Society for Ethnomusicology

Jos Maceda and the Paradoxes of Modern Composition in Southeast Asia Author(s): Michael Tenzer Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 93-120 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852513 Accessed: 19/10/2008 17:51
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VOL.47, No. 1

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

WINTER 2003

Jose Maceda and the Paradoxes of Modern Composition in Southeast Asia

TENZER/ University of British Columbia MICHAEL

Maybe the sonority of music had become more interesting than before, but listeners, accustomed for a millennium to following the keys in their royal court intrigues, heard a sound without understanding it. Anyway, the twelve-tone empire soon disappeared. After Schoenberg came Varese, and he abolished not only keys but the tones (the tones of human voices and musical instruments), replacing them with a subtle, no doubt magnificent structure of noises, but also inaugurating the history of something different based on different principles and a different language .... The history of music had ended in a flowering of audacity and desire. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting There is an old proverb: "Man makes plans... makes plans... Music laughs. Morton Feldman,A Compositional Problem God laughs." The Composer

the early and mid-twentieth century, the cultivation of contemporary art music composition in urban centers throughout Asia, Africa and South America created new cultural contexts for Western music. People identifying themselves as composers emerged where few or none had been before, working out their ideas on score paper and building musical communities, sometimes from scratch, to sustain their ventures. Over time they attempted to make their approach to the Western tradition not just a replication of imported European knowledge received at colonial and missionary hands, but a living, local entity. This process was social as well as musical, insofar as composers envisioned new cultural landscapes with themselves as empowered agents in their creation. At first, most were schooled in conservative institutions offering an education of hymns, marches, or the nineteenth-century symphonic romanticism then widely thought to have universal relevance and meaning. But many at a certain point looked up from their

During

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hymnals or sonatas and wondered how that music connected to their lives, and how it ought to.' The Filipino musician and ethnomusicologist Jose Maceda represents a case in point. Over the course of three-quarters of a century of performance, research, and composition, he sought to reshape contemporary musical life in the Philippines and throughout East and Southeast Asia. From the 1950s on, Maceda attempted to investigate, and ultimately embrace and transform the music of the spirit of European compositional modernism-particularly the Greek emigre' to Paris, Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), and the French emigre to integrate it with the muto New York, Edgard Varese (1885-1965)-and sical principles and aesthetics of his own homeland. My contacts with Maceda-the man, his aspirations, his community, his music, and his writings-have been the stimulus for this article and homage.2 Although his scholarly writings have circulated somewhat more widely than have his music compositions, here I draw attention to the latter works, attempting to discover relationships between his experiences and creative life.3 By casting postwar atonality and Southeast Asian traditional genres as interlocutors, Maceda has enacted a remarkable cultural drama. Sonatas and Coconuts: First Inklings

Maceda launched his career as a concert pianist before delving into hisand then finally to torical musicology, later turning to ethnomusicology, In 1947 he played a series of recitals featuring Beethoven's composition. Appassionata sonata before many of Manila's cosmopolitan acolytes of European culture. In preparing and performing, as he told me, he was repeatedly provoked by an interior voice posing what was for him an epiphanic and previously unasked question, "What has all of this got to do with coconuts and rice?" With his inner sense of contradiction and conflict, he may as well have asked: what have Western musical values to do with Asian ones, what has composition to do with ethnomusicology, and what had placed him in the position of feeling impelled to resolve these issues? A remarkable aspect of his self-questioning was not so much its anticipation of new musical directions as its special sensitivity in Philippine contexts. For Western music in the Philippines is as old as the Spanish arrival in 1565, and its dissemination as hoary as Manila's University of Santo Tomas, which predates Harvard. The absence of "coconuts and rice" -implicitly, of not in itself unusual in the experience indigenous, pre-colonial musics-was of someone like Maceda, who had grown up under American occupation and in a middle class community of professionals, clerics and civil servants. This sort of perspective did not arise as a consequence of young Filipino musicians' musical nourishment being exclusively and literally European in

