Sri Lanka, March 26 -- Resuming our discussion of writer and critic Eric Illayapaarchchi's in depth analysis of music (from his book 'Kalaawa Soya Yema' or In Search of Art), we come to a provocative thesis - that the singer's unassailable position within the noosphere of the song is the result of hard work through millennia, evolving from the hunting-centered group chanting of the stone age to the individualistic, itinerant singer of the Medieval Age and succeeding centuries. He argues that in Sri Lanka, the intrusion of poets into songwriting challenged and diminished the singer's status. But let's start by looking at his analysis of the historical development of the song.

Ion is one of Plato's shortest dialogues that is conventionally...