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Society for Ethnomusicology

Jos Maceda and the Paradoxes of Modern Composition in Southeast AsiaAuthor(s): Michael TenzerSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 93-120Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852513

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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

Jose Maceda and the Paradoxes ofModern Composition in Southeast AsiaMICHAEL ENZER University of British Columbia

Maybe the sonority of music had become more interesting than before, butlisteners, accustomed for a millennium tofollowing the keys in their royalcourt intrigues, heard a sound without understanding it. Anyway, thetwelve-tone empire soon disappeared. After Schoenberg came Varese, andhe abolished not only keys but the tones (the tones of human voices andmusical instruments), replacing them with a subtle, no doubt magnificentstructure of noises, but also inaugurating the history of something differentbased on different principles and a different language .... The history ofmusic had ended in a flowering of audacity and desire.MilanKundera,TheBook of Laughter and ForgettingThere is an old proverb: "Man makes plans... God laughs." The Composermakes plans... Music laughs.MortonFeldman,A Compositional Problem

During the early and mid-twentieth century, the cultivation of contem-porary art music composition in urban centers throughout Asia, Africaand South America created new cultural contexts for Western music. Peopleidentifying themselves as composers emerged where few or none had beenbefore, working out their ideas on score paper and building musical com-munities, sometimes from scratch, to sustain their ventures. Over time theyattempted to make their approach to the Western tradition not just a repli-cation of imported European knowledge received at colonial and mission-ary hands, but a living, local entity. This process was social as well as musi-cal, insofar as composers envisioned new cultural landscapes with themselvesas empowered agents in their creation. At first, most were schooled in con-servative institutions offering an education of hymns, marches, or the nine-teenth-century symphonic romanticism then widely thought to have universalrelevance and meaning. But many at a certain point looked up from their? 2003 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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94 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003hymnals or sonatas and wondered how that music connected to their lives,and how it ought to.'

The Filipino musician and ethnomusicologist Jose Maceda represents acase in point. Over the course of three-quarters of a century of performance,research, and composition, he sought to reshape contemporary musical lifein the Philippines and throughout East and Southeast Asia. From the 1950son, Maceda attempted to investigate, and ultimately embrace and transformthe spirit of European compositional modernism-particularly the music ofthe Greek emigre' to Paris, Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), and the French emigreto New York, Edgard Varese (1885-1965)-and to integrate it with the mu-sical principles and aesthetics of his own homeland.My contacts with Maceda-the man, his aspirations, his community, hismusic, and his writings-have been the stimulus for this article and homage.2

Although his scholarly writings have circulated somewhat more widely thanhave his music compositions, here I draw attention to the latter works, at-tempting to discover relationships between his experiences and creative life.3By casting postwar atonality and Southeast Asian traditional genres as inter-locutors, Maceda has enacted a remarkable cultural drama.

Sonatas and Coconuts: First InklingsMaceda launched his career as a concert pianist before delving into his-torical musicology, later turning to ethnomusicology, and then finally to

composition. In 1947 he played a series of recitals featuring Beethoven'sAppassionata sonata before many of Manila's cosmopolitan acolytes of Eu-ropean culture. In preparing and performing, as he told me, he was repeat-edly provoked by an interior voice posing what was for him an epiphanicand previously unasked question, "What has all of this got to do with coco-nuts and rice?" With his inner sense of contradiction and conflict, he may aswell have asked: what have Western musical values to do with Asian ones,what has composition to do with ethnomusicology, and what had placed himin the position of feeling impelled to resolve these issues?A remarkable aspect of his self-questioning was not so much its antici-pation of new musical directions as its special sensitivity in Philippine con-texts. For Western music in the Philippines is as old as the Spanish arrival in1565, and its dissemination as hoary as Manila's University of Santo Tomas,which predates Harvard. The absence of "coconuts and rice" -implicitly, ofindigenous, pre-colonial musics-was not in itself unusual in the experienceof someone like Maceda, who had grown up under American occupation andin a middle class community of professionals, clerics and civil servants.This sort of perspective did not arise as a consequence of young Filipinomusicians' musical nourishment being exclusively and literally European in


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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 95

origin, for European tonality was deeply enough rooted in Manila artisticcircles to have generated its own traditions of piano music, art song, and soon. One of these genres was the nineteenth century kundiman, a distinc-tively Philippine type of song musically cousin to the Indonesian kroncongbut much more of a literate genre, like French chanson, with known com-posers, published scores, and a piano-centered domestic audience. This wasnot an overtly nationalistic and symphonic Philippine art music in the roman-tic tradition, as would arise in the mid-twentieth century, but nonethelessan unselfconscious and treasured native expression. Such were the musicalartifacts of Maceda's childhood milieu, which inculcated aspiring musicianswith a sense of the inexorable authority of European tonality, and fed thetenacious illusion that there was nothing else musically Phillipine to discover.Maceda was born in Manila in 1917 and received his academic and mu-sical training there without losing cultural contacts with Laguna, the prov-ince of his forebears. He was sent to Paris with philanthropic and familysponsorship in 1937 to study the piano, where his primary teachers wereMadame Bascourret de Gueraldi and Alfred Cortot, a specialist in early mod-em and romantic repertoire and a student of Chopin's disciple Decambes.Maceda also worked briefly with Nadia Boulanger, doyenne of mentors to ageneration of American composers, including Aaron Copland, VirgilThomson, Elliott Carter, and many others. In 1941 he received the Dipl6mede Virtuosite at the Ecole Normale de Musique, returning home soon there-after because of difficulties under the German occupation. Maceda's recitalprogram from June 16, 1941 at the Manila Metropolitan Theatre reflectsCortot's tutelage by including the Bach-Busoni Organ Toccata, Chopin Etudesand Scherzi, character pieces by Paganini/Liszt, Albeniz, Debussy and Ravel,plus the Appasionata, which was to be a performance staple for Maceda anda provocative musical interlocutor. The performances of these years, he re-lated to me, constituted:

partof my experiences as a concert pianist; . . . the act of concretizing, express-ing the thoughts of classical Europeancomposers through refined techniques,phrases, oppositions of tonic anddominantchords, colors, touch, fingerings,armmovements, more than musicological readings ... are what brought me to livea way of life, a musical philosophy. (p.c., April 2001)Maceda speaks of long hours roaming the streets of Paris during his yearsthere, and even longer ones reading in his new language, until, he felt, he trulyabsorbed the culture's sensibility and taste. "Ithink my experience of Europewas deep," he told me, "and I got to understand French literature, thinking,

and especially the music." French students in his residence asked him whyhe didn't study "Oriental"music and he tried to ignore them, but their insinu-ations could not be undone, though at the time he felt that he "did not reallyknow what they were referring to." From 1946-50 he studied piano in San


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Figure 1. Two photos of Maceda: 1941 recital photo and 1997.