Tenzer: Jose Maceda

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origin, for European tonality was deeply enough rooted in Manila artistic circles to have generated its own traditions of piano music, art song, and so on. One of these genres was the nineteenth century kundiman, a distinctively Philippine type of song musically cousin to the Indonesian kroncong but much more of a literate genre, like French chanson, with known composers, published scores, and a piano-centered domestic audience. This was not an overtly nationalistic and symphonic Philippine art music in the romantic tradition, as would arise in the mid-twentieth century, but nonetheless an unselfconscious and treasured native expression. Such were the musical artifacts of Maceda's childhood milieu, which inculcated aspiring musicians with a sense of the inexorable authority of European tonality, and fed the tenacious illusion that there was nothing else musically Phillipine to discover. Maceda was born in Manila in 1917 and received his academic and musical training there without losing cultural contacts with Laguna, the province of his forebears. He was sent to Paris with philanthropic and family sponsorship in 1937 to study the piano, where his primary teachers were Madame Bascourret de Gueraldi and Alfred Cortot, a specialist in early modem and romantic repertoire and a student of Chopin's disciple Decambes. Maceda also worked briefly with Nadia Boulanger, doyenne of mentors to a generation of American composers, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, and many others. In 1941 he received the Dipl6me de Virtuosite at the Ecole Normale de Musique, returning home soon thereafter because of difficulties under the German occupation. Maceda's recital program from June 16, 1941 at the Manila Metropolitan Theatre reflects Cortot's tutelage by including the Bach-Busoni Organ Toccata, Chopin Etudes and Scherzi, character pieces by Paganini/Liszt, Albeniz, Debussy and Ravel, plus the Appasionata, which was to be a performance staple for Maceda and a provocative musical interlocutor. The performances of these years, he related to me, constituted: part of my experiences as a concert pianist; . . . the act of concretizing, expressing the thoughts of classical European composers through refined techniques, phrases, oppositions of tonic and dominant chords, colors, touch, fingerings, arm movements, more than musicological readings ... are what brought me to live a way of life, a musical philosophy. (p.c., April 2001) Maceda speaks of long hours roaming the streets of Paris during his years there, and even longer ones reading in his new language, until, he felt, he truly absorbed the culture's sensibility and taste. "Ithink my experience of Europe was deep," he told me, "and I got to understand French literature, thinking, and especially the music." French students in his residence asked him why he didn't study "Oriental" music and he tried to ignore them, but their insinuations could not be undone, though at the time he felt that he "did not really know what they were referring to." From 1946-50 he studied piano in San

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

PIANIST

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Francisco with Debussy specialist Robert Schmitz, and in 1950-51 studied musicology with Paul Lang at Columbia; there he encountered the work of Columbia 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 seminal influences that were connected in a hidden way. First, in the late 1940s, he came to know the avant-garde music of Varese, Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete, and thereafter, the music of Xenakis. Subsequently, upon returning to the Philippines in 1952, his encounter with the jaw's harp of Mindoro island led to decades of research in the Philippines and elsewhere, and to the amassing of a substantial body of artifacts, data, and writings about otherwise unresearched traditional musics. He would go on to synthesize these two sets of influences in his compositional creativity. But how did jaw's harps intertwine with moder composition, and to what end? In Europe and North America the works of Varese and Xenakis played a critical role in the musical debates of the day, but to Maceda their music also had a different set of potentialities. The Modernism of Varese and Xenakis

During his postwar student years spent abroad, Maceda's approach to composition was conditioned by the polemics regarding the total serialism of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt. Maceda was particularly attracted to the ideas of Varese and Xenakis, both of whom criticized as overly systematic the way that serial techniques, in the postwar years, had come to encompass not only contrapuntal and harmonic parameters but also rhythm, dynamics and other aspects as well. They countered that such systems represented an unproductive and confining substitute for the praxis of 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 reality is nothing but a mass of notes in various registers. The enormous complexity prevents the audience from following the intertwining of the lines and has as its macroscopic effect an irrationaland fortuitous dispersion of sounds over the 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 that Schoenberg, having freed music from tonality, subsequently sought refuge in a system. We learn from this that Varese saw the willingness of composers to adopt approaches devised by others as tantamount to confession of a failure of imagination-but also that inventing a system oneself was hardly any better. (Bernard 1987:xvii)5

