[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":242},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-w-b-makuloluwa":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":205,"description":206,"died":207,"era":208,"extension":209,"heroImage":210,"imageCredit":211,"imageLicense":212,"imageSource":213,"meta":214,"navigation":215,"notable":215,"path":216,"roles":217,"seo":221,"sources":222,"stem":240,"translated":215,"url":225,"__hash__":241},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fw-b-makuloluwa.md","W. B. Makuloluwa",null,1922,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":196},"minimark",[11,15,23,28,31,34,37,41,44,47,50,70,74,81,88,98,102,139,176,186,190,193],[12,13,14],"p",{},"\"Although one excels in a foreign music style, if he doesn't know the music traditions inherited by the country, he is an unwanted burden to the country, but not a blessing.\"",[12,16,17,18,22],{},"That sentence, from the preface to ",[19,20,21],"em",{},"Hela Gee Maga",", is the whole argument of W. B. Makuloluwa's life in one line, and it was written by a man who had every foreign qualification going. He had studied at Santiniketan in Bengal. He could play the esraj and the sitar. He was a trained Kathakali and Manipuri dancer as well as a Kandyan one. And having acquired all of it, he spent the rest of his working life insisting that none of it was a substitute for knowing what people sang in a Sri Lankan village.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"idamegama-to-santiniketan","Idamegama to Santiniketan",[12,29,30],{},"William Bandara Makuloluwa was born on 17 February 1922 at Idamegama, a village in Harispattuwa outside Kandy. He went to the Idamegama village school, then to Sri Rahula College at Katugastota and Ananda College in Colombo. He learned traditional dance from Rangama Gunamala, J. C. Malagammana and Thittawela Gunaya.",[12,32,33],{},"Then he went to India, to Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan — the school Rabindranath Tagore had built, and the same institution that drew Lionel Edirisinghe and Ananda Samarakoon from Ceylon in the same broad cohort. English Wikipedia says he studied there under Tagore himself, which would only be possible before Tagore's death in 1941, when Makuloluwa was still a teenager; the Sinhala accounts say simply that he studied music and dance at Visva-Bharati and name his dance teachers at home instead. The claim is worth treating carefully.",[12,35,36],{},"He came home to teach English at Sri Rahula College, Katugastota, and then moved into the state's arts machinery, where he stayed: Music Inspector at the Ministry of Education and later its chief director for the subject, and Creative and Inspecting Arts Director at the Ministry of Culture. He was the first principal of the Teachers' College of Aesthetic Education at Giragama, Pilimathalawa. He also taught at Sri Palee College in Horana, the school built on Tagore's model, where his most consequential student was Lionel Ranwala. (Wikipedia adds W. D. Amaradeva to the list of his Sri Palee students; Amaradeva's own well-documented biography — Moratuwa, Panadura, Lucknow — makes that hard to credit, and no Sinhala source consulted here repeats it.)",[24,38,40],{"id":39},"the-argument","The argument",[12,42,43],{},"Sri Lanka in the 1950s had a genuine problem and knew it. The country had just become independent and had no agreed idea of what its own music was. The default answer was North Indian: Hindustani classical training, Indian film melodies with Sinhala words dropped onto them, and a broadcasting establishment staffed by people who had studied in Lucknow or Bhatkhande.",[12,45,46],{},"Makuloluwa's answer was that the material was already here, in the fields and the ritual grounds, and that nobody had bothered to write it down. He began collecting: travelling village to village, taking down folk poems and their tunes, and — this is the part that made him a researcher rather than an enthusiast — charting them, classifying them, and reducing them to a notation that a syllabus could use.",[12,48,49],{},"He was not anti-Indian and said so plainly. \"It is true that Indian music can be an inspiration in developing a Sinhala music tradition,\" he wrote. \"Yet, we should study Indian music not to blindly imitate Indian music produced by Indian musicians which cannot be comprehended by the Sinhalese, and in most cases that cannot be understood by even the singer.