[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":195},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-sadiris-master":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":6,"body":7,"born":6,"description":165,"died":166,"era":167,"extension":168,"heroImage":6,"imageCredit":6,"imageLicense":6,"imageSource":6,"meta":169,"navigation":170,"notable":171,"path":172,"roles":173,"seo":176,"sources":177,"stem":193,"translated":170,"url":180,"__hash__":194},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fsadiris-master.md","Sadiris Master",null,{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":156},"minimark",[10,19,22,27,35,38,45,49,63,85,89,99,102,106,129,139,143,150],[11,12,13,14,18],"p",{},"On a Colombo stage in the first years of the twentieth century, an actor in a king's costume stood in front of a painted backdrop and sang — not because the play paused for a song, but because in ",[15,16,17],"em",{},"nurthi"," drama the singing was the play. The lead actor had to be a trained vocalist, night after night, in front of an audience that knew the tunes. For John de Silva's company the man who most often did that job was Sadiris Master.",[11,20,21],{},"He is the reason a whole generation of Sinhala singers knew what a Sinhala song was supposed to sound like. He is also almost invisible in the record.",[23,24,26],"h2",{"id":25},"what-is-actually-known","What is actually known",[11,28,29,30,34],{},"His full name was Jothiratnage Sadiris de Silva; he appears in Sinhala sources as ",[31,32,33],"strong",{},"සාදිරිස් මාස්ටර්"," and in scholarly footnotes as Sadiris de Silva or J. Sadiris Silva. He was born in Matara. No birth year has been published — English Wikipedia files him under \"year of birth missing\" — so how old he was when he took the Colombo stage is anybody's guess.",[11,36,37],{},"He was educated at a temple in Kalutara and studied oriental languages there, then trained in and performed both Hindustani and Karnatic music, singing and playing. He became, in the flat phrase of the one biographical dictionary that carries him, \"a popular musician\". He died on 8 April 1958.",[11,39,40,41,44],{},"That single paragraph is the whole of the documented life, and its source is one book: K. D. G. Wimalaratne's ",[15,42,43],{},"Personalities, Sri Lanka: A Biographical Study (15th–20th Century)",", published in Colombo in 1994. Everything else about him has to be read off the careers of the people he stood next to.",[23,46,48],{"id":47},"the-nurthi-stage","The nurthi stage",[11,50,51,54,55,58,59,62],{},[15,52,53],{},"Nurthi"," was the Sinhala musical theatre that grew out of the Parsi touring companies that began visiting Colombo in the 1870s: painted scenery, curtains, glittering costumes, and songs built on North Indian ",[15,56,57],{},"raga"," and ",[15,60,61],{},"tala",". John de Silva took the form over and turned it into an instrument of the Buddhist revival, and between roughly 1903 and 1916 his company was playing more or less nightly. There were no actresses; men took the women's parts, and the leading man carried the songs.",[11,64,65,66,58,69,72,73,76,77,80,81,84],{},"Sadiris took the lead in de Silva's ",[15,67,68],{},"Sirisangabo",[15,70,71],{},"Wessantara",". That places him at the centre of the most consequential songwriting in Sinhala history, because ",[15,74,75],{},"Sirisangabo Charitaya"," is the play that contains ",[31,78,79],{},"දන්නෝ බුදුන්ගේ"," ",[15,82,83],{},"Danno Budunge"," — three travellers cresting a rise and seeing Anuradhapura below them — written by de Silva to a melody by the Indian musician Visvanath Lawjee, and sung by the country ever since. No source found records who sang it on the opening night, and this article will not guess. What can be said is that Sadiris was working inside that repertoire, singing those songs to those audiences, at the moment the modern Sinhala song was being invented.",[23,86,88],{"id":87},"onto-the-record","Onto the record",[11,90,91,92,94,95,98],{},"When the gramophone companies started cutting Sinhala discs — Cargills under the His Master's Voice label, then Columbia, Millers, W. E. Bastian and others — the first thing they recorded was ",[15,93,17],{}," songs, because that was the popular music of the day. The Sinhala Wikipedia account of the gramophone era lists the small group of singers who supplied those early Sinhala recordings: Greta Janet de Silva, H. W. Rupasinghe, N. Romulus de Silva, Grace Margaret, and ",[31,96,97],{},"සාදිරිස් සිල්වා"," — Sadiris.",[11,100,101],{},"No catalogue numbers, no titles and no dates for his discs have surfaced in anything reachable online. Nor is that surprising: the hobbyist