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Before the war Varese had spoken out prophetically about the "liberation of sound" through orchestral and electroacoustic complexes unencumbered by either tonality or serialism (Varese [1967] 1998). Liberation, as embodied in works like Deserts (1952) and Poeme Electronique (1958, commissioned by architect Le Corbusier for the Philips pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair), constituted for him a fresh metaphor of sound as abstract sculpture, or, as he put it, a growing crystal, paralleling scientific advances. Throughout his career Xenakis sought comparably impersonal evocations of nature, and there is an uncanny resemblance between some of his architectural drawings of the period (produced while apprenticing under Le Corbusier), and the massed patterings of instrumental parts in the scores for works such as Achorripsis (1956) and Pithoprakta (1952).6 A prototheorist of chaos with training in mathematics and engineering, Xenakis was interested in the laws governing the behavior of masses of indeterminate events and the way probabilities group natural phenomena into distinct patterns and shapes. Both he and Varese created sound masses as independent, transforming, interacting parameters, in a kind of stratification of undiluted acoustical elements. Both imagined musical stasis and motion as a result of the spatial and timbral, rather than harmonic or melodic, qualities of these interactions. By way of illustration, page 41 of the score from Varese's composition Int6grales (Figure 2) exhibits six aerophone (winds and brass) strata in constant mutation: piccolo I and tenor trombone; piccolo II, Bb clarinet and C trumpet; oboe and Eb clarinet; bass and contrabass trombone; and French horn (alone). Each stratum assumes a special rhythmic identity consisting of almost-but-not-quite-repeating figures, fills a distinctive registral space and colors it with a pungent array of dissonant compound intervals, giving the vivid aural impression of hard, pointy objects (crystals?) in mobile-like motion around a fixed perspective (the listener's). These textures are punctuated, commented upon, and reinforced by layered percussion, a trademark of Varese's because of its perceivedly liberating contribution of a noise spectrum. The music suggests a kinesthesia of sonic polyhedrons. Conceived as structured in accord with scientifically defined behaviors such as "crystallization" and "the calculus of probabilities," the compositions of Varese and Xenakis sought to attain a higher form of universality than Western music had achieved through tonality and its putative heir, serialism.7 Both composers spoke of natural processes rather than musical syntax, and eschewed the conventional distinction between scientific and artistic modes of inquiry. Interest in spatio-mathematical conceptions and visual-art movements such as Cubism gave their work an additional synaesthetic aspect. Like them, Maceda also rejected serialism, understanding the music of Varese and Xenakis as part of Western music's search for universality. Remark-

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

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&1

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

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Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003 Part Two: Compositions and Research

Maceda's Journey

In the 1950s and '60s Maceda traveled widely, continued to give piano recitals in the Philippines, and began a long period of fieldwork throughout that country (Mindoro, Mindanao, Palawan, Luzon and elsewhere) as well as in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia. In 1968 he spent a year studying candomble (among other musics) in Bahia, Brazil,and worked for a time in Uganda and Ghana. In 1952 he accepted a faculty post at the University of the Philippines (in Quezon City, a Manila suburb), and began amassing its archival collection of instruments, recordings and photographs. In 1954 he married Canadianpianist Madelyn Clifford,who bore them four daughters. He heard Poeme Electronique at the 1958 Brussels Fair, and worked on musique concrete with Pierre Schaeffer at the French Radio studios in Paris. He attended the 1961 East-Westsummit in Tokyo, meeting Xenakis and witnessing the introduction of the music of Berio, Madema and Xenakis to Japan.8The years 1957-58 and 1961-63 were spent in the U.S.,finishinga Ph.D. in ethnomusicology with Mantle Hood at UCLAin 1963-the same year that his first mature composition, Ugma-ugma, was premiered in Los Angeles. Maceda's fieldwork encompassed a variety of ruraland court traditions, but in the Philippines-always the linchpin of the researches-court centers never grew as powerful as they did elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Thus his interests oriented toward village beliefs, customs and taxonomies, the abundant and comparatively simple musical instrument technologies, their use in rituals and open-air celebrations, and the varied musical structures and timbres that he encountered. But other musical concerns remained lucid and pressing. Varese's sound liberation beckoned, suggesting a liberation beyond that for which it was originallyintended. The absence of tonality or twelve-tone rows in works like Integrales appeared to Maceda to unshackle Western music from its moorings in Western culture. He later wrote: "Itis as if an acme of pitch organization was asking of itself another mode of conduct, other parameters, which Varese supplied" (1988). Maceda came to envision the language of Varese and Xenakis as a vehicle that could be reharessed to serve a different culture and way of life. Viewed this way, avant-gardemusic could take on a progressive social function in the Philippines by articulatingthe repressed voices and aesthetics of its marginalized peoples in a reinvigorating modem way. Maceda hoped, in other words, that insofar as Varese had undone the inherthen such music could be in effect a slate ent Westemness of the avant-garde, on which Maceda could inscribe traditionalSoutheast Asian values, thereby disseminatingthem more broadlythan ever before. But he was also faced with music to achieve a compatibility the dilemmaof how to transformavant-garde with its new context. Maceda explained, with reference to Varese and Xenakis:

