Sujatha Attanayake and the musical culture of Sri Lanka

By Prof. Wimal DISSANAYAKE

For the past so many decades, Sujatha Attanayake has been a formidable presence in the Sri Lankan musical scene. She is a distinguished singer and a musician; she has studied both North Indian (ragadhari) classical Music and South Indian (Karnatka) classical music. She comes from a musical family that is vitally connected to the Nurthi tradition of music.

Sujatha speaks Sinhala, Tamil, English and Hindi fluently. As a singer and musician one of her aims has been to bring about a harmonious union between classical culture and popular culture. Indeed, it is this theme that I wish to explore within the narrow compass of this essay paying close attention to the many-sided concept of a musical culture.

Musical culture

The musical culture of any society has to be understood as a site of struggle and negotiation. It is where diverse forces meet to gain ascendancy and establish their supremacy. The well-known anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in a well-known statement, said that culture ‘denotes an historically transmitted patterns of meaning embedded in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, sand develop their knowledge about and attitude to life.’

He also famously said that culture refers to the webs of meaning that human beings spin around themselves. This is a useful approach to the understanding of culture so far as it goes; however, to my mind, Geertz’s approach is deficient with regard to focus dimensions.

First, he pays scant attention to the material basis of culture and how it inflects culture in complex ways. It is indeed interesting to note that in examining the concept of culture, he deploys phrases such as ‘attitude towards life’, ‘ knowledge about life’, which signify a certain distance from the material and existential pressures, instead of phrases such as ‘knowledge from’, and ‘attitudes in.’

What such an approach promotes is a minimisation of the significance and determinative power of social practices and materiality and the valorisation of ideational aspects A more fruitful attitude to culture demands that we pay close attention to the shaping power of materiality in matters of culture.

Second, Clifford Geertz, it seems to me, gives insufficient attention to the question of history and how issues of culture are inseparably linked to issues of history. In understanding any culture we need to locate it in the movements of social change and flow of history. For example his classic and much-quoted essay on Balinese cockfights is vitiated by his unwillingness to situate the experience captured in it in history. To read culture sensitively is to read the history that shapes in sensitively.

Question

Third, in his discussions of culture, Geertz tends to ignore questions of agency despite the fact that a strong phenomenological current runs through his writings. Cultures are constantly be constructed and re-constructed by the people who inhabit it. Consequently, the ways in which cultures transform themselves, new systems of meanings rise, material forces are activated, human beings become the locus of actions, and change meaning systems invite close and sustained study.

Without paying sufficient attention to these factors we will not be available to comprehend the full complexity and the power of reverberation of any given culture. In other words, it is only by exploring the construction of culture within the framework of continuous social action and social practice that we will be able to understand its true nature. Fourth, Geertz tends to shy away from confronting questions of power and domination in the analysis of culture.

We need to constantly remind ourselves that culture is not something that resides outside of various social practices and human actins, but rather the terrain n which these practices and actions take place. Therefore, it is evident that questions of power, domination, exploitation, hegemony, manipulation emerge as integral facets of culture that merit careful consideration. Indeed, culture can most fruitfully be envisioned as the site in which an incessant struggle for meaning takes place. Hence, it is of paramount importance that we investigate how questions of power, exploitation, hegemony, domination are intertwined with cultural practices. What this means is that politics has to e brought into the discussions of culture in a way that Clifford Geertz had failed to do.

In modern societies cultural meanings are never stable and unitary; they are volatile and plural. Economic forces, materialist factors, institutional structures enter competitively into the process of culture-making. How certain groups appropriate cultural values and meaning systems as a way of securing legitimacy for their actions is indeed complex and problematic issue. It has to be recognised that cultural meanings are generated by human groups contending with each other in a space marked by domination and inequality. Culture cannot rise above or remain untouched by the material forces, including technology, and the relations of production in any given society.

This brief preamble about the need to understand culture in its true complexity is vital to gain entry into the complicated field of Sinhala music. Sujatha Attanayake’s success as a singer and musician has to be appreciated in terms of the deftness with which she has navigated these demanding forces. She has a good understanding of the nature of a musical culture and the way a singer should function within it by both reflecting its values and acting to further those values, if necessary, challenging them.

