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.

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.

My very hot boarding room in Quezon City.

As a preface, I’d like to warn you that this post will most likely be incoherent, disordered. But such qualities correspond to the overall nature of my experience here in the Philippines since arriving a little over a week ago. It feels like it’s been twice that long. And at the same time, the days also feel much longer than back home in the States. Contradictory? I won’t argue against that.

Upon arrival, I implicitly greeted the country with visual and psychological shock. It took four hours for my apo (my grandfather), his driver, and his fourteen year-old helper to take me from the heart of Manila to the central region of the Pampanga province, where his compound sits near a lake. For four hours I was rubbernecking. For four hours I sat behind a pane of glass, protecting me from aggressive humid heat, as the air conditioner exhausted a cool breeze onto my unconditioned forehead. All while few-lane highways supported tailgating, mirror-to-mirror traffic anarchy.

Inside the kubo (rest house). Macabebe, Pampanga.

Facing out the window of the kubo towards the lake.

Fifteen hours ahead in time from home, my eyes cannot escape the frank coexistence of poverty, and structures built of material comforts. The passé American dream is plastered on billboards, several stories high, blocking the sun in all sorts of places within and without the city. As one secures their fist around a rail in front of a window on the LRT (Light Rail Transit), passing over Araneta Boulevard in Manila, bleak condominiums tower over residential compounds of porous concrete, which shadow tin roofs and “walls”. Vendors of all kinds line the streets, forming corridors in which people of assorted classes travel in dense columns. You will see rubble occupying once-vacant ground, like anthills gaining land on the sidewalk, where people most likely used to light a cigarette or set their dinner table. They appear in places around the area no more predictable than the city layout is – generally – to the foreigner. In fact, after having to navigate by myself, I find the only predictable thing about navigating the cityscape is that you will feel like a child looking for your parents in a dense, crude promenade.

Metro Manila covers a massive area, including Quezon City – the second city of my research focus. (Any observation I make is, of course, a general statement, for a comprehensive account for my experience would require much more than a concise blog post). Kevin Lynch would have nightmares over many aspects of the city, especially that of its overwhelming imageability. But at the same time, its frank qualities lend to great diversity in some respects. For instance, despite the chaotic atmosphere, the traveler will never run out of paths if he/she/they so desires to deviate. Jane Jacobs would perhaps praise this degree. The paths which allow pedestrians to sift through the city resemble a large dry brush loosely dragged through wet sand, several times at different angles. Given the anarchy of traffic, city roads make merely suggestive edges, in Lynch’s world.

But if one must get somewhere any considerable distance without risking heatstroke, that person must use transportation. The main public transportation options include the rail systems, jeepneys, motorized tricycles, private drivers, or taxis. “Jeepneys” and tricycles are by far the most characteristic of these. Having to visit very often the micro-city campus of the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City to dig through their archives, I have to use jeepneys regularly. Usually, this consists of squeezing sticky shoulder-to-sticky shoulder, with the occasional passenger hanging their leg(s) outside of the entrances. Fares in this sardine-can situation are bucket-brigaded to the driver’s open palms. And although English is taught in schools, I am repeatedly ashamed to have not picked up by now how to appropriately indicate my desired stop; instead of grunting and pointing, or revealing the extent of my linguistic foreignness. Gratefully, the drivers are very forgiving.

UP Diliman Campus. April 13, 2015.

The UP Diliman campus has been, so far, the most culturally accommodating for me, as far as I have seen. But note that the following statements about it are strictly in comparison to the rest of the city, for you would be hardpressed to find an American level of material-comfortability throughout most of the country. Though UP Diliman is clearly a Southeast Asian school, it resembles an American clarity of design and accommodation – accessible cafes, “canteens” (cafeteria), and recreation areas.

On days I work in the Department of Ethnomusicology’s archival room in Abelardo Hall – the music college on campus – an aggregation of a variety of Western and Asian instruments breathe around the courtyard in open air. The walls grant them partial passage as I research. And there is rarely an extended rest. (note: keep updated for field recordings once I find an auxiliary cord). It is quite fitting with two important ideologies I have gathered of Jose Macéda’s musical thought: a centrality of colour of sound and of the emancipation of endless time.

