Benches and a tree. Cubao, Manila.

Recording of a Jeepney:

This week I will delve more into the research data I have collected about José Macéda.

My research so far has led me to believe that in order to answer the question of how Manila, as a city, causally influenced Macéda’s “avant-gardism”, I should consider different broad categories or types of causal factors. These are, so far, Manila’s colonial history, political discourse, geographic location, intellectual atmosphere, technology, urban environment, and cultural values. All of these greatly overlap. But, Macéda himself saw in Southeast Asian indigenous life and music, opposition to a linear notion of logic and causality (Maceda 1986) – a “Western idiom” (defined in the next paragraph) of Greco-Roman origin. (This puts into question the nature of this field study itself).

Makati, Manila.

It is an integral aspect of Macéda’s musical life that he was brought up wholly Western, socially subscribed and artistically trained under what he would later call the “Western idiom”.  He defined Western idiom as: “harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and other elements in the finished forms of European music” (Macéda 1955). He is not necessarily saying that these elements are exclusive to the Western culture, but rather there is something distinct in how European culture has treated sounds. And similarly for Eastern cultures.

So why is this “integral”? Well, the westernized culture of modern Manila is not its native culture, contributing the city as cultural set of stark veneers. Ramon Santos, a colleague and friend of Macéda’s, wrote “It is perhaps in the very deprivation of a nativist cultural surrounding that later contributed to a dramatic self-conversion and cataclysmic transformation in Macéda’s maturing consciousness” (126). This “deprivation” is heavily attributed to Manila’s deep and underwritten history as a colonial capital, which officially began 1571 by Spain. I have found that Manila’s colonial history, the institutions that were established here, and the indoctrinations that were injected, reveal casual “branches” that connect Manila to Macéda’s artistic discourse.

LRT station, Manila.

Macabebe.

I will only bring up two aspects regarding colonialism: geographic location and hispanization. Spanish control over Manila tied the two hemispheres together for the European empires. D.R.W. Irving writes, “Due to its provision of a reliable maritime connection between Asia and the Americas, and by virtue of its strategic location close to China, early modern Manila attracted a diverse body of migrants seeking to trade, conquer, and proselytize” (Irving 19). In addition, efforts were put forth to suppress and transculturate indigenous culture, especially in the capital. Irving writes, “Shaping the culture of the inhabitants seemed as important to Felipe II and his advisors as molding the physical structure of urban space” (104). Music, in the context of religion (Catholicism), was an invaluable tool in evangelical transculturation. European instruments, liturgies, and pedagogues were a constant import, as well as the missions that housed them. And this is only the Spaniard’s control – I won’t dig into America and Japan’s occupations here. At the same time, many Filipino’s appeared well-receptive, perhaps naively, to the culture of the West. Manila proved fruitful for imperial impulses.

Colonial processes that initiated in Macéda’s native city 346 years before his birth played a dominate factor in his insulation of Western culture from the native culture of his own country, one aspect leading to the composer’s defection. Eventually, he took an aggressive turn against the Western idiom of his upbringing and the state of the industrialized Western world in which he lived, seeing modern salvation in pre-colonial indigenous wisdom, demonstrated through their music. Macéda said that hearing the kinaban (Hanunoo Jews’ harp) for the first time “transformed his entire outlook on music” (Santos 128). This attitude guided the rest of his career – as an ethnomusicologist, a composer, and a philosopher, each field informing the other.

a kinaban being played. (http://www.bamboomusic.50webs.com)

Throughout his works, he rationalizes a dichotomy between the East and the West. “The West” appears to be a more homogeneous monolithic culture; whereas with non-western culture, he refers to both “the East” and “Southeast Asian”. The dominant subjects of this dichotomy in Macéda’s ideologies are the treatment of time, hierarchies of sound, and the relationship with nature and technology.

Reflecting its imperial ethos, Western music treats time as linear, finite, and something to control (counterpoint, harmony, etc.). Southeast Asian natives, in contrast, treats time as infinite, “measured by natural events such as migration of birds, flowering of plants, or sounds of insects in the dry season” rather than “fixed clocks”, and “immaterial”, “divided not as a record of man’s achievement” (Macéda 1976). These philosophies that Macéda proposed the urban person look to for well-being are similar to Baudelaire’s “nature corrective” in de Botton. Unfortunately, I must leave you incoherently. I want to share more details of Macéda’s ideas, but as it turns out colonial history has had to occupy most of the space on this post.

Mataguiti, Pampanga.

Works Cited

Santos, Ramon. Tunugan: Four Essays on Filipino Music. 2005.

Irving, D.R.W. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. 2010.