Sinhala culture

Any student of modern Sinhala culture would agree that there are three main segments that demand close scrutiny. First we have our folk culture which includes folk stories, folk poems, folk paintings, folk music, folk behavior patterns etc. In the case of music, musicians such as W.B. Makuloluwa championed the folk culture as a way of creating a distinctive tradition of Sinhala music that was different from classical Indian music.

Second, We have the elite culture which includes elite literary works such as Amavatura and Kavsilumina, classical sculpture and painting and classical music. Musicians like Lionel Edirisinghe advocated the need to strengthen the classical tradition of music which was largely inspired by North Indian music.

Third, we have the popular culture that has come into being largely through the efforts of radio cinema television and the music industry. Unlike, the other two this popular culture bears the indubitable print of Western culture and civilisation. This popular culture which is a form of mass culture is inextricably linked to consumerism and what Thedor Adorno referred to as cultural industries.

This popular mass culture offers us distinct dangers as well as clear opportunities. Sujatha Attanayake, for one, is deeply ware, as reflected in her work, of this ambivalence that marks popular culture.

It is against this backdrop that we have to locate Sujatha Attanayake;s achievement. Like Amaradeva before her, Attanayake was keen to create a popular tradition of music that combined the essence of all three – folk, classical and popular - while not falling victim to the trivialities, debasements and vulgarisations of taste associated with popular mass musical culture. In other words she was able to draw on the riches of the classical and folk traditions while taking advantage of the resources made available by popular mass culture. When we examine Sujatha Attanayake’s songs and musical compositions this fact becomes evident. It is her considered judgment that we do not have the luxury of retreating into a golden past, and insulate ourselves from all Western influences. That is not a realistic option. Instead, what she advocates a realistic and forward-looking blending of the classical, folk and popular traditions so as to create a vibrant Sinhala musical culture that appeals to the people at large while not yielding to crass commercialism and the concomitant vulgarisation of musical sensibility.

The work of a singer and musician such as Sujatha Attanayake can be examined from two distinct perspectives. First musicians and musicologists can examine her work technically in terms of the composition of the music, collocation of sound patterns, and the rendition of them. An Amaradeva or a Sanath Nandasiri or a Victor Ratnayake will be happy to pursue this track.

As a student of Cultural Studies, I wish to follow the second pathway, that is, to examine her music in terms of the larger cultural discourse of which it is an integral part. That is why I chose to focus on the idea of Sinhala musical culture. Scholars of cultural studies have ushered in a number of important shifts in the study of music, one such being the re-interpretation of the genius of the artiste.

Music analysis

Traditionally, in music analysis, the artiste was held in the highest esteem and the focus of attention was decidedly on his or her genius. There has been a shift of emphasis in recent times, largely die to the work of scholars such as Tia DeNora. Her book, ‘Beethoven and the Construction of Genius’ is a good example of a work that instigated this change.

Instead of focusing solely on the genius of the singer or musician we now are in the habit of paying equal attention to the social, cultural, institutional forces that made that genius possible.

Therefore, when we examine Sujatha Attanayake's music we need to focus not only her indisputable talents but also on the social discourse of which her music is a part. This is why focusing on the musical culture becomes such an important exegetical enterprise.

A musician like Ravi Shankar fully recognised the importance of this desideratum. In his autobiography he calls attention to the importance of the social discourses, cultural conventions, imperatives of music schools and the intimate relationship between teachers and pupils in the efflorescence of musical genius.

I wish to invoke, in this regard, the name of Theodor Adorno who was one of the most important cultural theorists of the twentieth century and a trained musician. He wrote illuminatingly on the cultural understanding of music. One of his aims was to rescue music from the misleading notion that it represented the sovereign genius of the composer. He was equally opposed to the idea that music was totally subservient to external forces.

It was his belief that authentic musical subject was ‘not individual but collective’. What he meant by this was that the musical subject represented the amalgamation of the musician’s genius and what the existing musical culture has made available to him or her.

Adorno was of the conviction that musical production cannot be entirely autonomous or reduced to the social forces that it manifested. This line of approach advocated by Adorno can be useful in unravelling the relationship between Sujatha Attanayake’s music and the musical culture that she inhabits.