Pasig River, Intramuros, Manila.
[The morning of departure in the province]:
After an approximate twenty hour trip, I arrived back home last night. I noticed my trip in the Philippines has afforded me new senses to experience my familiar environment. Here I am typing starting this post in a café, back in downtown Olympia, when just yesterday I was pouring a cup of coffee so that I could conjure up my goodbyes at dawn next to my grandparent’s banana leaf garden in the middle of a Philippine province. I greeted my home with a shock, like I had when I arrived in Manila, though a different kind of shock. This was shock of underwhelmingness. The sterility of the “ideal” part of the States is much more evident to me now. Although it is true that America’s does have its myriad of blemishes, we can look at the laws and what is actually enforced to see that a precise and industrial efficiency pervades how it and its general population operates.
The imageability of roads, of both neighborhoods and expressways, in the Philippines has great diversity and excitement I now realize – insofar as “excitement” denotes an awareness of hazard or other stimulation. After my return, it was strange being in a car and surrounded by others that adhered to their lanes, rather than a semi-considerate free-for-all. And on Philippine roads, there is no shortage of sensuous temptations: carabao grazing in proximity to the remains of a harvested rice fields burning near and far, condos in proximity to squatters, congested business signs, horizontal pillars of pedestrians, and colorful traffic that shares with clouds undefined motion, to name a few. The environment’s visual texture consists of an overwhelming amount of figures, which obscures the ground from which those project against. In contrast, the drone soundscape of the road is barely surprising, although one will hear more distinct human voices from in their car than on a road in Olympia, Washington.
Plant in the yard. Macabebe, Pampanga.
[An insect (cicada?) in the province performing its music with no metric restriction (in fact, many native Philippine instruments were made to imitate the buzzing sounds of insects such as these); you can hear karaoke and the occasional car in the background]:
As discussed in previous posts, imprecision and indefiniteness are some key characteristics in Macéda’s ideology as a result of his fieldwork in remote Philippine cultures. Upon reflection, I have found that these two characteristics pervade even the modern Philippine environment, more in the daily operations than in the predominant music. The “loose” operation of traffic I described above serves as an analogy for the general lifestyle and, ultimately, the musicality of imprecision and indefiniteness. While many returning retirees and other local residents reside in lavish gated houses ornamented with columns and/or high-rise condos, the majority of the population live on a day-to-day basis. The life of the latter is indefinite, unpredictable. (Certain privileges afforded me this perspective with little to no cost to me).
Macéda found that musicalities in native lifestyles were more than mere analogies, they were directly connected to their relationship with nature. In my (limited) observations of the contemporary life in the modernized regions, there is a different interface between the similar traits of imprecision and indefiniteness, and the predominant Western pop music being sung in the shower and broadcasted on the radio. In other words, these traits appear in a different context and to a less severe degree than the native culture. The aspect of Western-influenced pop culture – and therefore its music – is not only the remnants of Western musical and life values initiated during colonial times, but it also “updates” the aesthetic of the modernized or modernizing regions.
National Museum of Art, Manila.
Clustered across Manila, massive economic enterprises advertise monolithic-mindsets by their sheer size, and with surrounding cranes foreshadowing even more growth and resource-use. It is not difficult to perceive that for a person whose family’s lively-hood in the city depends on selling flip-flops and single cigarettes in between car lanes, a modern aesthetic, whose grandest advertisement are the towers I described, may be the only viable avenue and also consolation. The “gain”-based sect of the modern aesthetic exploits nature rather than “accommodates with nature”, or at least does not place explicit importance on harmony with it as in the “primitive” cultures of SE Asia. The Western influence on Philippine pop music means that it adheres to “Western idioms” (see top of “April 28th” post), in which strict, precise and closed systems of time and harmony dominate the aesthetic (see also “May 5th” post). A precise and “closed system” mindset can also be seen in imitations of American infrastructure, and far more so, of course, in America itself: the gated community, the blocky expressway and overpasses, the financial district versus the residential developments, mass-producing factories for disposable products.
My goal here is not an ethnomusicological report on modern Manila, but rather extending upon what I have gathered of Macéda’s works, in order to elaborate my interpretation of his ideas. Like I mentioned in the third paragraph, a degree of imprecision and indefiniteness that Macéda said of native cultures can be seen today, just not in the popular music culture; then I noted this caveat as being a key difference between modern Manila and pre-colonial Philippines in the interface between lifestyle and music aesthetics. For instance, though consumer-level automobiles is owed to modernity, a looseness of lifestyle is demonstrated when pedestrians and drivers stop and go in any place on the street or sidewalk (if there are any) at will; and no local is surprised to see five people situated on the roof of a work vehicle. Most to all public transportation has no fixed schedule, forcing one to approximate time – indefinitenes. Free improvisation with what is available – in any aspect of daily life – and indefinite measurements is still present in the life of modern Philippines, and is something I will dearly miss from here in the U.S.
Here is a taste, a video of some friends and I interacting with the environment (the friend, a local, who put together the video happened to choose “Western” popular music):