PIANIST


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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 97Francisco with Debussy specialist Robert Schmitz, and in 1950-51 studiedmusicology with Paul Lang at Columbia; there he encountered the work ofColumbia anthropologist Franz Boas, who had died only a few years before,and also the newest developments in art music composition.These experiences conditioned his exposure to two sets of seminalinfluences that were connected in a hidden way. First, in the late 1940s, hecame to know the avant-garde music of Varese, Pierre Schaeffer's musiqueconcrete, and thereafter, the music of Xenakis. Subsequently, upon return-ing to the Philippines in 1952, his encounter with the jaw's harp of Mindoroisland led to decades of research in the Philippines and elsewhere, and tothe amassing of a substantial body of artifacts, data, and writings about oth-erwise unresearched traditional musics. He would go on to synthesize thesetwo sets of influences in his compositional creativity. But how did jaw's harpsintertwine with moder composition, and to what end? In Europe and NorthAmerica the works of Varese and Xenakis played a critical role in the musi-cal debates of the day, but to Maceda their music also had a different set ofpotentialities.The Modernism of Varese and Xenakis

During his postwar student years spent abroad, Maceda's approach tocomposition was conditioned by the polemics regarding the total serialismof Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt. Maceda wasparticularly attracted to the ideas of Varese and Xenakis, both of whom criti-cized as overly systematic the way that serial techniques, in the postwar years,had come to encompass not only contrapuntal and harmonic parameters butalso rhythm, dynamics and other aspects as well. They countered that suchsystems represented an unproductive and confining substitute for the praxisof harmonic tonality.4 In 1955, at the height of serialism's Parisian vogue,Xenakis wrote:

Linearpolyphony destroys itself by its very complexity; what one hears in real-ity is nothing but a mass of notes in variousregisters. The enormous complex-ity prevents the audience from following the intertwining of the lines and hasas its macroscopic effect an irrationaland fortuitous dispersion of sounds overthe whole extent of the sonic spectrum. (Xenakis 1971:8)Similarly, Varese spoke of the prewar twelve-tone approach as a

"hardening of the arteries," and ... [he] considered it a great tragedy thatSchoenberg, having freed music from tonality, subsequently sought refuge in asystem.We learnfromthis that Varesesaw the willingness of composers to adoptapproaches devised by others as tantamount to confession of a failure of imagi-nation-but also that inventing a system oneself was hardly any better. (Ber-nard 1987:xvii)5


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98 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Before the war Varese had spoken out prophetically about the "libera-tion of sound" through orchestral and electroacoustic complexes unencum-

bered by either tonality or serialism (Varese [1967] 1998). Liberation, asembodied in works like Deserts (1952) and Poeme Electronique (1958, com-missioned by architect Le Corbusier for the Philips pavilion at the BrusselsWorld's Fair), constituted for him a fresh metaphor of sound as abstract sculp-ture, or, as he put it, a growing crystal, paralleling scientific advances.

Throughout his career Xenakis sought comparably impersonal evoca-tions of nature, and there is an uncanny resemblance between some of hisarchitectural drawings of the period (produced while apprenticing under LeCorbusier), and the massed patterings of instrumental parts in the scoresfor works such as Achorripsis (1956) and Pithoprakta (1952).6 A proto-theorist of chaos with training in mathematics and engineering, Xenakis wasinterested in the laws governing the behavior of masses of indeterminateevents and the way probabilities group natural phenomena into distinctpatterns and shapes. Both he and Varese created sound masses as indepen-dent, transforming, interacting parameters, in a kind of stratification of un-diluted acoustical elements. Both imagined musical stasis and motion as aresult of the spatial and timbral, rather than harmonic or melodic, qualitiesof these interactions.

By way of illustration, page 41 of the score from Varese's compositionInt6grales (Figure 2) exhibits six aerophone (winds and brass) strata in con-stant mutation: piccolo I and tenor trombone; piccolo II, Bb clarinet and Ctrumpet; oboe and Eb clarinet; bass and contrabass trombone; and Frenchhorn (alone). Each stratum assumes a special rhythmic identity consisting ofalmost-but-not-quite-repeating figures, fills a distinctive registral space andcolors it with a pungent array of dissonant compound intervals, giving thevivid aural impression of hard, pointy objects (crystals?) in mobile-like mo-tion around a fixed perspective (the listener's). These textures are punctu-ated, commented upon, and reinforced by layered percussion, a trademarkof Varese's because of its perceivedly liberating contribution of a noise spec-trum. The music suggests a kinesthesia of sonic polyhedrons.Conceived as structured in accord with scientifically defined behaviorssuch as "crystallization" and "the calculus of probabilities," the compositionsof Varese and Xenakis sought to attain a higher form of universality thanWestern music had achieved through tonality and its putative heir, serialism.7Both composers spoke of natural processes rather than musical syntax, andeschewed the conventional distinction between scientific and artistic modesof inquiry. Interest in spatio-mathematical conceptions and visual-art move-ments such as Cubism gave their work an additional synaesthetic aspect.Like them, Maceda also rejected serialism, understanding the music ofVarese and Xenakis as part of Western music's search for universality. Remark-


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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 99Figure 2. From Varese Integrales (1926:41).

&1

ably, it was these same transcendental ambitions that provoked him to lis-ten with growing attentiveness to Philippine traditional music, and to hearit as both culturally embedded and something more than expressions boundto a particular time and place.


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100 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Maceda's Journey Part Two: Compositions and Research

In the 1950s and '60s Maceda traveled widely, continued to give pianorecitals in the Philippines, and began a long period of fieldwork throughoutthat country (Mindoro, Mindanao,Palawan, Luzon and elsewhere) as wellas in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia. In 1968 he spent a year studyingcandomble (among other musics) in Bahia,Brazil,and worked for a time inUganda and Ghana. In 1952 he accepted a faculty post at the Universityofthe Philippines (in Quezon City, a Manilasuburb), and began amassing itsarchival collection of instruments, recordings and photographs. In 1954 hemarriedCanadianpianist MadelynClifford,who bore them four daughters.He heard Poeme Electronique at the 1958 Brussels Fair,and worked onmusique concrete with PierreSchaefferat the French Radio studios in Paris.He attended the 1961 East-West ummit in Tokyo, meeting Xenakis and wit-nessing the introduction of the music of Berio, Madema and Xenakis to Ja-pan.8Theyears1957-58 and 1961-63 were spent in the U.S.,finishinga Ph.D.in ethnomusicology with Mantle Hood atUCLAn 1963-the same yearthathis first mature composition, Ugma-ugma, was premiered in LosAngeles.Maceda's fieldwork encompassed a varietyof ruraland court traditions,but in the Philippines-always the linchpin of the researches-court centersnever grew as powerful as they did elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Thus hisinterests oriented toward villagebeliefs, customs and taxonomies, the abun-dant and comparatively simple musical instrument technologies, their usein rituals and open-air celebrations, and the varied musical structures andtimbres that he encountered.But other musicalconcerns remained lucid andpressing. Varese'ssoundliberation beckoned, suggesting a liberation beyond that for which it wasoriginally ntended.The absence of tonalityor twelve-tone rows in works likeIntegrales appeared to Maceda to unshackle Western music from its moor-ings in Western culture. He later wrote: "It s as if an acme of pitch organiza-tion was askingof itself another mode of conduct, other parameters,whichVarese supplied" (1988). Maceda came to envision the language of Vareseand Xenakis as a vehicle that could be reharessed to serve a different cul-ture andway of life. Viewed this way, avant-gardemusic could take on apro-gressive social function in the Philippines by articulating he repressedvoicesand aesthetics of its marginalizedpeoples in a reinvigoratingmodem way.Macedahoped, in other words, that insofar as Varesehad undone the inher-ent Westemness of the avant-garde,hen such music could be in effect a slateon which Macedacould inscribe traditionalSoutheastAsianvalues, therebydisseminating hem more broadly han everbefore. But he was also faced withthe dilemmaof how to transformavant-gardemusic to achieve a compatibilitywith its new context. Maceda explained, with reference to Varese andXenakis:


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102 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003world. The musical techniques used in musical forms prefer melodic ambigu-ity, repetition and diffusion to an identification and isolation of things as theseare brought about by a system of logic known as causality. (1986:46)But even as he reported these essentials, in his mind's ear Maceda wasstill responding as a composer to the stochastic agglomerations of Varese andXenakis, understanding them to possess compatible characteristics. Withtheir shifting sounds and colors, their structural processes that through in-cremental change and overall continuity suggest drone, and their radical waysof deploying, or reclassifying, the structures and materials of Western mu-sic, thus giving them new meaning, these musics became also for him ex-

pressively congruent to Southeast Asian ones. Philosophically underpinningthe similarity lay what he saw as a transcendence of the dualisms of post-Aristotelian thought through a less self-conscious, ostensibly more natural andimpersonal approach to music, as suggested, in his own manner, by Xenakishimself: 10

