Mataguiti, Pampanga.
Last week I examined most heavily on his insights on native thought and aesthetic, and a couple examples of how he applied them. This post will touch more on the nuances of his own aesthetic.
Macéda’s examination of pre-modern SE Asian tradition did not manifest in his ideology as a call for a retrograde verbatim imitation of these “primitive” ways of lives. In fact, he was willing to embrace modernity in so far as it could be made in respect of nature, not in undue exploitation of it. After all, he and his likes, owe their career to modern institutions (within and without Manila). Thus, he assumed responsibility and confronted his modernity in his music and writing, “It is the task of modern man today to look for an attitude of mind and a course of action other than that which imprisons him” (Macéda 1978). He saw emancipation outside the walls of his society, in the attitude of mind in villages remote in nature. This in no doubt qualified him as an “experimental” composer of the 20th century.
In the essay Materialism, Ontology, and Experimental Music Aesthetics, Joanna Demers describes a historical dialectic between the place of “content” (i.e. ideas behind the art, or what is intangibly “revealed”) and “material” (i.e. form and/or the tangible and/or sensuous qualities) in aesthetics. At each extreme of this dialectic are the anti-materialists, and hyper-materialists.
This album cover is in fact a key for the positions of performers among the audience. For “Pagsamba” (premiered in 1968).
After a musical analysis, the author concludes “Sounds cry out for explanation, even as they render language superfluous. Sounds are at once material and content” (Demers, in Piekut 268). In other words, despite any intent, music, in the end, is neither anti- nor hyper-material. But then she explains how it wasn’t until the rise of phonography that most artists regarded sound itself artistic “material” – sounds written down (notated music) were.
Sounds were typically considered merely a means to an end, that end entailing a mixture of form and content. This is because a “natural” sound is physically finite – it rises, then dissipates – in comparison with marble or oil paint which can stand in front of a viewer of for centuries. But with the advent of phonography, the illusion of sound as having continuity became available – something to which R. Murray Schafer might ascribe “schizophonia” – and so it contributed to the spread of sound viewed as material, or a form itself, a notion that paved a path for the experimentalism to follow, although this notion already sparsely existed. Part of this notion was, as Demers shows, sound as having agency as well as passivity. And also, content and material being equivalent, suggesting that “we don’t need to aspire to restrictive or prescriptive forms of listening” (Demers, in Piekut 170).
Me trying to get multiple sounds out of the strings at once within the Macabebe soundscape:
It is evident in Macéda’s writing that “content” is very significant in understanding his music, particularly the content of “accommodation with nature” through music. But, in his discussions of colour and time, we how significant the properties of sounds themselves are. For example, in describing the importance of freely vibrating mediums in SE Asia such as in a metallophone, he says they are designed so that with one stroke, they sound, “free of human control”. We can also look at how he stresses the great diversity of sound material and timbre (see last post). Something I have not mentioned yet is sound density through mass participation. All of these qualities, as he explains, explicitly reflect their ideologies of equilibrium with the environment. In other words, the meaning is contained within the sound. So, in light of the previous paragraph, material and content seem to be one in these cultures.
Macéda readily adopted such practice into his own thinking and composition. He adopted the use of material (native sound aesthetics) which centered around more diverse and indefinite qualities, that is, largely, in drone and melody (also described in my last post). On “Udlot-Udlot”, he said “The total effect was one of an identification of this music with natural sounds or the sounds produced by instruments made from products of nature. It is as if sounds in rural areas were suddenly transported into the city” (Macéda 1978). Within that practice of sound contained the “task of modern man”
As de Botton points out, Wordsworth expresses the adverse effect of the city on the soul before living a life of nature. To sum up Wordsworth’s ideas on the “ills of the city”: social anxiety, envy, insincerity, and excess plague its inhabitants (de Botton 136). Nature, he argued, provided a remedy and a moral source, “an image of right reason” (144). Then he speaks of his task as a poet: “A great Poet…ought to a certain degree rectify men’s feelings…to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, consonant to Nature” (145). The last three words bear strong resemblance to Macéda’s wording of “accommodation with nature”. The whole sounds similar to his “task of the modern man”
Macéda mentions technology and development more often than Wordsworth in de Botton, but it is always spoken of as presently at odds with nature, an adverb suggesting change in practice. As said before, Macéda was not interested in “retrograde”. Rather, in seeking wisdom from pre-industrial societies, we should use is it merely as a frame of mind in the now modern setting. At times in which each artist were witnessing explicit urban growth, both saw spiritual potency in nature, which provided both content and material for their life’s work.