The Challenges Faced by the Harmonium Used in Sri Lanka’s Public Musical Life

This paper is dedicated to the use and the distribution of the harmonium, a free reed musical instrument, in Sri Lanka, where the British heritage item was often applied in musical dramas, spoken plays, religious and ceremonial contexts. It developed its own life on the island in comparison to other British colonies such as India, Malaysia, in some areas of Myanmar or Singapore, where Indian theatre troops travelled. The main research question might be the questioning of its sustainability throughout time and the diversity in use throughout history. School curricula and public disseminations had a big part in keeping the harmonium’s imagination. However, technology allows for more than this, and one can find the harmonium often as samples or as stage performance supporting items in circumstances other than traditional contexts. Another interesting observation is the admiration of the harmonium as a musical instrument of the learned and of the well-trained. All these stigmatizing and labelling ideas have to be thoroughly scrutinized and investigated with interview and report tools that have to be made available to everyone.