In 1954 I denounced linearthought (polyphony) and demonstrated the contra-dictions of serial music. In its place I proposed a world of sound masses, vastgroups of sound-events, clouds and galaxies governed by new characteristicssuch as density, degree of order, and rateof change, which requireddefinitionsand realizationsusing probability theory. (1971:182)Xenakis' conceptualization, with its goal of achieving universality

through replicating natural phenomena via mathematical models, was moreabstract than that of Maceda, with its grounding in traditional ruralpractices.Maceda was thus less interested in Xenakis' techniques than in his musicalresults, which, to Maceda, could approximate the collective sonic output ofevents like Southeast Asian village rituals. It is paradoxical that Maceda couldfind the music of the Western avant-garde to be both universal and applicableto Southeast Asian values; as it were, one man's crystals are another man'scoconuts.As one technique of grappling with tensions inherent in reconciling thesedomains, Maceda juxtaposed large groups of native Philippine instrumentsin his first compositions. In these formats he wrote layers of precise and in-tricate rhythmic patterns to produce timbral fields in which individual ele-ments combine into regions of drifting colors and drones. A note to a per-formance of Agungan (1966) explains:Agungan uses six gong families or qualities of gong sounds to project the vari-ety of sounds that can be producedwithin a certainhomogenousness of sounds-the sounds of gongs. In this artificialorchestra, a musical permutationof soundevents is based on isolated sounds produced by the people who play these in-struments;however, the organizationof these sounds is not a mere copy of nativemusical invention. Rather t is a result of new concepts seeking to draw out thephysical qualities of non-pitch sounds. Some of these qualities are sound den-


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Tenzer:Jose Maceda 103sity (when the peaks of about sixty gongs are heardtogether in mixtures of timedelays);color (mixturesof scale structures,instrumentalblends, types of attacks,effects sounded by mallets of variousmaterials,hand slides, dampenings, etc.);and rhythm (there is no metric regularityof phrases anywhere).In a second phase of works, he assembled participatory, ritualistic event-

pieces. For Pagsamba of 1968 and Udlot-udlot of 1975 he designed activi-ties for large auditoriums or outdoor spaces involving groups of hundredsor more singing or playing gongs, bamboo clappers and buzzers, blurring theaudience-performer distinction. In such cases a few rhythms or phonemeswould be distributed among the participants, sometimes aleatorically by giv-ing groups of performers freedom to reiterate a few simple designated pat-terns at will, and at other times with fully worked-out versions scored for fiftyor more performers, aspiring toward a similar sonic result. In 1974 he urban-ized ritual music in the style of musique concrete, marshalling twenty Ma-nila radio stations to simultaneously broadcast parts of his Ugnayan. Heprepared a unique set of village music sounds for each station, creating a mixfor the millions that could be experienced communally wherever peoplegathered with portable radios and combined the sounds in ways that theychose. Figure 3 gives a page from Udlot-udlot.Since the 1980s Maceda has composed intricately scored works forsmaller ensembles, including Western chamber groupings and mixed groupsof Western and Philippine instruments, as well as for enormous Westernorchestral ensembles. The progression from the graphically notated loose-ness of the second-phase compositions to the complexity of recent ones isbest seen as an aesthetic development rather than a shift. Both idioms drawon Southeast Asian sounds, but it is the intended performers-mainly un-trained in the former case and professional in the latter-who have changed(see appendix for a list of Maceda's works to date).A 1953 research project jointly conducted by Maceda and anthropologistHarold Conklin documented music of the Hanunoo of Mindoro, then a forest-dwelling, un-Christianized group of some six thousand. Something of the in-ner soundscape Maceda gradually developed for his compositions may beevoked by comparing the music corresponding to the Varese score presentedabove (or that of a Xenakis work such as Achorripsis) with the recording byMaceda and Conklin of a Hanunoo festivity, kalipay. ' This field document isonly one of myriad possible examples that could be used for these purposes.I stress that I am only trying to shed light on the most general kinds of connec-tions, appropriately leaving the rest to imagination. Nor have I made any at-tempt to visually render this obviously spontaneous and freely coordinatedjoyous activity. (In the absence of this recording, readers could substitute anysimilar one depicting a multiplicity of simple, separate and simultaneous mu-sical activities using comparable instruments in a collective context.)


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104 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Figure 3. From Maceda's Udlot-udlot (1975).

UDLOT-UDLOT (HESITATIONS)for 6, 60, 600 or more performers Jose Maceda (1975)TIME MIXED NSTRUMENTS TlMEDRONE in in VOICESmin. Group Group2 min.

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Kalipay uses stick-beaten gongs (agung), tiny guitar-like kudyapi andthree-stringed fiddles called gitgit (both strung with human hair), togetherwith hollers, whoops and other miscellaneous sounds. The aural experienceis enhanced by the listener's shifting perception of the position and balance

0001 SILENCE

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DRONE:Playersbeata pair of percussionsticks continuously,slowlyuntil he end ofthe music. They willwalk in stylized stepsaround a big circle.11: J J :11

12345MIXEDNSTRU-MIXED INSTRU-MENTS: Performersremainseated in thecenter of the circle.Each player hits,pounds, blows hisintrumenttwice: oneat the end of count-ing the 1st number,and another at theend of counting the2nd number. Eachplayer should counthis numbers at aspeed different fromone close to him.VOICES:Mixedsing-ers stand and sing to-gether in one sectorof the circle. Duringperiods of Silence,they should changeplaces, walktowardsanother sec:or andprepare for theirnext tu,n to sing.NO. OF PERFORM-ERS: For 6 players -one plays the Drone,four play Mixed In-struments and onesings for the Voice.For 60 performers -10 play the Drone,40 play the MixedIn-struments and 10sing Voices; etc. Themusic maybe playedhalf its length for 20'or 1/4th for 10'

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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 105of these sounds in the recording. Whether this fluidity is due to the unsteadi-ness of hand-held microphones or the relative movements of participants "onthe ground" is inconsequential, since kalipay is naturally no prosceniumperformance but a village activity. What we hear are layers of changing tim-bres in constant motion, and in discrete registers. One's attention passes fromthe fluctuation of rich partials emitted by gongs struck at varying places onthe surfaces, in a frenetic, unsynchronized cluster of simple rhythms, to theebb and flow of delicate masses of strummed or bowed strings, and the oc-casional cacophony of human shouts and ululations as the merrymakingreaches a critical mass of intensity. And in all of this sound the pitch languageis essentially reduced to one or two tones per participant, so that what oneexperiences is an action primarily of colors. As a creative listening exercisesimulating the kinds of sonic connections Maceda inferred over the years, itis illuminating to juxtapose recordings of this type of sound-event with mu-sic of Maceda's avant-garde influences. It becomes effectively possible to hearXenakis in the Philippines.Further illustrative of this aesthetic are Figure 4, an excerpt from Maceda'sSuling-suling (1985), a work scored for ten flutes (Southeast Asian bambooones are encouraged in the composer's note to the score), ten bamboo buzz-ers, and ten flat gongs; and Figure 5, from the 1995 Two Pianos and FourWinds (clarinet, French horn, bassoon and trombone).12 These pieces, typi-cal of his post-1980 music, each consist of a single movement of around thirtyminutes. The length and characteristic slow pace make excerpting difficult;yet in both of these cases, as in a Xenakis score or Le Corbusier drawing, theshapes traceable by the eye convey some flavor of the musical result.In Figure 4 the flutes, divided in two groups, execute a simple hocketpattern on clustered chords while the percussion groups pyramid in and out,charting intricate subdivisions of the beat, staggered both internally and withrespect to one another. Billowing and irregular in comparison to the flutes,they recall Xenakis' probability distributions. Following soon on this excerpt,some of the flutes add a simple, sustained melody to the existing texture. Adifferent outcome is achieved with the chamber ensemble in Figure 5. Herethe polyrhythmic dialogue of the winds is constrained to a quasi-polyphonicand pentatonic idiom, while the pianos' octaves, poly-pentatonic when takenin toto, ring out in contrasting dynamics and registers, layered and gong-like.Such a dense texture substitutes harmonic color for the characteristic me-lodic prominence of Southeast Asian pentatonic heterophony. In both caseswhat is highlighted is the mass motion of groups, both sonorous and human.In his writings and in conversation with him in Manila in July 2000,Maceda's comments on his compositions disclosed some of the contradic-tions inherent in their diverse sources of inspiration. Inconsistent from acertain perspective, his words nonetheless illustrate how categories like"European modem" and "Southeast Asian traditional" can be made to merge


