[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":271},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-r-a-chandrasena":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":241,"description":242,"died":243,"era":244,"extension":245,"heroImage":246,"imageCredit":247,"imageLicense":248,"imageSource":249,"meta":250,"navigation":251,"notable":252,"path":253,"roles":254,"seo":259,"sources":260,"stem":269,"translated":251,"url":263,"__hash__":270},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fr-a-chandrasena.md","R. A. Chandrasena",722,1924,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":232},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,43,46,49,53,68,71,75,82,85,115,118,122,173,211,222,226,229],[12,13,14],"p",{},"Sometime in the late 1930s a boy from Kandy was let into the Radio Ceylon studios and handed an instrument. Then another. Then another. The harmonium, the piano accordion, the piano, the organ; the tabla, the mandolin, the violin. Whatever was put in front of him, he played. He was twelve years old.",[12,16,17],{},"That boy was Ranasinghe Arachchige Chandrasena Perera, and the versatility that got him through the studio door in the first place turned out to be the least interesting thing about him. What he did with the next four decades was rarer. He built a school. And the students who came out of that school — Dharmadasa Walpola, Premasiri Khemadasa, Victor Ratnayake — are today far better known than the man who taught them.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"kandy-kotahena-kelaniya","Kandy, Kotahena, Kelaniya",[12,24,25],{},"He was born on 27 August 1924 in Kandy, the third of eleven children of Ranasinghe Arachchige Jeiris Perera and Selesthina Dias Abeysinghe, a Sinhala Buddhist family whose roots in the hill capital went back generations. His father was not a professional musician, but by every account a very good one, and the house was full of music before the boy could read.",[12,27,28,29,33,34,38,39,42],{},"He was schooled at Sri Rahula College in Kandy, then Prince College in Kotahena, then Sri Dharmaloka College in Kelaniya — a Colombo education for a Kandyan boy, which in the 1930s meant a family taking his talent seriously. At school he came under the eye of unusually good teachers. D. B. Dhanapala, later editor-in-chief of ",[30,31,32],"em",{},"Davasa",", was his principal at Sri Dharmaloka; C. M. Weeraratne, later vice-principal of Ananda College, taught him there. And somewhere in this stretch he was mentored by ",[35,36,37],"strong",{},"Ananda Samarakoon",", composer of the national anthem. Accounts differ on where: his English Wikipedia entry places the Samarakoon connection at Prince College in Kotahena, while the tribute site maintained by his family puts it at Sri Dharmaloka in Kelaniya. Either way, the boy who would go on to teach Khemadasa had himself been taught by the man who wrote ",[30,40,41],{},"Namo Namo Matha",".",[12,44,45],{},"At Radio Ceylon he was taken up by U. A. S. Perera — \"Siri Ayya\" to two generations of children who listened to his programmes — and it was in that children's-hour world, the same nursery that produced so many of the period's musicians, that he learned how a studio works.",[12,47,48],{},"In 1943, at an audition at Radio Ceylon, he met a young singer named Mohoppu Arachchige Shriyaawathie Perera. They married on 26 July 1946. As Sriyani Chandrasena she sang for a while and then stopped, and for the rest of his life she ran the practical side of everything he built. They had three children: Thilangani, Lalith and Darshani.",[19,50,52],{"id":51},"dasabaladhari","Dasabaladhari",[12,54,55,56,59,60,63,64,67],{},"His own voice reached the public in March 1948, with ",[35,57,58],{},"දසබලධාරී බුදුරජු පෙර කල"," ",[30,61,62],{},"Dasabaladhari Budu Raju Pera Kala"," — \"the Buddha of the ten powers, in a former age\". It was the theme song of ",[30,65,66],{},"Sanda Kinduri",", a stage play produced by the dancer Vasantha Kumara, and it took its story from the Chanda Kinnara Jataka, one of the Buddha's previous lives. The words were by S. L. Kakulawela, later Sri Lanka's first professor of linguistics and a vice-chancellor of the University of Kelaniya. The melody was Chandrasena's own — by his family's account, the first he ever wrote.",[12,69,70],{},"It is still sung. In 2013 his grandson Harshadewa Ariyasinghe recorded it again, which is one way of measuring how long a devotional melody can last in this country.",[19,72,74],{"id":73},"the-sangeethaayathanaya","The Sangeethaayathanaya",[12,76,77,78,81],{},"In December 1951 he opened the ",[35,79,80],{},"Chandrasena Sangeethaayathanaya",", the Chandrasena Institute of Music. This is the thing he should be remembered for.",[12,83,84],{},"The institute was not a conservatory in the European sense and not a gurukula in the Indian one. It was a working musician's classroom, run by a man who could demonstrate on any instrument in the room, and it caught students at exactly the moment when a talented Sinhala teenager had almost nowhere formal to go. Three names from its rolls have become part of the national furniture:",[86,87,88,95,105],"ul",{},[89,90,91,94],"li",{},[35,92,93],{},"Dharmadasa Walpola",", the playback voice of the first two decades of Sinhala cinema, dated to 1949;",[89,96,97,100,101,104],{},[35,98,99],{},"Guruge Khemadasa Perera",", who became ",[35,102,103],{},"Premasiri Khemadasa",", the composer who dragged Sinhala music towards the symphony