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| Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Melodies and memories by Nigel Kerner
Legendary For those few Sri Lankans who might not have listened to any of the 125 programmes transmitted by SLBC, in the 'Melodies and Memories' series, it was Radio at its best. It was radio for the people by the people with the intimate human persona of the listener in mind. Its format included a team of three broadcasters led by the legendary and gentle voiced Nihal Bhareti as anchorman known to many as the 'Voice of Sri Lanka'. With him, there was the self effacing and kindly Bertram Jayasuriya the compiler of the songs and Harold Jansz the researcher and commentator par excellence, on the history of the lovely old songs they played. Both Jayasuriya and Jansz are authorities on the genealogy and broadcast history of melodies of yester year. The programme invited guests for an informal chat in brief interludes between songs. Guests included ;a previous Australian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, distinguished cricket personalities, Clive Lloyd, Doug Walters, and our own Sanath Jayasuriya, Romesh Kaluwitharana and President's Secretary Bradman Weerakoon. The team provided fascinating historical anthologies of the songs played. In this way it both informed and entertained and, more than anything else, as its title presumed, fortified our spirits with a vista of memories that swept the hardest hearts in gists of sentiment and good feeling. The programme meant a lot to my whole family and we were all saddened by its termination. But in the throes of looking into its post operative demise in a search for reasons why it had been taken off, I discovered that it meant an awful lot to other people too. I could not find a single individual who disliked the programme. They all loved its folksy nature, warts and all. There is an incidental and untutored feel to the presentation. Both Bertram Jayasuriya and Harold Jansz added to the charm of the programme and made one feel part of it. Listening to the programme, a marvellous chemistry between all three comes over loud and clear and this might have been one of the secrets of the programme's success. Professional So what then explains the loss of this sanguine programme. Why was I so sad at its passing. It was after all just a radio broadcast and as part of my professional work I had heard hundreds all over the world. Many on the same format. But 'Melodies and Memories' was different. It was a programme unlike any other of its sort. Apart from the internecine chemistry of the three presenters, the choice of music for the programme took us back in time to an age quite different to the present. They played some of the real old oldies, never heard anywhere in the world today with such frequency. It is not surprising that Sri Lankan listeners to the English service loved the programme. We are a people's people and, unlike many Occidentals, we still appreciate the capacity to feel sentiment as a quality that signals a good heart. Most of the people who would listen to such a programme would be in the 40 - 80 age group. People with more sober wizened musical tastes, less given to spontaneous gyrations of the torso at every beat they hear, and are more amenable to appreciating the meaning of lyrics. Why then had they taken it off. The more I thought about it, the more I was puzzled. Whatever the truth about it, the whole thing seems to be a vestment soaked in the juice of foolishness. I am fortunate enough to work in the international entertainment industry both in the UK and the US and I think I know a little bit about things TV, Radio and Film in that context. My life in the world of the music industry takes me to the most sophisticated entertainment paradigms on the planet and I had arrived at the conclusion long ago that the English speaking world, indeed most of the Occident, within the Occident, was slowly converting its tastes in music into the thuds hisses clicks beeps bops and shoos that sign robots and machine minded nerds. Noises more akin to chain saws and the percussion plenitude of 'steam hammers and road drills', as one of the programme's invitees said, pass for music now, bursting our eardrums and shaking our biologies into mental stupefaction day after day. Transmitted from almost every radio signal post around the Occidental world, thousands of programmes churned out the same unending tirade of musical drivel expounding sounds that in the past soothed the savage breast but now serve to engulf ENT surgeon's operating lists by excoriating tympanic membranes and raising the levels of deafness in the young to unprecedented levels. Soothing the savage breast indeed. This is the modern way we are told. We live in a machine age and we must move with the times. But why has music become a parade of violence in sound. It is a good question to ask. Why does violent more discordant music seem to lead musical taste these days. If you think about it all, music probably started with the cave man banging stones and pieces of wood together in a rhythm, and cavewomen softly cooing a lullaby to the baby at her paps. It was simple pure and true. It would progress with sounds that soothed consoled and told simple stories. Narratives of everyday life. As time went on more and more expression was added to word and melody and harmonising and multiple voice singing began. Sound was related to what was all around in