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106 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Figure 4. From Maceda's Suling-suling (1985:mm. 266-69).

into a permeable and ambiguous musical imaginary. Showing me the com-plex rhythms and stratified sound layers in the score for an early, conven-tionally-notated work, Kubing, he was insistent that "this is not Westernmusic, it is Asian music. I don't know if you can call these structures rhyth-mic or melodic, these things are intentionally blurred, it is more of an outlayof sounds according to a certain logic that is Asian." But a moment later, with


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Figure 5. From Maceda's Two Pianos and Four Winds (1995:mm. 50-53).

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Horn > >f_ crr J .

,-o 'J r r"r '.1 I-? 1?rr.pC I / CTi .JM"f ' ...the same ardor, he added, "Yes, there is a counterpoint of sounds here, whichcould not have been possible for me without my studies of Palestrina orXenakis. Yes, this is Western music, Western music played with bambootubes and men's voices." "So,"I asked, "areyou saying that on the one handit's Palestrina, and on the other it's a ritual at a village in Mindanao?" "Bravo,"he replied, "yes."Activism

Apart from his varied activities as an ethnomusicologist, Maceda's activ-ism comprises the social philosophy of his compositions themselves, inno-vations in concert programming, conceiving and organizing symposia, andprofessional community-building. The massive ritual-like performance forcescalled for in his earlier works attempted to involve as many Manilans as pos-sible in contemporary music, as well as to expose them to the Philippinethought at the music's basis. Ugnayan, the broadcast piece that used radiostations as if they were musical instruments, was heard-in some form-byhundreds of thousands if not millions. This and other coordinated publichappenings (together with later government awards and recognition) pro-mulgated Maceda's name well beyond musical circles in Manila. His fieldworkexperience distinguished him from most other Asian composers. ToruTakemitsu in Japan, for example, absorbed Asian musics without fieldwork.


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108 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003AlthoughTakemitsuspoke ofJapanese principles like ma and incorporatedshamisen, biwa andshakuhachi into his ensembles, their sounds were es-sentiallyas exotic to him as the gamelanwas to Debussy(Takemitsu1995:56-67; Corbett2000:178). Maceda'sgoalswere in some respects more ambitious,seeking to build a new basis for contemporary music, from instruments totechniques to performance.As a thinkerand creative musician in this spirit,one with few peers in his part of the world, he set an important example.13In a series of writings in the 1960s and '70s Macedaexplained SoutheastAsian musical principles and proclaimed them as antidotes to what he sawas the excessively Westernized and technologized musical culture of theregion (Maceda 1964, 1974, 1979). Some of the prose from these yearsreso-nates presciently with JamesClifford's nsistence that "historiesof emergentdifferences"give a truer picture of late twentieth-century experience thando narrativesof a monolithically hegemonic Western modernity (1988:17).Considering congruences between the Latinatenations Brazil and the Phil-ippines, Macedaobserved:

The sense that binds Europeans ulturallywith other peoples of differentstocks-the AlgeriansndtheFrench,heFilipinos ndtheSpaniards,heMon-goliansand heRussians-maybetaken o mean hat"Europeans"itha Greco-Latinview or a Christian ultureare found not onlywithin the geographicalboundaries f Europe,butalso in otherpartsof theworld,andamongpeoplesof varied tocks ivingunderdifferentphysicalconditions .. (1964:223)Achangeofperspectiveanddirectionsevidentlyn the air.Whilenew theo-riesofchangekeepstreamingrom he West tself-from Europe nd heUnitedStates-it appearshatanother ndperhaps icher ourceof ideas s neededandfound n thevery ives of nativepeoplesall over theworld,whose culturepro-vides freshgrounds or anotherway of thinking, eeling,anddoingthings.AmixtureofLatin,African, ndAmerindianultures nBrazil, s well asthe inter-action of Latinand native traitsamonga Malaysianeople in the Philippinesfurnishuniquegrounds or ameetingandmutual nrichment f these cultures.(1964:227)Such formulations informed the various concerts and symposia thatMacedaorganizedfrom the 1960s, in which he engineered clashes of other-wise remote musical systems. Feeling free to adapt musical modernism tohis own ends, he sought to promote local musical thought in collaborationwith Western interventions, and to assert Southeast Asians' right to adoptelements of European culture in accordance with their own needs and in-terests. Rather than viewing the past as a static tradition and the present adynamicmodernity, Maceda envisioned a new continuity in which the two

invigoratedeach other.At the 1961 East-West ummit in Tokyo he had been struckby the over-whelmingly Europeanleanings of the contemporary music scene in Japan.As Maceda saw it, the invitations that organizersextended to European lu-


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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 109minaries (Berio, Maderna, Nono) reflected a wish to import their latest ad-vances and techniques, but no inclination to transcend them with a nativeexpression or even meet them on equal terms. In response, Maceda organizedthe 1966 UNESCO "Musics of Asia" festival in Manila. An international col-lection of scholars and composers attended, including Xenakis, the Dutchcomposer Ton de Leeuw, Japanese pianist/composer Yuji Takahashi, musi-cologists like Tran Van Khe and Mantle Hood, and many others.'4 Maceda'sbreakthrough was to have the musics of the European avant-garde performedat the symposium in direct sequence with a variety of Asian traditional genres.He wrote:

The Symposiumdoes not intend to be a wholly musicological affair.Besides anobjective examination of music, it tries to introduce new ideas of experimenta-tion and change which underlie the spirit of musical creativityin Europe.Asianmusic is also bound to change ... how is this change to take place? This is ofcourse difficult to foretell-and to control. However by dealingwith avant-gardemusic in the discussions as well as by preparing concerts in which Asian andavant-gardemusics are played in sequence, the symposium may suggest ideasand directions toward such a change. (1971:11-12)He had already tested the idea at a Manila concert hall two years earlier

(Figure 6a), and wrote for the program notes:InAsia-particularly in the Philippineswhere Latinand Orientalculturesmerge,or in Tokyo, where moder Western and old Japanese traditions clash-thereis an audience more culturallyprepared than that of New York or Paristo listento a mixture of variousWestern and Asianmusics on the same program.A musical re-awakeningin Asiaenjoys the privilege of being partialto a West-ern culture which the Eastunderstandsfarbetter than the West understandsAsia.(1964)

Four years later, while in Brazil, he produced a performance bringing togethercandombl, his own music, and that of Xenakis (Figure 6b).Such symbolic actions stimulated the burgeoning activities of new mu-sic composers in Asia. The impetus for an Asian Composers' League (ACL)intensified after the 1966 symposium and developed further during 1968discussions between the already established League of Filipino Composersand certain Taiwanese composers, notably Hsu Tsang-Houei (Hsu in Ryker1990:219). Several gatherings took place in subsequent years under shifting

auspices and with different constellations of delegate countries. Many com-posers in the region (particularly Japanese ones) had long been involved withthe ISCM(International Society of Contemporary Music), an organization thatprovided a model. In existence since 1922, the ISCM held yearly new musicfestivals which, although international in intent, remained quite Euro-Ameri-can in orientation, and were never held outside Europe or North America.In 1971 the first ACL meeting was held in Taipei, with founding member-