\" What he objected to was the substitution of one for the other — and he was scathing about the counter-position, that the Sinhalese needed no distinct tradition of their own because Hindustani music was sufficient.",[12,51,52,53,56,57,60,61,65,66,69],{},"Two things sharpened this. The first was ",[19,54,55],{},"Maname",", Ediriweera Sarachchandra's 1956 play built on the nadagam tradition, which showed him a native idiom working on a modern stage in front of a delighted audience. The second was a delegation abroad in 1957 — Ceylon Today places it at a music conference in Russia — where a Sinhala song set to an Indian tune was performed, and the hosts asked for something that was ",[19,58,59],{},"not"," set to an Indian tune. What the party fell back on was the Turanga Vannama, the Vannama of the Horse, and ",[62,63,64],"strong",{},"තිකිරි තිකිරි ලියා"," ",[19,67,68],{},"Tikiri Tikiri Liya",". The audience preferred them. The anecdote circulates widely in the Sinhala literature and has not been traced to a contemporaneous document, so it is best read as the movement's founding story rather than as established fact; what followed it is documented decision by decision.",[24,71,73],{"id":72},"getting-it-into-the-syllabus","Getting it into the syllabus",[12,75,76,77,80],{},"In 1959 the government held the first national conference on Sinhala music. Makuloluwa delivered a paper there on the methodical singing of ",[19,78,79],{},"hela virith"," — Sinhala prosody — and, in his own account, \"after much discussion and debate, it was accepted that my lecture supports the progress of the Sinhala music sector.\"",[12,82,83,84,87],{},"That acceptance is the hinge of the whole ",[19,85,86],{},"jana gee"," movement, because it turned an argument into a curriculum. Through the 1960s music and dance entered the school syllabus, teacher-training colleges opened, and workshops and competitions followed. Makuloluwa streamlined the folk-music section of the school curriculum himself and devised the classification and notation system it used.",[12,89,90,91,93,94,97],{},"His programme, stated in ",[19,92,21],{},", was uncompromising and slightly contradictory, which is the honest thing about it: \"All schools and all music schools should teach folk songs as a compulsory subject… Radios should broadcast folk songs, folk poems, and wannam sung by talented singers.\" But also: \"Distorting Hela Gee is a national crime. Hela Gee should be sung and presented preserving their authenticity and rawness and should be sung as they are. If not, new songs and new tunes can be created using Hela Gee tunes.\" He wanted the raw material kept untouched ",[19,95,96],{},"and"," reused. The movement mostly delivered the second half.",[24,99,101],{"id":100},"symphonies-sung-dramas-and-a-film","Symphonies, sung dramas and a film",[12,103,104,105,65,108,111,112,65,115,111,118,65,121,124,125,65,128,131,132,124,135,138],{},"He composed as well as collected, and at a scale nobody expected from a ministry inspector. Sri Lankan accounts credit him with the country's first symphonies — ",[62,106,107],{},"ගොයම් දා මගුල",[19,109,110],{},"Goyam Da Magula",", ",[62,113,114],{},"මාර පරාජය",[19,116,117],{},"Mara Parajaya",[62,119,120],{},"හිර ගෙයින් මරුමුවට",[19,122,123],{},"Hira Geyin Marumuwata"," and ",[62,126,127],{},"මහාභිනිෂ්ක්‍රමණය",[19,129,130],{},"Mahabhinishkramanaya"," — and with ballets including ",[19,133,134],{},"Pahanin Pahana",[19,136,137],{},"Tharanaya",".",[12,140,141,142,65,145,148,149,65,152,124,155,65,158,161,162,164,165,124,168,171,172,175],{},"The best known of his stage works is ",[62,143,144],{},"දෙපානෝ",[19,146,147],{},"Depano"," (1966), a sung drama built almost entirely out of traditional folk