Lasting legacy
(José Maceda doing fieldwork in Palawan, from the CD cover of Archival Sound Series: José Maceda, Field Recordings in Philippines, 1953-1972. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.)
NOTABLE compositions and writings displayed in the form of interactive audio and visual installations, electronic sound works, restored photographs and artifact collection ripen every spectator’s artistic and nationalistic thought.
“Attitude of the Mind Exhibit,” organized by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology (UPCE), honored National Artist Jose Maceda's high regard for communal music.
While there are numerous music experts in the realm of local art scene, what makes an artist truly worth-emulating is his desire to transfigure the native musical environment.
(The contemporary art exhibition collected works that reflected Jose Maceda’s corpus of spatial environments. Photo by Paola Navarette)
Hailed as the country’s first ethnomusicologist, Maceda was able to collect field tapes amounting to 2,500 hours of traditional music of Philippine linguistic groups and incorporate it with his piano compositions, filtering the heavily Western-influenced Asian music landscape.
Head Curator Dayang Yraola said the social awareness of Maceda could serve as an impetus for change.
“With my exposure to the materials, I realized that it can guide creatives and scholars, even scientists just like myself, who are seeking philosophical guidance, within and even beyond the realms of indigenous traditions," she said in an online interview with the Dapitan Post.
Yraola shared the four concepts framing the exhibit that are often attributed to Maceda’s craft: nature as source of sound experience, space as state of things, technology as people and time as experience.
“The manner of presentation was a different challenge, [but] for this part, we just have to trust the inherent kindness of the universe,” she said.
Visual artist Leo Abaya paid homage to Maceda through a grand piano owned by the artist himself as a receptacle for rice grains.
“I started thinking of the sounds of rice mills, which I am very familiar with growing up in a home beside one, remembering too the sounds of rice threshers and water flowing from irrigation canals to rice paddies until I came up with an idea to unify rice with the piano,” he told the Dapitan Post in an online interview.
(“Begone drizzle, go away, rain! The rice grains will rot and the coconut palm will be slippery,” a visual installation by Leo Abaya. Photo by Paola Navarette)
An essay wherein Maceda questioned himself saying, “What has all of this got to do with coconuts and rice?” during his preparation for a recital became the inspiration of Abaya for his impeccable installation.
“His reorientation as a classical concert pianist for me was a visionary and courageous shift but also cognizant of the avant-garde music movement at the time or space he belonged to,” Abaya added.
Espousing anthropology in his archival installation, Ricky Francisco demonstrated the ingenious spirit of Maceda by noting the role of music in human culture.
“I zoomed in on the photos, notes, and descriptions Maceda had in the gongs played by the Kalinga and the other ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleras; and used that as an entryway to illustrate the general principles which he used in understanding the communal music,” he said in an online interview with the Dapitan Post.
Francisco was also inspired by the lifelong desire of Maceda to produce music that reflected the social lives of indigenous people.
“His music, which looked into the ritual and communal aspect of creating music differed not just from his contemporaries, but also to many composers now,” he said.
Jose Maceda’s enviable work in the exhaustive dissection of various traditional music proved that the primacy of social consciousness in one’s life is never forsaken as it is one of the qualities that endure.
"The Attitude of the Mind" exhibit is a part of Maceda 100, a year-long series of momentous events that sought to celebrate the legacy and the 100th birth year of Jose Maceda.
The exhibit was unveiled to the public last September 26, and would run until December 2, 2017 with support from National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCAA), UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, and the Museum Foundation of the Philippines. --PAOLA NAVARETTE