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110 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Figures 6a (Philamlife Auditorium, Manila 1964) and 6b (Universidade Fed-eral de Bahia, 1968). Lists of works mounted at concerts organized and pro-duced by Maceda. PROGRAMCONCERTFASIANNDVANT-GARDEUSICPhilamlifeuditoriumNovermber7,1964I. GONGUSICROMINDANAOa. Completeong nsemble d.Kulintangolob. Agungolo e.Completeong nsemblec. GandinganoloSoloists: Amalumuntudn heagungndkulintang

Medandugamansan hegandinganII. INTEGRALESORMALLRCHESTRANDERCUSSION1926) EdgardareseINTERMISSION

III. SOUTHERNHINESELASSICALUSICNSEMBLEa. "CombinationfEight otes,"orClassicalnsemblendPercussionb. "The lumlower,"uite orClassicalnsemble1. Earlypringn heSun 4.Pearl-likeuds2. Smilen heBreeze 5.ThousandlowersnBloom3. Fragrancen heFlowingaterIV. UGMA-UGMASTRUCTURES)OR SIANNSTRUMENTSNDOICES JoseMacedaFigure6a. Concert rogram,Manila,1964.

UniversidadeederalaBahiaDepartamentoulturalSEMINARIOSEMUSICAReltoriaia14.11.68-21 hs.CONCERTOEMUSICAEVANGUARDAAFRO-BRASILEIRADirecao:OSE ACEDAORQUESTRAINFONICAAUFBaPROFESSORESESTUDANTESOSEMINARIOSEMUSICACONJUNTOECANDOMBLIEOLGAEALAKETU

PROGRAMMAI. Cantigas,oquesDancaseCandombleara conjuntooterreiroeOlga ranciscoegisOlgaeAlaketu)II. JoseMaceda: Ugma-ugma.struturasaranstrumentosvozesIII. Yannisenakis: AchorripsisIV. Jos6Maceda: Kubing.usicaara ercussaovozes e homensFigure6b.Concert rogram, ahia,1968.


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delegates from Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Republic of China (Tai-wan), and South Korea in attendance. Later, with meetings held most years,Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia,Indonesia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Israel, Australiaand New Zealand gradually entered the fold. The People's Republic of Chinabegan sending representatives in 1981 (Ryker 1990:7). The ISCMheld its firstAsian meeting in Hong Kong in 1988, jointly with the ACL. These eventsstimulated a world of contemporary music that remains little known beyondthe region, and which owes much of its vitality and direction to Maceda'sinspiration.I attended the impressive 1997 ACLconference in Manila, whose themewas "New Theories of Composition from Music Ensembles in Asia." One ofmy compositions was performed and I read a paper about my research onBalinese music. The six-day series of diverse events brought together nearly250 composer delegates from twenty-two countries and a planning staff ofeighty. On one evening, a twilight concert of new choral works by compos-ers from New Zealand, Taiwan, the Philippines and China was followed bya recital of kontemporer works from the central Javanese music conserva-tory and dances of the Formosan (aboriginal) Tsou and Ami. Taiwan's ChinaFound Workshop Ensemble presented screechingly dissonant scores of newmusic, performed on Chinese instruments with astonishing extended tech-niques. A workshop session was shared by a Samulnori troupe and a liveelectronics ensemble. A superbly rehearsed orchestral concert with thePhilippine Philharmonic featured nine new and innovative works from sevenAsian countries. Seminars and discussions ranged from theories of composi-tion to ethnographic studies of Chinese minority traditions. A recurrent,implicit theme of the conference was that composition, theory and ethno-musicology should interact symbiotically and are impoverished if remainingseparate. 15

What Has Maceda Achieved?For many historical and cultural reasons, Philippine musics and theiroffshoots have not enjoyed the global appeal of, for example, sub-SaharanAfrican musics. Accordingly, Maceda's field tapes have not been influentialfor popular music, or intersected in any way with the transnational music

industry and its concerns with money and power. His collections archivesat the University of the Philippines, with their trove of unexplored material,are in disarray and in need of cataloguing. Published versions of his fieldrecordings are few and rare.16 These have attained nothing like the renownof, for example, Simha Arom's recordings of the Central African Aka, withtheir secondary circulation of millions of dollars' worth of contemporaryrecord sales and royalties (see Feld 2000:261).17 Similarly, Maceda's compo-


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112 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003sitions, because they require large numbers of performers, are costly tomount, dependent upon government and private subsidy, and yield an in-consequentialor negativefinancialreturn.Theiravant-gardismonsigns themto limited popularity and appeal. Personally,Maceda has benefited from aremarkablenumber of internationalgrants,awardsandrecognitions, and heis a well-known public figure in Manila,but he lives modestly, in a small on-campus home.Minimalas the compromisingforces of money andcommercial influencehave been, in gatheringperspective on Maceda's achievements we mayalsoconsider what role the more difficult-to-assessalluresof status and prestigehave played for ethnomusicologists in general, and Maceda in particular.These are the conventional "innocent"compensations of academia,the flipsides of knowledge advancement and intellectual influence, in which ethno-musicologists are entangled. Behind them lie possible moral undercurrentsof exploitation,or the exoticizing of tribalpopulations,whose voices becomemediated or supplanted by urban, academic agendas. On one hand there issomething anachronistic about such a notion in this particularcase, becausewhen Maceda began his fieldwork a half-centuryago there had been liter-ally no prior work in the region. He was an important part of the eagerethnomusicological consciousness of the day, and while hindsight may af-ford a criticaljudgement, that is only proof of the ethical complexity of field-work. As we have seen, Maceda worked to bringperformersof Mindanaoanand other traditions to concert stages, and he advocated energetically andover a long span of time for broader awareness of and empathy for thosemusic cultures.As aFilipinohimself,he could in many respects relate to thosehe studied as compatriots rather than ethnic Others. On the other hand, hewas raisedessentially as a Westerner in the Manilaof his youth. An adult lifespent at the University of the Philippines as a professor representing themusic of traditionalor pre-cosmopolitan peoples is different only in degree,not kind, from that at a comparable (though likely wealthier) Western insti-tution.To complement this view of Maceda's ethnomusicology, we may alsoaskwhere he fits along the spectrum of twentieth-century composers, espe-ciallywith regardto the practice of culturalappropriation.Western art mu-sic composers of the era engaged provocatively and consistently with othertraditions,generating a diverse range of reactions and experiences that re-cent musicology hasbegun to describe in appropriatedetail(Feliciano 1983,Bellman 1998, Bornand Hesmondhalgh 2000). At one end of this spectrumof interests andcommitments, there are such relativelysuperficialnon-West-ern engagements as the commentaryof Xenakis(cited in endnote 7), ClaudeDebussy's paeans to Javanese music, or Messiaen's philological interest inancient Hindurhythms.These standin contrast to Maceda'sabiding, Bart6k-


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Tenzer:Jose Maceda 113like dedication to research and publication, and the careful articulation ofthe relationships between his scholarship and his music. Moreover, whileBart6k lived near to central Europe and operated fully within its geographi-cal and cultural spheres, Maceda has faced the additional challenge of nur-turing modernism in isolation from the generating centers of Western cul-ture.

