"url":182},"Remembering Devar Surya Sena — Kamani Samarasinghe, Daily FT","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ft.lk\u002Fharmony_page\u002FRemembering-Devar-Surya-Sena\u002F10523-760360",{"title":184,"url":185},"Devar Surya Sena collection of folk music from Ceylon (AFC 1951\u002F014) — Library of Congress","https:\u002F\u002Flccn.loc.gov\u002F2011655388",{"title":187,"url":188},"Devar Suryasena — recordings, Internet Archive","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002FDevarSuryasena",{"title":190,"url":169},"Devar Surya Sena — Ape Kattiya (reprinting Nalini Jayasuriya's profile)",{"title":192,"url":193},"Devar Surya Sena's Communion Service at Scots Kirk — The Sunday Times, 8 November 2015","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F151108\u002Fsunday-times-2\u002Fdevar-surya-senas-communion-service-at-scots-kirk-170829.html",{"title":195,"url":196},"Of Sri Lanka I Sing: the life and times of Devar Surya Sena (1978) — Library of Congress catalogue","https:\u002F\u002Flccn.loc.gov\u002F78907863",{"title":198,"url":199},"වන්නම් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B7%80%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B1%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%8A",{"title":201,"url":202},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fdevar-surya-sena","jmAYbKALHAwRBSVbRx7WxA1_krcPc1ri6V3bZfF_nNs",1787999331575]