Four heads on a bus from Manila.

Last week, I introduced ways in which Manila’s colonial history could be traced to Macéda’s work. This week, I will pick up where I left off, to elaborate on the distinctions José Macéda drew between the Western and Eastern “idioms”.

“To understand [native people’s] thinking and feeling, and to express this musically would be to step into another world freed from the constraints of a technological life today” (Maceda 1979). Macéda was strongly a humanist, asserting that since tools and technology reflect the guiding ideologies of a culture, a hovering focus on the latter is a more “valid” source of a culture’s musical essence (ibid). For instance, an instrument with three holes at different distances apart allude to the structural ideology which assigned those particular parameters. Macéda saw modern salvation in village ideologies because of what he saw in their values, demonstrated through their musical practice. (What might we find reflected in the prevalent musical practice of our own culture?) And so, this post will provide more ideological differences than specific techniques, in a condensed form.

Fuzz.

The “kubo” I am staying in.

As Macéda collected, the overarching characteristic which makes rural Southeastern Asian music distinct is the importance of indefinite and diffuse musical elements, through a unique use and definition of drone and melody. This is opposed to the precision and closed-system that comes with the Western employment of “development” and cadence within demarcated time.

Macéda makes a summary of the concept of time in Southeast Asian rural music: “This simple music is based frequently on repeated sounds, with no stresses, showing a concept of time without marking time, like a straight line with no end – a concept of infinity” (Macéda 1979). A sense of “infinity” is achieved through a inclusive sense of drone and melody mainly centered around colour (a broad sense of “tone quality”) dynamics rather than specific and fixed pitches. From his field work in various remote villages in SE Asia, Macéda describes drone as “understood not only a sustained sound” but also a periodic reiteration or continuous repetition of several tones from pitched or non-pitched percussive or non-percussive sources.

His definition of melody is a “permutation” or arrangement of multiple tones, pitched or un-pitched.  This contrasts with the Western definition of melody in which tones are arranged in definite pitch relations. He categorizes drone and melody into six types of combinations:

(a) drone without melody; 

(b) multiple drones;

(c) drone and melody simultaneously;

(d) drone and melody consecutively;

(e) several drones to one melody;  and

(f) several individual drones to make one melody (Macéda 1976).

 

He employs all of these combinations throughout “Udlot-Udlot” (1975), see video below this paragraph. He writes, “written melodies can be seen, whereas drones can only be heard” (Macéda 1986).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The natives’ concept of time in their music reflects the relationship they aspire to uphold with the universe through their way of life. This relationship with nature is: intimate, equilibrious, endless, yet indefinite, just as in their drone-melody relationship. Macéda sees the parallels between musical practice and non-musical lives not as a mere analogies, but actual connections. One area where he realized this was in the diversity of musical and domestic uses SE Asian natives derived from the richness of sound materials found in their natural environment – e.g. bamboo, coconut shells and leaves, animal parts, rice stalk reeds, carabao horns, vines, hair, wood, etc. (Maceda 1979). In such a rich use of ‘natural’ sound material, Macéda saw a “profound respect for nature”, in which the natural vibrational/tonal decay of the sound material, once struck,  “describes time” in the music (1986). In other words, the tonal envelopes of sounds as a central measurement of time, derives from a cultural value placed on the natural environment which produced the sound material. Hence, as he earlier wrote, “time is measured by natural events, such as the migration of birds, flowering of plants, or sounds of insects in the dry season”, instead of “fixed clocks ” (Macéda 1976).

Masantol, Pampanga.

Masantol, Pampanga.

This points to the role of sonic “colour”, in conjunction with pulse, as one central indicator of the passage of time, rather than a precise calculation and strict adherence of duration based on one’s position in relation to a metrical beat, marked by a pitch or harmonic stress. Pitch hierarchies sometimes exist in native practices, but they are created through flexible durational or drone/melodic patterns. (Defining the SE Asian concept of colour deserves a whole section, so this will have to wait for another post for elaboration). The former yields more arbitrary, ambiguous, unpredictable time structures; whereas the latter is more specific and, thus, makes the music more identifiable in terms of its temporal position. In the beginning of “Udlot-Udlot” (see video above), we can hear Macéda employing “unfixed” or “imprecise” measurements of time and pitch in the “TINIG” (voice) sections, his directions:

“Singers sing a pitch given by a leader. The pitch is held for approx. 10 sec. As one singer takes a breath, another continues singing, thereby prolonging the pitch. The passage of time is indicated by a leader who swings a flag left to right. Each swing should take approx. one sec. The sliding voice (gliss[ando]) takes 5 sex. and the ‘rest’ or silence takes 5 sec. This whole pattern – 10 sec. plus 5 sec. plus 5 sec. – is repeated many time over for 4 min., according to  to duration indicated in TAGAL [‘time column’]…”

 

A roof beyond the wall.

Incidentally, there is a correlation between this musical dichotomy and  Kevin Lynch’s idea of imageability of a city. With words like identification, predictability, ambiguousness, etc. I see how urban navigation, and perhaps even spiritual well-being in a city, may depend on similar factors….

Macéda makes the philosophical claim that the technologies of the modern city “strive to promote constant and increasing production, in contrast to the primitive thinking which seeks to minimize the use of technology and to emphasize a life of accommodation with the process of nature” (Maceda 1978). Manila is precisely that kind of modern city which he contrasts to “primitive thinking” (see previous post titled: “First week in the Philippines”), owed to its ingrained colonial past. D.R.W. Irving writes in Colonial Counterpoint, “With its proximity to the markets of island and mainland Asia, Manila grew quickly into an important commercial entrepôt and thriving international community” (23). Western enterprises began, with Spain’s colonization, to displace the “primitive” aspiration and practice of an infinite, equilibrious relationship with nature in what became Manila. And, correspondingly, the local musical practices shifted, reflecting those new enterprises.

Part of the modern experience. Manila.