Maceda did not seek to avoid the challenge by simplifying his music, ascan be seen in the complexity of pieces like his 1992 orchestral Distempera-ment, involving upwards of three dozen independent instrumental parts incomplex rhythms, dynamics and phrasing. The music, with its technicallydemanding instrumental parts, is notated painstakingly on small-staved, over-sized vellum, with lightly ruled vertical lines facilitating the proper alignmentof the parts. Yet despite their resemblance on paper to Xenakis' styles ofabstract architectonics, such works attempted to actualize some SoutheastAsian quality, and were animated by Maceda's vision of cultural and socialrenewal.

By studying and applying older indigenous musical thought, Maceda andhis younger colleagues sought to engineer a benevolent form of appropria-tion. Inspired by a new and empowering sense of musical history that ex-tended much farther back than Spanish conquest, they sought a fusion oftraditional and modern in their music and were unquestionably exhilaratedby the implications of their endeavor. I was struck, when I met for lunch atthe Quezon City campus in July 2000 with a group of music faculty (includ-ing composers Jonas Baes, Ramon Santos, and Chino Toledo), at how allevinced an affecting indebtedness and fealty toward Maceda. They said thathis compositions of the '60s and '70s were what had convinced them that agenuinely Southeast Asian new music was in fact possible, and had inspiredthem to produce not only orchestral and chamber works but also event-ori-ented pieces like Maceda's, which, they felt, collectively effected a degreeof cultural change.From my perspective their claims were justified if somewhat exagger-ated by idealism. The composer in me resonated with their enthusiasm, butthe skeptical ethnomusicologist was more equivocal. They may indeed havereason to feel as they do, given the very fact that they have careers as com-posers in Southeast Asia. The shape-and to some extent the very exis-tence-of these careers owes a great deal to Maceda's original posing of thequestion about coconuts and rice. But their event-pieces were fleeting, one-time events, akin to university new music concerts elsewhere. Presented onthe University of the Philippines campus, few performances permeated theawareness of students beyond Abelardo Hall, the music building.For its part, the Asian Composers League, an especially important out-come of their activities, continues to hold its international gatherings, but


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114 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003like new music organizationselsewhere, it performsand discusses music fora specialized audience consisting mainlyof its members. New music in thePhilippines, like the traditionalmusics on whose shoulders it now strives tostand, remainsperipheral even within the Western music enclaves that en-gendered it. This work, like Varese's music, is liberated sound, not culturalliberation. Indeed, it would be expecting too much to hope for the compo-sitions of Maceda and his colleagues to do more than embody his concep-tion of liberation from excessive Westernization.Formyself as a composer and scholar familiarwith Southeast Asian mu-sics as well as the gamut of contemporary Western composition-rangingfrom hermetic modernism to various kinds of minimalism,neotonality, primi-tivism and cross-culturalhybridization-there remains aprovocative anddis-turbing side of Maceda'sventure. I sense an aura around the high modern-ism of Varese andXenakis,emanatingin partfrom their rhetoric of autonomyand universality,that acts as if to shield their music from the possibility ofhybridization.Even in light of Maceda'seffort, achievement and optimism, Iremain astonished to think of how radicalit was to grasp modernism as be-ing in dialog with Southeast Asian sounds during the '50s, '60s and '70s. Itwas like envisioning a Philippine shamanstraightfrom the pages of NationalGeographic sittingdown as an equalwith a Parisianhomme des belles lettresfor a panel discussion on culture and aesthetics. Could the implications notbe complex, contentious, conditional? So little groundwork had been laid.Even in the contemporary magination, he friction that we can sense betweenmodernist universalityand Southeast Asianparticularitydoes not dissipate.Yet Maceda envisioned the coexistence of the two back then, and his idea oftheir miscegenation lit in him a hope that seemed to hold the potential totransform consciousness in SoutheastAsia. But it is no casting of aspersionsupon Maceda to say that what he mainlyended up doing was transformingother composers, who continue to speak mainlyto each other.

Parisiansand shamans.At around the same time as Maceda,Levi-Strauss(1969:21-30) articulateda less sanguine juxtapositionbetween serialismandthe BrazilianBororo. He extolled musicalexperience as aunique force "withan extraordinary power to act simultaneously on both the mind and thesenses" and held that its qualities are both culturally specific and universal.But for him serialism risked irrelevance by abandoning "generalstructureswhose universalityallows the encoding anddecoding of individualmessages,"and relying instead on "an ever new internallogic." He wrote in this vein:Itmaytherefore urnout that serialmusicbelongsto a universe n which thelistenercouldnot be carriedalongbyits impetusbutwouldbe left behind.Invain he would try to catch up; with every passing day it would appear moredistant and unattainable.Soon it would be too farawayto affect his feelings;onlythe idea of it would remain accessible, before eventually fading away into the


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Tenzer:Jose Maceda 115dark vault of silence, where men would recognize it only in the form of briefand fugitive scintillations. (1969:26)Granting that neither Maceda, Xenakis, nor Varese were serialists, Levi-Strauss' words of foreboding nonetheless apply to them because they were

looking, like the serialists, for "ever new internal logic" eschewing musical"general structures." To modernist composers like Varese and Xenakis, uni-versality-and value-lies in the tones' potential as emancipated sound, itsdepiction of nature as an impersonal force. Theirs was a humanist vision,however debatable and contradictory, of a post-cultural, post-national, post-ethnic future. In contrast, Levi-Strauss's anthropological perspective favoredas an a priori good the universal aspects of musical experience, but only ifsupported by cultural precepts shared within a society. He could not appre-ciate (much less endorse) the possibility that a core value of modern musicis its aspiration to transcend culture, to seek the further musical consequencesof the Western ideal of the ennobled individual. Maceda was drawn to bothof these perspectives, but he could not fuse autonomous modem sound anda communitarian Southeast Asian practice without compromising one or theother set of values. His activities have led to inspiring rhetoric, original mu-sic, and the mobilization of new professional communities. But communi-ties such as the ACL are so indebted to their Western models as to be essen-tially indistinguishable from them, such that the musical reconciliation theyachieve has not been matched by a social one. With a modernist stance to-wards the universality of music sound having prevailed, it is fair to concludethat Western values have also.

One might question whether these dualities and oppositions-betweenthe modern and the mythical, between new music and old, between theurban Westernized world and rural Asia, between composition and ethno-musicology, the avant-garde and tradition, centers and peripheries, sound andculture-are in need of reconciliation. Engaged musicians such as readersof this journal may or may not feel such a need, while the world at largeconstantly reconfigures the tensions in the inexorable course of formingcultural hybrids. Given the presence of so many more economically viablemusical stimuli around us, anomalous hybrids like those created by Macedamay remain undetected. Perhaps we near a point at which music likeMaceda's, and the issues it raises, appear to us as but traces, reminiscent ofLevi-Strauss' "brief and fugitive scintillations." Might Levi-Strauss find it strik-ing that his premonitions of avant-garde music "fading away" into isolationwould be actualized not only by the music's own recondite nature, but alsoby the cultural realities of the global economy?The once fiery polemics about European and American postwar musichave dissipated over time. In its day and milieu that music was of the essenceand crucial for the future. But today the shock of dissonance is easily ignored,


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116 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003and, like a candidate running low in the polls, can be shut out of the debates.Yet for Maceda, absorbed with the paradox of modernism in Southeast Asia,avant-garde composition was not abstract and impersonal, but humane andtransformative.

