The politics of musical taste, the inadequacy of good intentions, and not saying “no!” to racism

Featured image courtesy Bands in Town

by Eshantha Joseph Peiris 

- on 02/16/2016 

The timeless universal language, music?

Not the way I see it… in fact, a musical experience is much more likely to reflect a particular time, place, and way of thinking. But don’t just take my word for it; anybody you ask will probably associate different types of music with specific lifestyles and values. Whether they approve or not is a matter of social conditioning: one person’s baila is a another person’s baila, so to speak. But enough with the abstract thought.

Paved with good intentions, the road to hell

John de Silva probably meant well when he wrote the nurthi musical playSirisangabo in 1903, subliminally teaching noble Aryan values while promoting modern Arya-Sinhala notions of race, creed, and nation-state, all with a dramatic back-story. Given the end goal to cast off colonial oppression, the justified means included creating links to the past glories of India, through use of Sanskritized Sinhala lyrics, and the importation of the Indian composer Visvanath Lawjee.

One paradox of nationalistic songs all over the world is that they all tend to express similar ideas of patriotism and similar musical preferences (in other words, all national anthems sound like generic national anthems when played by military brass bands). The idea of being part of a system of nation often seems more important than expressing any form of national individuality.

It’s hard to tell whether Ananda Samarakoon’s songs – with their obvious musical debt to Tagore’s Rabindra Sangeet – were trying to express an essential spirit of a potential new nation-state, or were simply reflecting pan-South-Asian anti-colonial sentiments, but they were certainly composed with the best of intentions.

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