Sounds of history

One reason why history classes are often so boring is that students get an overdose of names, places and dates, mostly as written texts. If there are illustrations, these are usually from the West: famous and infamous men (and occasionally women), a few castles here and there, lots of battle scenes.

Modern photography comes around only in the early 19 th century, initially developing very slowly. The occasional photograph we get in history classes are black and white or sepia. I have to remind my students that people a hundred, a thousand years ago, did live in a technicolor world.

Fortunately, for more recent times, we are now more conscious about building up our archives. The Filipinas Heritage Library has an online archive for photographs (retrato.com.ph) and film maker and historian Nick Deocampo assures mework is progressing for moving pictures as well.

History needs to be re-imagined, animated. We need to make more visuals accessible to schools, in whatever form they’re available in, and which can be used to teach not just history but also the sciences as well, for example chemistry and physics (optics in particular).

Muted history

I do worry though that while we’re improving with visual materials from the past, we still lack an important ingredient to make history more palatable, even enjoyable: sounds. Without exposure to the sounds of the past, history will be mute or muted. This can happen even for fairly recent events.

Think of the Edsa revolt of 1986 and we mainly see the crowds and the noise of the crowds, occasionally punctuated by snippets of speeches of politicians. I have yet to see documentaries where you actually get to listen to people talking about how they felt. When I see videos of people giving flowers to the soldiers, I wonder what they said as they handed out the flowers.

What’s even more deficient in the documentaries are the sounds of music. Because I was at Edsa, I know people were breaking out singing. It’s a national trait: We begin to hum, then sing out when we’re tense, or when we’re bored and we do this anywhere: in a store, walking down the street, or overthrowing a dictatorship.

There was music at Edsa, a mix of the religious and patriotic. During martial law, people had built up a repertoire of protest and revolutionary songs, which were tapped at Edsa ... and which continues to happen, with many new songs, at street protests across the political spectrum.

Let’s push back further into history. Think of World War II and the Japanese occupation and all we have in history books and films are bleak images of suffering and death. We forget everyday lives, and people still making music. Bands played, people sang and danced, through the darkest periods of our history.

The American occupation had its music, too, including nationalist songs disguised as kundiman and performed in bodabil (vaudeville). “Bayan Ko” dates back to that era.

Can we go further back, to the 19th century, to reconstruct the music of the past?

UP Diliman’s College of Music is rendering a valuable public service by doing that, collecting recordings, as well as old musical scores, some coming from family archives like those of the Legardas, a major supporter of the Manila Symphony Orchestra.

Just taking care of the scores is a feat in itself—I’ve watched the archival staff handling the music sheets with gloves, very gently “cleaning” the documents with brushes and powder and then using special tape to mend tears.

‘Saysay Himig’

For their centennial this year, the College of Music released a 3-CD set called “Saysay Himig: An Anthology of Transcultural Filipino Music (1880-1941),” where the country’s best musical performers, from the Philippine Madrigal Singers to the Manila Symphony Orchestra, resurrect our past (saysay) by playing music (himig) from the past, almost all the pieces by Filipino composers. The title is modest, the oldest pieces in the collection actually dating back to the late 18th century. The editor for this valuable collection, which includes informative notes, is Arwin Tan.

The first CD is a compilation of piano music, all from the 20th century and here I will name all of the composers just to underscore the fact that we have many composers of Filipino classical music: Julio Nakpil, Marcelo Adonay, Nicanor Abelardo, Francisco Santiago, Ramon Valdez y Pica, Antonio Molina, Arturo Buenaventura, Francisco Buencamino Sr., Ignacio Massaguer and one piece attributed to Dolores Paterno, which makes for interesting discussions around gender and music.

The second CD is devoted to vocal and instrumental music, more of popular and folk music, including religious villancicos, as well as the kundiman, kumintang and balitaw. Jocelynang Baliwag, from the Katipunan era, is in this CD. Bayan Ko is not in the anthology but Lou Borromeo’s My Beautiful Philippines is, a nationalist piece played with jazz influence.

The third CD is ensemble music, mainly symphonic. Here again you find nationalism coming in, as in Julio Nakpil’s Salve Patria: Gran Marcha and Daniel Fajardo’s Veteranos de la Revolucion.

The compilation was described as “transcultural” because we see how Philippine music absorbed the sounds and styles of many musical traditions: local ones, as well as those of our colonizers (except the Japanese).

D. M. Irving describes Manila as “the world’s first global city” in his book “Colonial Counterpoint”. The gateway to and from China in a global market across two oceans, Manila was a crossroads not just for commodities but also ideas and culture, with people visiting from all over the world, including as far as South America and Africa.

Irving notes how the Spaniards initially tried to suppress local music, which was seen as pagan, but came to realize how they could do their missionary work by tapping into our himig. Filipinos in turn adapted from the outside instruments and rhythms to develop our ownmusic.

Making the anthology truly transcultural are two compositions by foreigners who were apparently captivated by our music. One is a transcription of work by Jean Baptiste Mallat, a Frenchman better known to historians as a travel writer. It seems that Mallat also had a musical ear and transcribed a kumintang, a song traditionally accompanied by a guitar but modified here to include a piano.

The other piece by a foreigner is Alexander Lippay’s Themes and Variations on the Philippine National Anthem. Lippay was an Austrian who settled down in the Philippines, teaching at UP and founding the Manila Symphony Orchestra. Listen carefully to catch all 13 versions of our Lupang Hinirang.

The anthology only covers compositions up to 1941 and it will not be surprising if we have another anthology that takes us into the present. I’m hoping we’ll be able to have this first Saysay Himig made more accessible to schools where it can help students to reimagine the past with music adding color to people’s lives.

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