Hooting, jeering and ridiculing the rendering of ‘Dhanno Budunge’ by renowned soprano Kishanie Jayasinghe reflected a base ill-informed audience 

An internationally renowned soprano from Sri Lanka sings the popular devotional song Danno Budunge at Galle Face as part of the independence day celebrations. She gets hooted by the crowd and pilloried by television and electronic websites. A week after this shameful event, none of the better-informed media, or people who should know better, have come to her defence. What exactly is the problem?

One argument is that an opera singer was out of place at the Galle Face concert which catered to the superstar crowd. The question then arises; in which context  do we then place an opera singer? Is there a place for one at all in our cultural context? The next question is: why do people need to insult someone who dared to differ? Wouldn’t it  have been more dignified to bear in silence what one can’t fathom instead of lashing out so ruthlessly? A television commentator reportedly compared  her singing to a ‘yelping of a dog.’

But Kishani Jayasinghe was not singing opera that night. She sang ‘Danno Budunge’,  a perennial favourite among music fans ever since dramatist John de Silva presented it more than a century ago, with a technical and artistic virtuosity very different to what has been done so far by previous exponents of this song. There is a haunting beauty about her version which will ensure it a permanent place in the ‘Danno Budunge’ repertoire in future.

What enraged the crowd, television commentators and the patriotic website crowd is her ‘abuse’ of the song.  If the sheer beauty of that performance didn’t get through the beholders’ ears, the problem lies with the hearing, not with the singer’s voice.

That’s  understandable since most of them would  not be familiar with opera. But the comments made on TV that night are totally unacceptable. It shows they don’t know their jobs. 

The singer hit the higher tonal range of her voice only occasionally. To see what she’s capable of, videos of her operatic performances abroad are available on You Tube. To say that what is done in London, Paris or Singapore cannot be done here is to play down to the audience, which in this case is unfortunately ourselves. That’s the sad and horrible truth of all this ridicule. People were laughing at themselves, which might be a good thing if anyone has learned anything from it, though I doubt it very much. 

What those state in bold letters is this: Never experiment. Never step out of line. Never change. Danno Budunge now is as part of tradition as the perahera elephant or the devil drum. While there is no conceivable need to transform the elephant into something else, one can’t see anything wrong with experimenting with either the song or the drum. That’s how culture renews itself with new ideas and sources of energy.

The hostility towards Western music (or music inspired by it) is deep rooted. You can excuse the Galle Face crowd for being ignorant. I can never forget the shock of hearing one of our top singer-composers saying on radio that people can’t ‘feel’ Premasiri Khemadasa’s forays into Sinhala opera because they sound alien.  This is because our education system does not provide any introduction to Western opera. To many Sinhalese, even Karnatic music, where the vocal range can equal Western opera, can sound alien. I wonder what the reaction would have been if a Tamil classical singer had sung Danno Budunge that night. 

These are problems that our politicians should address. But the chances of this happening look so remote. The President, who said a lot of himself  with his reaction to an incident during the Enrique Iglesias concert, said another interesting thing more recently at a naval ceremony at Trincomalee. He said that the Sri Lankan Navy was the first in the world to combat suicide attackers at sea. One wonders if he has heard of Kamikazes during World War II when the Japanese used aircraft instead of ships for suicide missions is a matter of detail. The end goal was the same. The people who are most likely to succeed him know even less. It’s a frightening scenario where culture is concerned.

Kishani Jayasinghe, who has returned to Sri Lanka after almost two decades as a singer in the UK, has performed in Versailles, Verona, St. Louis, Singapore, Holland, Zurich and elsewhere, singing challenging  roles such as Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro and Papagena in the Magic Flute. She was adjudged the Asian Woman of Achievement for Art and Culture in the UK, and it’s hard to think of another Sri Lankan, man or woman, with equal stature in the world of international opera today. It’s pathetic that a performer of such magnitude should have been jeered at in her own country of birth.

That she is unknown in her own country is largely the fault of the media, whose entertainment pages every week are full of minor singers, actors and starlets and their ‘achievements.’ Radio, television and newspapers have a role to play in introducing the public to ‘alien’ musical forms, be it opera, jazz, blues or indeed, Karnatic music. People who are paid for informing the public should start by being better informed themselves. There is a world outside these shores if only we have the wits to grasp it.