Research Guides: International Music Resources by Country: Philippines

Map of the Philippines

Citation (2)

Books

Dangerous Mediations by Áine Mangaoang; Lisa Perrotti-Brown (Series edited by); Holly Rogers (Series edited by); Carol Vernallis (Series edited by) In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, ine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism. In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediations is the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.
Call Number: ML3920 .M155 2019
Gongs and Bamboo by Jose Maceda This panorama is a pictorial view of music instruments starting with older bamboo and other instruments of undetermined age, going on two types of gongs-flat in Northern Luzon and bossed in the South. These two areas may be viewed as pocket cultures comparable to other pocket cultures in Borneo, Sumatra, other islands in Southeast Asia and the mountain regions south of and including Yunnan province of China, thus placing the music of Luzon and Mindanao in a larger geographical context. For example, mouth organs in Borneo and continental Southeast Asia are absent in the Philippines, where, however, separate pipes of panpipes are on occasion still being played by groups of boys among the Kalingga of Luzon. The musical elements of drone and melody identified in two lutes in Borneo or ensembles in Yunnan find examples in two players of the same tube zither in Mindanao and flat gongs in Luzon. The nearly 500 photographs in the book are almost all taken in the field, showing details of making and playing bamboo buzzers, jaw harps, zithers, percussion tubes, flutes and other instruments. Manners of tapping and sliding with the hands on flat gongs differ from beating them with sticks. Examples of big bossed gongs with wide rims (agung) struck with a mallet on the boss and a stick on the rim show affinities with a manner of playing bronze drums in Yunnan. In North Luzon, men and women dancing in circles with outstretched hands distinguish them from solo dancers with minimum body movements in the South.
Call Number: ML541.P6 M33 1998
Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation by Christi-Anne Castro The first cultural history of the Philippines during the twentieth century, Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation focuses on the relationships between music, performance, and ideologies of nation. Spanning the hundred years from the Filipino-American War to the 1998 Centennial celebration of the nation's independence from Spain, the book has added emphasis on the period after World War II. Author Christi-Anne Castro describes the narratives of nation embedded in several major musical genres, such as classical music and folkloric song and dance, and enacted by the most well-known performers of the country, including Bayanihan, The Philippine National Dance Company and the Philippine Madrigal Singers. Castro delves into the ideas and works of prominent native composers, from the popular art music of Francisco Santiago and Lucio San Pedro to the People Power anthem of 1986 by Jim Paredes of the group Apo Hiking Society. Through both archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, Castro reveals how individuals and groups negotiate with and contest the power of the state to define the nation as a modern and hybrid entity within a global community.
Call Number: ML3917.P55 C37 2011

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music-Philippines

Philippines
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Philippines

Capital: Manila

Official Languages: Filipino, English

Population: 112,508,991

Area: 300,000 sq km

Climate: The climate is maritime and tropical. It is generally hot and humid, except in the mountains. There is abundant rainfall, and the islands are frequently in the path of typhoons.

Religion: Christianity (90%), Islam (5%)

Citation (2)

Traditional Music from the Philipines

Indigenous and Muslim-influenced Traditions

In the northern Philippines, indigenous music is represented by the Negrito, a very small minority mostly from Luzon, and the people of the Cordillera mountain range, a larger population. In the south, the indigenous and Muslim-influenced peoples live separately. There, the influence of Islam is discernible in many singing styles and in some flute and reedpipe music, but there is no apparent Muslim influence in the music of the gong ensemble kulintang or in terms of other musical instruments.

Among the Negrito in Bataan, marriage rituals and those for honouring the dead or curing the sick still exist. The singing style consists of a few lines of melismatic melodies sung by a leader and repeated responsorially by the crowd of men and women.

In the northern part of Quezon province, among the Dumagat of eastern Luzon, the musical bow, a rare instrument in the Philippines, is most probably an original Negrito musical instrument and is the single instrument that is found only among the Dumagat, being unknown to other indigenous groups. The other musical instruments played by the Dumagat have been borrowed from adjacent cultures, just as song texts contain words from their neighbours.

Popular Music

Filipino popular music may be traced to songs sung in the course of everyday living: work, war and drinking songs, lullabies and ballads. Western contact in 1521 brought Spanish colonization and Christianization to the islands; this produced musicians trained in the performance of Western music and resulted in new forms of music adapting Western idioms (e.g. jota, habanera and valse), which became the accompaniment to indigenous dances at town fiestas and celebrations.

Despite the seemingly absolute reign of Western pop music, small pockets resisted the trend. Villar Records, founded in the early 1950s, recorded over 500 albums and 300 singles of kundimans, folksongs and local pop songs, including the well-known Dahil sa iyo (‘Because of you’), written by Mike Velarde, the composer Antonio Maiquez’s Sapagkat kami ay tao lamang (‘For we are only human’) and Manuel Villar’s Diyos lamang ang nakakaalam (‘Only God knows’).

Though Philippine popular musical forms are predominantly derived from or inspired by the West, in language and spirit they are now Filipino. Traditional views on undying love and a resignation to heartbreak, carry-overs from the kundiman, still prevail in local ballads as sung by figures such as Celeste Legaspi, Basil Valdes and Sharon Cuneta.

Citation (3)

Composer Highlight: Nicanor Abelardo

Nicanor Abelardo

1893-1934

Filipino composer, conductor and teacher. As a child he had violin lessons from his father, and in 1901 he wrote his first composition, Ang unang buko (‘The First Fruit’), a waltz. He was sent to study at the Liceo de Manila and he learnt to play the piano, but at the same time he had to take various jobs to support himself and his family. In 1916 he entered the Conservatory of the University of the Philippines, and in the next year he composed a march, U. P. Beloved, which won first prize in an open competition. He studied with Victoriano Carreon (singing), José Silos (bandurria), Bonifacio Abdon (violin) and José Estella (piano); he received a teacher’s certificate at the conservatory in 1921, and in 1923 he pursued postgraduate studies there. His contribution to Philippine music lies not only in his abundant and profound output (he wrote over 150 works), but also in his work as a brilliant teacher of theory and composition. He published a number of treatises and scholarly essays.

POPULAR GUITAR MUSIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

Listen to music by Nicanor Abelardo on Naxos Online

International Music Resources by Country: Philippines