collectors who chase this period report that most of the register books naming Sri Lankan artists were destroyed by damp or simply thrown away, which is why the surviving discographies of the Indian labels matter so much. If Sadiris's records are ever properly identified, it will be from those.",[23,103,105],{"id":104},"the-pupil-and-the-standard","The pupil, and the standard",[11,107,108,109,112,113,116,117,120,121,124,125,128],{},"The clearest evidence of his importance is what he passed on. ",[31,110,111],{},"Vincent Somapala"," (1906–1989) — the son of a ",[15,114,115],{},"nadagam"," artist, a scholar of Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit, and a composer who worked through the entire transition from village theatre to radio song — learned music from J. Sadiris Silva and H. W. Rupasinghe. It was Somapala who in 1938 was handed the job of composing the melodies for Cumaratunga Munidasa's ",[15,118,119],{},"Hela Miyasiya",", the Hela Havula's attempt to build a Sinhala music free of North Indian influence, and who was among those consulted when ",[15,122,123],{},"Namo Namo Matha"," became ",[15,126,127],{},"Sri Lanka Matha",". The teacher, in other words, trained the man the purists turned to.",[11,130,131,132,58,135,138],{},"Sadiris also stands in the literature as a benchmark of a particular sound. Writing about why Sunil Santha's voice struck listeners as new, the scholar Sunil Ariyaratne contrasts him precisely with the older generation: Santha \"was uniquely different from vocalists like Sadiris de Silva, H. W. Rupasinghe, Don Manis Pattiarachchi, N. Romlas de Silva, and even Ananda Samarakoon. These musicians who trained in North India used all the ornamentations like ",[15,133,134],{},"kan svara",[15,136,137],{},"meend"," found in Hindustani classical music.\" Santha moved straight from note to note. Sadiris ornamented — and that ornamented Hindustani manner was the Sinhala singing voice until, in the late 1940s, a singer whose voice had been trained from childhood in Catholic church music decided it should not be.",[23,140,142],{"id":141},"a-loose-end","A loose end",[11,144,145,146,149],{},"The films.lk cinema database has an entry for a \"J. D. Sadiris Appuhami\", credited as an actor in B. A. W. Jayamanne's ",[15,147,148],{},"Kavata Andare"," (1960). The initials are suggestive and the type of performer is right, but Sadiris Master died in April 1958, and no source connects the two names. It is recorded here as an open question rather than a fact.",[11,151,152,153,155],{},"He was, on the evidence, the last link of a chain: a temple-educated singer from Matara who carried the ",[15,154,17],{}," songs from the stage onto shellac and then handed the method to a pupil who taught it into the radio era. Almost nobody wrote him down while he was alive. The people he trained are the record.",{"title":157,"searchDepth":158,"depth":158,"links":159},"",2,[160,161,162,163,164],{"id":25,"depth":158,"text":26},{"id":47,"depth":158,"text":48},{"id":87,"depth":158,"text":88},{"id":104,"depth":158,"text":105},{"id":141,"depth":158,"text":142},"The nurthi stage's leading singer-actor, who took the lead in John de Silva's plays, sang on the earliest Sinhala gramophone records, and taught the man who set Cumaratunga's Hela Miyasiya to music.","8 April 1958","1900s-1950s","md",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fsadiris-master",[174,175],"Singer","Musician",{"title":5,"description":165},[178,181,184,187,190],{"title":179,"url":180},"Sadiris Master — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSadiris_Master",{"title":182,"url":183},"සාදිරිස් මාස්ටර් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%AF%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%8F%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%A7%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%8A",{"title":185,"url":186},"Vincent Somapala — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FVincent_Somapala",{"title":188,"url":189},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211",{"title":191,"url":192},"ග්‍රැමෆෝන් තැටි යුගය (සංගීතය) — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%9C%E0%B7%8A%E2%80%8D%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%90%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%86%E0%B7%9D%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%AD%E0%B7%90%E0%B6%A7%E0%B7%92_%E0%B6%BA%E0%B7%94%E0%B6%9C%E0%B6%BA_(%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%82%E0%B6%9C%E0%B7%93%E0%B6%AD%E0%B6%BA)","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fsadiris-master","urDzPjqTBDrXLspI5F-1LvnGhCaVPU4m7hhX9yryDME",1787999333416]