To my understanding so far, “colour of sound” describes the distinct suggestive timbral qualities of a sound. It would be interesting to ask Macéda (if he were still alive) his thoughts on the colour of Metro Manila’s soundscape today. It is distinct, dominated by constant jeepneys and tricycles which evoke mucous-congested, mechanical boars. (again: keep updated for field recordings once I find an auxiliary cord). It is bluntly piercing, and I easily imagine myself being deployed onto the front lines of a World War Two front, when instead I am on my way to a convenient store. To illustrate in what sense “colour” might describe a particular soundscape, imagine panning between 100% this  the type of soundscape I just described, and 100% that of a livestock farm... To make this easier, think of how you are able to perceive a shift from purple to blue. You may not immediately know exactly why, but you know intuitively the difference at the least. As for the meaning of “emancipation of endless time”: music that is unrestricted by temporal borders. Much like an imaginary city whose edges do not exist, and whose paths never end or begin.

“There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue…

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. “

-Baudelaire

This is a poem that Alain de Botton uses in his chapter “On the Country and the City” in The Art of Travel. He uses this poem to reiterate the ‘spiritual’ benefit s of respecting nature, much having to do with the experience of “sublimity” themed in the next chapter. I am reminded of the only time I tried a substance of what they call “pre-mature enlightenment” (Drugs are bad, mkay? Unless fed to you by a doctor). I went about my day walking through the Garfield Nature Trail, sitting next to the water at East Bay Park, and walking around a park in the rain at night. Anything I chose to focus on would reveal itself as the organic composite that it was (or could be). Cellular movements on the surface revealed themselves, counterpart to movements naked to the human eye. Everything equally had something to show. My perceptions were, of course, altered, and I took care in being aware of that due to the nature of the experience. What might de Botton have to say on this? On Baudelaire,

“He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting or even inspiring?  Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with” (de Botton 147).

Surely, my experience is probably not what Baudelaire or de Botton had in mind. You might find my personal example distasteful. Nonetheless, I understand more fully what it could mean to “shuttle between perspectives”. Further engrained in me is how, with focus and determined curiosity, any object can have something valuable to show or tell. When I read Baudelaire’s poem, it occurred to me that certain experiences in fact permanently stain our memory, for better or worse. If it is possible that these stains can be for worse, then we ought to remedy ourselves with good ones for mental and “spiritual” health.

“Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us – oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm – and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue” (de Botton 145). De Botton builds the suggestion that the remedy is to take a detour out of the city, and place ourselves within deep natural landscapes. Making ourselves fully present in a natural landscape may compel us to pursue moral qualities. But I don’t think we necessarily have to escape the urban environment in order to be inspired. What about skyscrapers suggesting to us determination or greed, sidewalks progression, oil rigs exploitation?

“[A successful work] will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilize them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us – or if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives” (de Botton 183). This is one important value de Botton turns our attention to of art. Van Gogh offered viewers qualities of the ordinary, worthy of attention, irrespective of their position in nature or not. The painting of a city corridor may help us find not only the sublimity of human architecture, but also our attention can be flipped towards the curiosity of how it displaces “nature”. Putting into practice in our daily life those qualities of “successful” art that allow us to be psychologically and “spiritually” moved thus becomes an invaluable cultivation.

An appropriate quote at this time: “My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter” (Ruskin, in de Botton 217). It may sound like I’ve been preaching about a formula for a happy life. But I don’t want to hear that anymore than you do. Rather, as implicit in de Botton’s book, it is about cultivating a full life. “Full” connotes the inclusion of a wide range. It’s not about being relentlessly happy – such an effort would render you a sociopath. Fulfillment comes from becoming aware of things from different perspectives through inquiry. If successful in this effort, we realize that one cannot escape to nature anymore than one can escape from nature, the sublime.