As Plato said to Ion, ‘you aren’t skilled, but you are divine’

Resuming our discussion of writer and critic Eric Ilayapaarachchi’s in depth analysis of music (from his book ‘Kalaawa Soya Yema’ or In Search of Art), we come to a provocative thesis — that the singer’s unassailable position within the noosphere of the song is the result of hard work through millennia, evolving from the hunting-centered group chanting of the stone age to the individualistic, itinerant singer of the Medieval Age and succeeding centuries.

- Gamini Akmeemana

He argues that in Sri Lanka, the intrusion of poets into songwriting challenged and diminished the singer’s status. But let’s start by looking at his analysis of the historical development of the song.

He quotes a folk tale about a man who killed a nightingale for food. After removing its feathers, the body looked very small. Disappointed, the man cried: “Oh nightingale, you are nothing but your voice!”

Similarly, the singer exists within the song, which encompasses his present, past and future. But, despite music’s lengthy history, the singer and what he or she sings is overwhelmingly ‘live’ and contemporary. This is the rationale behind gramophone and vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, concerts and radio listeners’ requests.

In ancient times, the song derived to a large extent from the singer’s mobility as well as trades and crafts practiced in a given society (My note: a group of such itinerant singers/ musicians of the Mughal times are shown in the Indian film Baiju Bawra. Blues music originating in the cotton fields of the American Deep South in the 19th-20th centuries is another good example).