orchestra, dated to 1953;",[89,106,107,110,111,114],{},[35,108,109],{},"Victor Ratnayake",", whose one-man concert ",[30,112,113],{},"Sa"," changed what a Sinhala singer could do on a stage, dated to 1962.",[12,116,117],{},"Those enrolment years come from his Wikipedia entry and are repeated on the family site, and one of them does not quite fit: 1949 is two years before the institute is said to have opened, which probably means Walpola was studying with Chandrasena privately before there was a building with a name on it. It is worth flagging rather than smoothing over.",[19,119,121],{"id":120},"films-and-a-label-of-his-own","Films, and a label of his own",[12,123,124,125,128,129,59,132,135,136,59,139,142,143,146,147,150,151,59,154,157,158,161,162,165,166,59,169,172],{},"Between 1954 and 1972 he was music director on a handful of films, most of them for the Jayamanne company — the Minerva stable whose stage comedies had produced the first Sinhala talkie. For ",[30,126,127],{},"Ayiranganee"," (1954), recorded at a Madras studio, he wrote ",[35,130,131],{},"තරු පායන ආකාසේ",[30,133,134],{},"Tharu Payana Akase"," (\"in the star-filled sky\") for Rukmani Devi and Mohideen Baig, and ",[35,137,138],{},"දුප්පතාගේ සෑම",[30,140,141],{},"Duppathage Sema"," for Rukmani Devi alone. ",[30,144,145],{},"Mathabedaya"," followed in 1955, ",[30,148,149],{},"Daiva Vipakaya"," in 1956 with ",[35,152,153],{},"නීල අහසේ",[30,155,156],{},"Neela Ahase"," (\"in the blue sky\") for Shirley Blythe, and ",[30,159,160],{},"Vanaliya"," in 1958. For ",[30,163,164],{},"Vedi Bima",", with lyrics by Ananda Samarakoon, Dharmadasa Walpola sang ",[35,167,168],{},"හේ රාමා",[30,170,171],{},"He Rama"," — the pupil singing for the teacher, to words by the teacher's teacher. Sources date that film to 1958 or 1961 depending on where you look.",[12,174,175,176,179,180,59,183,186,187,59,190,193,194,197,198,59,201,204,205,59,208,42],{},"The later films brought him back to the Walpolas. In ",[30,177,178],{},"Kolamba Hadayo"," (1966) Dharmadasa sang ",[35,181,182],{},"ජීවිතේ ජීවිතේ",[30,184,185],{},"Jeewithe Jeewithe"," and Latha Walpola ",[35,188,189],{},"ආලෝකේ දීලා",[30,191,192],{},"Aloke Deela","; in ",[30,195,196],{},"Miringuwa"," (1972) Latha sang ",[35,199,200],{},"දෙසඳුන් සුවඳ මැකී යයි",[30,202,203],{},"Desandun Suwanda Maki Yayi"," (\"the sandalwood scent fades away\") and G. S. B. Rani Perera ",[35,206,207],{},"ලස්සන මලකට",[30,209,210],{},"Lassana Malakata",[12,212,213,214,217,218,221],{},"Then, in 1969, he did something almost no Sinhala musician of his generation did: he started his own record company. The ",[35,215,216],{},"RAC"," and ",[35,219,220],{},"Shrimath"," labels issued 45 rpm EPs into the Sinhala song market, every track composed and directed by Chandrasena himself, using whichever singers and lyricists he wanted. In an industry where a handful of importers and one broadcaster decided what got recorded, that was a small declaration of independence.",[19,223,225],{"id":224},"the-teachers-arithmetic","The teacher's arithmetic",[12,227,228],{},"He died in the early hours of 1 March 1980, after a short heart illness, aged fifty-five. Sriyani kept the Sangeethaayathanaya going and trained their youngest daughter, Darshani, who took a music degree at the University of Kelaniya and became a teacher in her turn. Sriyani died on 4 August 2009. In 2001 the Presidential Awards gave Chandrasena a Pioneering Award, twenty-one years after his death.",[12,230,231],{},"There is a particular unfairness in the way music history is written. The singer is remembered, the composer is sometimes remembered, and the person who taught them both is a line in somebody else's biography. Chandrasena's own catalogue is modest — seven films, a devotional song everyone knows, a shelf of EPs on a label nobody now stocks. His actual output was three careers that were not his: Walpola's, Khemadasa's, Ratnayake's, and beyond them the many hundreds of students who never became famous and went on to teach music in schools. That is the arithmetic of a teacher, and it never shows up in a discography.",{"title":233,"searchDepth":234,"depth":234,"links":235},"",2,[236,237,238,239,240],{"id":21,"depth":234,"text":22},{"id":51,"depth":234,"text":52},{"id":73,"depth":234,"text":74},{"id":120,"depth":234,"text":121},{"id":224,"depth":234,"text":225},"27 August 1924","A twelve-year-old who talked his way into Radio Ceylon and could play anything put in front of him, then spent thirty years teaching the musicians everyone else remembers.","1 March 1980","1930s-1970s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fr-a-chandrasena.webp","films.lk (Sinhala Cinema Database)","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.films.lk\u002Fsinhala-cinema-artist-r-a-chandrasena-4745.html",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fr-a-chandrasena",[255,256,257,258],"Musician","Composer","Music Director","Producer",{"title":5,"description":242},[261,264,267],{"title":262,"url":263},"R. A. Chandrasena — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FR._A._Chandrasena",{"title":265,"url":266},"R. A. Chandrasena — biography and timeline, chandrasenamusic.com (family tribute site)","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.chandrasenamusic.com\u002Fbiography",{"title":268,"url":249},"R.A. Chandrasena — films.lk artist profile","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fr-a-chandrasena","uq9p3LgPQkyCLJGISpK-15tyqZE5YgZaUspp99tmYoI",1787999333188]