Letting the music take control
Tanya Ekanayaka, Sri Lanka’s linguist-musicologist-pianist-composer based in Edinburgh is getting great reviews for and made it to the Naxos Critics Choice page in December 2015 with her debut album “Reinventions: Rhapsodies for Piano”.
The album was composed, performed and produced in its entirety by her. While Tanya’s compositions are solid in their classically-influenced structure, and brilliant in their performance, they are also uniquely endearing and nostalgic in their Lankanisms.
“So far, my works have evolved spontaneously when I am at the piano and have remained frozen in my memory thereafter,” she says, describing what seems like an instinctive process of ‘receiving’ compositions. “They are not written down in any way.”
Despite the seemingly mystical (hence “Rhapsodies”) nature of the process, Tanya points very confidently to “a musical principle” which forms the basis of the compositions in this album.
This principle, which is explained in detail in the album booklet, is a short and clear motif in each composition that brings together tonal centres of a number of well-known classical pieces which she may put together for a particular performance.
These pieces include works by Bach, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and a host of other loved composers, and so “each of my works may serve to facilitate connectivity between other potentially diverse works of a performance,” she explains.
But Tanya’s work brings not only diverse classical works together, but also cultures and genres. The compositions which make up “Reinventions” are heavily classical in their structures and devices (Tanya was trained as a classical pianist from a very young age), but ring clearly of Sri Lankan melodies.
“Dhaivaya” especially seems almost simply a re-arrangement of the popular “Danno Budunge” also known as “Hymn for Sri Lanka”.
“Vannam (Gajaga, Mayura and Hanuma) and You” on the other hand takes three vannam which are overused as compositional centres in Sri Lankan music, and plays refreshingly with the tonal and rhythmic possibilities they offer.
There is a flirtatiousness and lightness of drama in this piece which we are not used to associating with these vannam, creating the sort of healthy disconcerting any intelligent work of art should produce.
“To me it is simply a reflection of the homogeneous manner in which different kinds of music reside within a person,” she says, speaking of this amalgamation of genres and styles found in her compositions.
“Traditional and popular Sri Lankan musics were very much a part of my wonderful school environment,” Tanya reminisces. “Similarly, western classical music, jazz, country and pop music were among the main genres constantly playing at home.”
It is these memories from her childhood and youth at “home” that form the primary source of emotional inspiration for the composer.
“I find myself travelling through a series of sometimes unrelated personal narratives whenever I play one of the works,” she explains.
“There is one [piece] in which I find myself as a young girl perched on an Araliya tree moments before discovering an unusual multi petal Jasmine flower and next find myself an adult in Edinburgh staring at the hues of the rainbow which greeted me on my first morning in this city.
I grew up in a Sri Lanka at war and so there is also a work in which I relive my own experience of the war in Sri Lanka as well as my first-hand experience of the insurrection in 1989.”
These memories Tanya describes are charged with diverse emotions, giving the album a pattern of highly dramatic moments intertwined with mellow “singing” ones.
“I never set out to evoke any particular emotions,” she says. “Whatever evolves does so from deep within me as part of a very natural inclination and is almost beyond conscious control…”
And so she waits for the music to take control, to be “ready” to record again, before thinking of another album. “Teaching and performing are all part of my life,” she says, speaking of her plans for the near future.
“I also hope that I will have an opportunity to further develop my Sri Lanka Music Composition Project this year.”
Tanya is currently in Hong Kong adjudicating the Hong Kong Schools Music Festival and will return to the UK to give a solo recital at the Turner Sims Concert Hall and possibly conduct a master class for music undergraduates in April as part of the University of Southampton Concert Series.
Tanya Ekanayaka’s debut album “Reinventions: Rhapsodies for Piano” was commissioned as part of the Naxos Grand Piano label and is available for download at www.naxos.com.