songs, which is generally described as the first Sinhala opera; Lionel Ranwala was among the many musicians in it. ",[62,150,151],{},"නොනිමිද මගුල",[19,153,154],{},"Nonimida Magula",[62,156,157],{},"ඇසිදිසි",[19,159,160],{},"Esi Disi"," belong to the same run of folk concert productions, several of which he took abroad. He published ",[19,163,21],{}," — the research, with notation for the songs — along with ",[19,166,167],{},"Gemi Geeya",[19,169,170],{},"Abhinawa Mulika Geetha",", in which he fitted Sinhala vocabulary to the teaching of ragadhari music. ",[19,173,174],{},"Hela Mihira",", dated 1962, is described in some accounts as a collection of folk songs and in others as one of his sung dramas; it may well have been both, but the sources do not agree.",[12,177,178,179,65,182,185],{},"He wrote the songs and directed the music for one film, Amaranath Jayathilake's ",[62,180,181],{},"අරුණට පෙර",[19,183,184],{},"Arunata Pera",", released in 1984. It won him the award for best music director at both the 7th Presidential Awards and the 12th OCIC ceremony the following year. He did not live to collect either: W. B. Makuloluwa died on 8 September 1984, aged sixty years and six months.",[24,187,189],{"id":188},"what-he-left","What he left",[12,191,192],{},"The people who carried it on are the measure of the work. Lionel Ranwala, his student and working partner, took the collecting into performance and left more than three thousand recorded folk songs with the National Archives. C. de S. Kulatilake, working alongside him under the Department of Cultural Affairs, took charge of the SLBC's research unit in 1972 and recorded villages systematically. Makuloluwa, writing later, called that unit's service \"unmatchable.\"",[12,194,195],{},"Behind the institutional story sits a simpler one. A generation of Sinhala songwriters after 1960 reached for a folk melody as a matter of course rather than as an experiment. That reflex was not spontaneous. It was taught — in schools, from a syllabus, using a notation that a schoolmaster from Harispattuwa had spent seven years assembling from villagers who sang for him for nothing.",{"title":197,"searchDepth":198,"depth":198,"links":199},"",2,[200,201,202,203,204],{"id":26,"depth":198,"text":27},{"id":39,"depth":198,"text":40},{"id":72,"depth":198,"text":73},{"id":100,"depth":198,"text":101},{"id":188,"depth":198,"text":189},"17 February 1922","The Kandyan schoolmaster who spent seven years writing down village songs, argued that Sinhala music should be built from them rather than from Hindustani raga, and got folk melody written into the school syllabus.","8 September 1984","1940s-1980s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fw-b-makuloluwa.webp","films.lk","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.films.lk\u002Fsinhala-cinema-artist-wb-makuloluwa-1589.html",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fw-b-makuloluwa",[218,219,220],"Researcher","Composer","Music Director",{"title":5,"description":206},[223,226,228,231,234,237],{"title":224,"url":225},"W. B. Makuloluwa — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FW._B._Makuloluwa",{"title":227,"url":213},"W.B. Makuloluwa — films.lk (Digital Identity of Sinhala Cinema)",{"title":229,"url":230},"ඩබ්ලිව්. බී. මකුලොලුව — sri lankan musicians, December 2017","http:\u002F\u002Fsrilankanmusiciansfor.blogspot.com\u002F2017\u002F12\u002Fblog-post_45.html",{"title":232,"url":233},"Ama H. Vanniarachchy, 'History of our melody (Part I)' — Ceylon Today, 25 February 2023","https:\u002F\u002Fceylontoday.lk\u002F2023\u002F02\u002F25\u002Fhistory-of-our-melody-part-i\u002F",{"title":235,"url":236},"Ama H. Vanniarachchy, '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":238,"url":239},"Ama H. Vanniarachchy, 'History of melody (Part III)' — Ceylon Today, 11 March 2023, quoting Hela Gee Maga in translation","https:\u002F\u002Fceylontoday.lk\u002F2023\u002F03\u002F11\u002Fhistory-of-melody-part-iii\u002F","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fw-b-makuloluwa","EPIe8N9FAUXC1DxUCZiiEQQfR3z27bT08SFIO6aa0TA",1787999334115]