Once I asked Maceda why, in his opinion, the standard repertories ofWestern art music had made such tremendous inroads into urban East andSoutheast Asia. His answer:

Western music is a revelation-to people everywhere. And this in turnis boundto a legacy of humanism,Greco-Roman ogic and thought. But it is the particu-larityof this music's origins that makes the question of its continuation loomlarge. Now is the time to explore other logics and music potentials. (p.c., July2000)What he intends with the phrase "question of its continuation" is preciselythe crisis that modernism has undergone, its regrettable parting of ways withthe sympathies of its public. And when he says that we should "explore other

logics" he means traditional, Southeast Asian ones steeped in communality. Ithink I understand the forces pulling at him. In my long experience investi-gating Balinese music I encountered a world that fully met my need as a com-poser for sonic challenge, but also awakened me to the satisfactions of a mod-em-day collective music that plays a more vital role in its context than Westernnew music ever will. Yet the urge to find a common ground can be irresist-ible (Tenzer 2000:388). Maceda discovered this for himself in the Philippines,and sought to embrace what he found in his homeland without sacrificing acloseness to the profound revelations of Western music. For him the liberat-ing openness of post-Varese sound was a foothold and an enabling link.

AcknowledgmentsThis article in its original form was presented as a paper at the Toronto 2000Musical Intersections conference under the title "Jose Maceda: A Universa-list's Paradoxes of Southeast Asian Music," on the joint panel New Historiesof Western Music. I am grateful to my co-presenters that day, Bruno Nettland Yayoi Uno, and also to Joseph Lam, for their comments. Thanks also toVera Micznik, Marc Perlman, Elaine Barkin, and three anonymous peer re-viewers for challenging readings of this expanded version.

Notes1. See Ryker 1990 and Nettl 1985.2. Afterknowing his scholarship for some time, I met Maceda n Manila nJanuary1997 atthe Asian Composers' League conference. Our discussions were intense and lively. His TwoPianos and Four Winds,performed at the event, made a strong impression on me. I returnedto Manila n July 2000 especially for a week of conversation and study with him. I joined him


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Tenzer: Jose Maceda 117again ater thatyearin California or his residencyasJean MacDuffVeaux Composer-in-Residenceat MillsCollege, where he was the focus of concerts and symposia, and a number of his workswere given Americanpremieres. My accounts in this article are based on these several discus-sions and subsequent email contact, together with Maceda'swritings and those of others abouthim. (Feliciano 1983 contains an excellent chapter-lengthdiscussion of Maceda'swork in rela-tion to other Asian composers.) I am deeply grateful to Jose for his warmth, hospitality andinspiration. His support of my work on this project also included the loan of a priceless pack-age of personal memorabilia. He read and condones this article, but, naturally,I alone am re-sponsible for it.3. Maceda's Music for Five Pianos and Two Pianos and Four Winds are availablein Ja-pan on an ALMRecords CD (ALCD-54).Among the performers are Yuji and AkiTakahashi, n-ternationallyprominent pianists who commissioned the works and have been instrumentalinintroducing Maceda'swork there. InJuly 2001 musician/producer John Zorn's Tzadik label inNew York issued Colors Without Rhythm, Suling-Suling and the Catholic massPagsamba (TZ7067). See the list of Maceda'sworks at the end of this article.4. Eschewing system, for them, also meant eschewing shared codes of expression. Thisperspective had social and political resonance, especially within the new music community.The zeitgeist of individualismat midcenturyrendered collective endeavors suspect because theyall too easily raised the specter of the totalitarianismvanquished in the war. As RichardToopwrote, "serialism, ike any other approach to composition, is only marginallydescribed by therecitation of its surface mechanics. Its essence lies in the musical, philosophical and aestheticideas and conflicts which it helps to articulate ... The old banalityabout the 'totalitarian'char-acter of serialism,ancient or recent, is probablybest evaluatedby looking at the composers whomade such accusations,whose works would have been a greatdeal more acceptable to Goebbelsand Zhdanov than the music they seek to attack"(1993:52-53).5. He also said, in a 1953 radio interview, that "Schoenberg, Bergand Webern were greatdespite their systems,"and he wrote, in a 1952 letter to LuigiDallapiccola, that "theintellectu-alism of the interval [i.e., the serial concept] is a factor which for me has nothing to do withour age and its new concepts" (in Oullette 1968:173).6. See alsoXenakis' sketches for the Polytopes, a sound-sculptureenvironmenthe designedfor Montreal in 1971 (Xenakis and Revault D'Allonnes 1975).7. Xenakis saw unsystematized music sound as ideallygoverned by "naturalprinciples,"aconviction which elicited from him this rare comment on world traditions, consistent with acertain orientalism:

The force of a work is in its truth ... Alltrulycreative people escape ... the exaltation ofsentiments ... so as to listen only to the music, to have it within us. That is what confersits value, its perennity, independently of the sentiments of the time.It is the same for African,Hindu,Chinese or Egyptianart.Why am I so sensitive to themwithout ever having studied them? Because I appreciate them just as I appreciate the curlof a leaf, the photograph of a galaxy or of a cosmic dust could lighted [sic] by the stars.For in these sorts of things there exist signs made by mankind. Signs that we must see,not as representations, but as relations among them, without any romanticism. If theserelations are sufficiently rich, necessary and elegant, then the piece is a work of art.(1987:48)

See also Xenakis 1971:183, 191-92.8. HenryCowell and ColinMcPhee also attended this meeting, where Cowell reportedthat"the ethnomusicologists wanted to keep everything very pure ... they didn't want anyone totouch the cultures they were studying"(in Tenzer 1993:410). Macedaconfirmed to me that thecomposers and ethnomusicologists had little interaction there.9. Maceda'smost extensive ethnomusicologicalpublications,in additionto the articlescitedhere, are his 1963 dissertation, a 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica entry, the Philippines articlein New Grove's Dictionary (1980), and the book Gongs and Bamboo (1998).


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118 Ethnomusicology, Winter 200310. Maceda often remarked to me that post-Aristoteliandualisms are musically reflectedby tonic/dominant polarities or their substitutes. He defined a kinship between Xenakis andPhilippine musics in terms of the absence of such polarities, "adifferent kind of logic."11. Hanun6o Music of the Philippines (1955). Smithsonian Folkways Cassette Series04466.12. Referringto the recordings listed in footnote 3 above, Figure4 can be heard on theTzadik CD (track 6) beginning at ca. 18:35 and Figure 5 on the ALMCD (track 2) at 4:18.13. One true peer in EastAsia, arguably, s Chou Wen-Chung,whose writings from thoseyears(1968, 1971, 1978) promote a "re-merger"f Western and Asianmusicalthought. But Chouhas been only minimallya fieldworking ethnomusicologist. As an influential teacher and com-poser, he has urged his latter-daystudents to revere old Chinese musical values, though hisimpact for most of his life was felt less in Asia than in New York,through teaching at ColumbiaUniversity.In a New York Times profile of Chinese composers (Ostreich 2001) Chou disparagedtheachievements of his notable disciples such as TanDun, whom he taught in China after the cul-tural revolution. Of him and other students Chou remarks:"Theyreflect the intellectual ambi-ence in China today. They are not in the habit of going to libraries, doing real research, ordebating issues. I'm disappointed. It's not the kind of situation I wanted. What I'm looking foris a spiritualdigestion of one's legacies."To which Tanreplied: "I hink ChouWen-Chungprob-ably hates me. He thinks we haven't concentrated enough on basic studies. He doesn't under-stand why we write so much. But I will always be a wild child."Elsewhere outside the Euro-Americanworld composers have confronted many of the is-sues Macedadidin distinctiveways, though few were asintensively scholarly n theirapproaches.Blum (2001:198-99) provides a summaryof their characteristic dilemmas. Profiles of Africancomposers include Agawu's publications (1984, 1987) on EphraimAmu, a Ghanaian, andKimberlin'stribute (1999) to Ashenafi Kebede, an Ethiopianwho lived in the U.S. The Nige-