nature and in time the natural world imposed its contribution of bird and animal sounds into the musical frame. Millennia passed with not much change to the root structure of music. Instruments got more and more sophisticated with time. Then an interesting thing was discovered as things got to the present day. Musical expression continued substantially unchanged till the dawn of the 20th Century and the establishment of the Industrial age. The machines and their effect on the psyche of man took time to establish and soon the half tones semi tones and disharmonic sounds that characterise machine sounds, began to enter the publicly expressed structures of music. This I believe accelerated when sound began to be recorded and made available to the general mass of people. But the mind-set that fed all this happened in the womb. Proliferation It struck me some years ago when I was writing a music review, that the growing infant is surrounded by water in the womb. Water is a more powerful conductor of sound than air and the fast proliferation of brain cells and their connections in the growing infant, which is fastest in the womb, will be bludgeoned by a continual panoply of processed sounds reflecting the powerful heavy discordant outturn of the machine, the factory and all the other industrial and technological based cacophonies we are more and more subject to in everyday life today. The new generations would and have to be powerfully imprinted in the womb with a mindset reflecting these mostly violent enforced sounds. It would be a short step to musical composition instinctively reflecting this mind-set when the baby is born and grows into an adult. If you consider it, there seems to be a clear concatenate line increasing force in music with time to the present day. The sweeter notes that reflect a less violent daily life seem to have gone out of music. The old classical composers when set against the Schoenbergs, Weberns, Stockhausens and the other neo-classicist composers illustrate this very clearly. Then a very interesting thing was discovered. It was found that certain specific notes and combinations of notes had a particularly powerful effect on the human psyche. What we call the major Chords such as C,G,D. & F. These chords were found to particularly stimulate the emotional centres of the brain. A research study was done in the seventies that illustrated that more than 80% of the number one hits up to the late 1960's were based on the major chords, C,G,D & F. This factor has reduced now to about 20% in the present day hits. Recorded sound is based on the fiscal imperative. The richest group of record buyers potentially are the 50-80 group. They have mostly made their stash with mortgages paid and investment returns high. Many have retired and have time on their hands to listen and be entertained. But the market is now geared to the cheap and the facile an the untalented. The many listeners who are disaffected by the loss of the program will I'm sure inundate the SLBC with letters of protest. I don't know who takes the decision for these things within the organisation but whoever he or she is, has reckoned the program's removal I believe without an insight into its sociological and fiscal significance. I am told on good authority that the head of SLBC now, is a visionary. I cannot see him taking a short sided decision like this. I hope he will intervene and persuade whoever did take this decision as Program Controller to think again. He will be a very popular man with the English speaking people of Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese and Tamil programmes put out by the SLBC are brilliantly designed radio fare. Let's hope that sense of equity prevails and those listening to the English service are better served than the decision to take out this programme implies. Great men such as Dodd and Corea in the founding days of Radio in Sri Lanka left a marvellous legacy and those coming thereafter have a grand tradition to follow. At one time all of Southern India tuned into Radio Ceylon. We were considered premier broadcasters in the whole of the sub-continent area. The latest information I have is that 'Melodies and Memories' will be back again in a briefer new format. It would be a great shame if this is so. Its format should not be touched. They should be increasing its time allocation, not reducing it. They should be placing it in a one whole hour Sunday slot between 10 and 11 am in the morning when they will have thousands of listeners, relaxing after breakfast and religious observances, able to take in the powerful informality of three truly gentlemen dedicated to seeing that the beautiful music of yesteryear never dies. At least not in this lovely island of ours where we triumphantly can still appreciate the music that feeds the soul and not the body. Note: Kerner bemoans the fact that SLBC has taken the program'Melodies and Memories' off the air as there are many listeners who still adore this program.
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The
radio listeners of Sri Lanka lost a dear friend the other day, 'Melodies and
Memories' a very popular radio program broadcast by the SLBC Commercial
Service was taken off the air. This would be a non event to most Sri Lankans
but to many listeners of the SLBC English service this was a flagship
program that meant something special and said some very special things about
Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans. 