rian composer Akin Euba, an activist like Maceda, has long advocated an African art musicthrough compositions, writings, and conferences.14. A fuller list of attendees includes musicologists HaroldPowers, RobertGarfias,DavidMorton, ErnstHeins, BarbaraSmith, NarayanaMenon, Shigeo Kishibe, Rulan Chiao Pian, com-posers Chou Wen Chung, Eliseo Pajaro,LucreciaKasilag,Felipe Padillade Leon, and perform-ers Hussein Malik(santur), Prasidh Silapabanleng(ranaad), Ravi Shankar(sitar), Mrs. ShigeoKishibe (koto), Amahl Lemuntodon (kulintang), a gangsa topaya and sulibao ensemble fromLuzon,Sun Pei Cheng (pipa and chin), and a nanguan Chinese ensemble.After the symposium Xenakis(5 September 1966) wrote to MacedafromTokyo (author'stranslation from French): "Iwas very happy to meet you in Manilaand to see the work you aredoing. Yourgenerosity made a strong impression (and your work) and I ampersuaded that thepath you are following is a good one indeed. I am of one heart and mind with you" (Maceda,personal collection).15. See also Santos 1999.16. Music of the Kenyah and Modang in East Kalimanta, Indonesia (1979). Quezon City:Department of Music Research, Universityof the Philippines.17. Feld's analysis, although mentioning Stockhausen in passing, does not explore therecordings' connections to avant-gardemusic, presumablybecause of their minimal economicsignificance (2000:266-67). Particularly elevant, however, was the impact of Arom'spublica-tions on GyorgyLigeti.

ReferencesAgawu, V. Kofi. 1984. "TheImpact of Languageon MusicalComposition in Ghana:an Intro-duction to the MusicalStyle of EphraimAmu."Ethnomusicology 28(1):37-73.--. 1987. "Conversationwith EphraimAmu: The Makingof a Composer." The Black Per-spective in Music 15(1):50-63.


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Tenzer Jose' Maceda 119Arom,Simha.1991. African Polyphony and Polyrhythm:Musical Structure and Methodology.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress.Bellman,Jonathan, ed. 1998. The Exotic in Western Music. Boston: Northeastern University

Press.Bernard,Jonathan. 1987. The Music of Edgard Var&se.New Haven:Yale UniversityPress.Blum, Stephen. 2001. "Composition."In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,2d ed., edited by StanleySadie,vol. 6, 188-201. London:MacMillan.Born, Georgina, and D. Hesmondhalgh. Western Music and its Others:Difference, Represen-tation, and Modernity. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.Chou Wen Chung. 1968. "Eastand West, Old and New." Asian Music 1(1):19-22.-- . 1971. "AsianConcepts and Twentieth CenturyWesternComposers."Musical Quarterly57(2):211-29.-- . 1978. "Towardsa Re-Mergern Music."InContemporary Composerson ContemporaryMusic, edited by E. Schwartz and B. Childs, 309-15. New York: Da Capo.Clifford,James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress.Corbett,John. 2000. "ExperimentalOriental:New Music and Other Others." In Western Musicand its Others: Difference, Representation, and Modernity, edited by G. Born and D.Hesmondhalgh, 163-86. Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress.Feld, Steven. 2000. "The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop."In WesternMusic and its Others:Difference,Representation, and Modernity,edited by G.Bornand D. Hesmondhalgh,254-79. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.Feliciano, Francisco. 1983. Four Contemporary Asian Composers. Quezon City:New Day.Griffiths,Paul. 1995. Modern Music and After:Directions Since 1945. Oxford:Oxford Univer-sity Press.Kimberlin, Cynthia Tse. 1999. "The Scholarship and Art of Ashenafi Kebede (1938-1998)."Ethnomusicology 43(2):322-34.Levi-Strauss,Claude. 1969. TheRaw and the Cooked. New York:Harper& Row.Maceda,Jose. 1963. "TheMusic of the Magindanao n the Philippines."Ph.D.dissertation,UCLA..1964. "LatinQualities in Brazil and the Philippines."Asian Studies 2(2):223-30.---. 1966. Programnote to February4 and 5 performanceofAgungan. AbelardoAuditorium,Universityof the Philippines.1971. "The Aim of the Symposium."In Musics of Asia, edited by Jose Maceda, 9-13.Papers read at the International Music Symposium, National Music Council of the Philip-pines and UNESCONational Commission of the Philippines. Manila.~- . 1974. "Music." n "SoutheastAsianPeoples, Arts of."Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed.Volume 17, 237-41. Chicago: Encyclopedia BritannicaCorp.- . 1979. "A Search for an Old and a New Music in Southeast Asia."Acta Musicologica51(1):160-68.~---. 1980. "Philippines,"In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed.,edited by StanleySadie,vol. 14, 631-50. London:MacMillan.--- . 1986. "AConcept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia."Ethnomusicology 30(1): 11-53.~---. 1988. Programnotes to January30 performance of Strata. AbelardoAuditorium,Uni-versity of the Philippines.. 1997. "Theoriesof Music from MusicEnsembles in Asia."Paperreadat 1997 AsianCom-posers' League conference, 20-26 January,Manila.---. 1998. Gongs and Bamboo: A Panorama of Philippine Musical Instruments. QuezonCity:University of The Philippines Press.Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The WesternImpact on World Music. New York: Schirmer.Ostreich,James. 2001. "ANew Contingent of AmericanComposers."New YorkTimes, 1 April,Section 2:1, 26.Oullette, Fernand. 1968. Edgard Varese. London:Calderand Boyars.Ryker,Harrison. 1990. New Music in the Orient. Buren: FritsKnuf.


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120 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003Santos, Ramon,ed. 1999. Tunugan. Proceedings of the 1997 AsianComposer's LeagueConfer-ence. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.Takemitsu,Toru. 1995. Confronting Silence: Selected Writings.Berkeley:Fallen Leaf Press.Tenzer, Michael. 1993. "WesternMusicin the Context of World Music."In Man and Music IX.Modern Times, edited by R. Morgan,388-411. London: MacMillan.--. 2000. Gamelan Gong Kebyar: TheArt of Twentieth CenturyBalinese Music. Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press.Toop, Richard.1993. "OnComplexity."Perspectives of New Music 31(1):42-55.Varese.Edgard. 1926] 1956. Integrales:for small orchestraandpercussion. New York:Ricordi.- . [1967] 1998. "TheLiberationof Sound."In Contemporary Composers on Contempo-rary Music, edited by E. Schwartz and B. Childs, 195-208. New York: Da Capo.Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. Formalized Music. Bloomington: Universityof Indiana Press. (Excerptspreviously published in Gravesaner Blatter, no. 1, 1955).1987. "Xenakison Xenakis."Perspectives of New Music. 25(1-2):16-49.Xenakis, I. and RevaultD'Allonnes. 1975. LesPolytopes. Paris:Balland.

List of Maceda's Compositions to Date:1. Ugma-ugma (Structures)for Philippine instruments and voice 19632. Agungan for families of gongs 19653. Kubing for bamboo instruments and men's voices 19664. Pagsamba ritual music for a circular auditorium 19685. Cassettes 100 100 participantswith cassette recorders play together 19716. Ugnayan for 20 radio stations andthousands of people in Manilaand environs 19747. Udlot-udlot (Hesitations) for 30 to thousands of performers, mixed instruments

and voices: a ritual music in the open air 19758. Ading music for 100 instrumentalists, 100 singers and 600-1000 audience 19789. Aroding for 40 mouth harps, 7 men's voices, and 3 tiny flutes 198310. Siasid for percussion, 10 blown bamboo flutes, and 5 violins 198311. Suling-suling for 10 flutes, 10 bamboo percussions, and 10 flat gongs 198512. Strata for 10 buzzers, 10 pairs of sticks, 5 tamtam, 5 flutes, 5 celli, 5 guitars 198813. Dissemination for Orchestra 199014. Distemperament for Orchestra 199215. Musicfor Five Pianos 199316. Two Pianos and Four Winds 199517. Music for a Chamber Orchestra 199718. Colors Without Rhythm for Orchestra 1998

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