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While physical laws of matter and graphic movements of gas as applied to music indeed transformed musical expression [in the West], they seemed to strengthen ratherthan weaken the validity of tempered tuning...The idea is then to change the concept of traditional orchestra and admit in it a logic or an arrangement of things outside the discipline of temperament. This liberationwould prepare for musics with other categories of sound distribution. (1988) In our correspondence he elaborated further:

Instead of densities in "clouds" and a trigonometry of lines, other designs in a swirl of bamboos and gongs depict a tropical environment of rain, insects, people, a vehicular traffic, albeit geographically Southeast Asian, yet worldwide in occurrence, as "graphic movements of gas" and statistical probabilities are universal. The transformationof these instruments from their ritualfunctions in village Asia to one of physical density partakes of an evolutionary process associated with European harmonic music. This progression led to an identification of other parameters of sound not present in Varese or Xenakis. The articulation of these examples of "other categories of sound distribution" developed out of a series of foundational principles Maceda had discovered through fieldwork. In his 1984 Society for Ethnomusicology Seeger lecture (Maceda 1986) and elsewhere,9 he related the three irreducible kernels of his research, which by the late 1960s had become essential to his compositional thought as well. All are facets of the traditional lifeways and group rituals of Southeast Asian villagers. First among them are the varieties of musical color produced by the collective playing of large ensembles, in which many timbrally rich sounds produced by simple instruments of bamboo or bronze combine in the village open air to create ever-changing textures. Second is the primacy of drone, loosely defined by him as a constant, recurring, or repeating sound (potentially encompassing ostinato), and the necessity of such continuity in large-group musics, for both musical and social cohesion; equally significant is the drone's ability to signify continuity and permanence. Last was the notion of epistemology or classification of things, which, in his words, is "a source of ideas in Southeast Asian music composition, on how to combine instruments or relate one sound source to another" (1997). For Maceda, taxonomic systems embody a worldview, and a set of connections between physical materials, their uses, belief systems, and a repository of meanings "distant from the patterned dictates of European logic and reason" (1979:160). While most applicable to traditional village musics, these concepts, Maceda indicated, could with some modification apply as well to more compositionally elaborate ensembles such as the gamelan or pi-phat (1986:41-44). Together they represented an experiential domain of Southeast Asian music distinct from that of the West: The music of Southeast Asia fills time along notions of continuity, infinity and indefiniteness in a non-secular metaphysical world, and hierarchy in a secular

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world. The musical techniques used in musical forms prefer melodic ambiguity, repetition and diffusion to an identification and isolation of things as these are 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 was still responding as a composer to the stochastic agglomerations of Varese and Xenakis, understanding them to possess compatible characteristics. With their shifting sounds and colors, their structural processes that through incremental change and overall continuity suggest drone, and their radical ways of deploying, or reclassifying, the structures and materials of Western music, thus giving them new meaning, these musics became also for him expressively congruent to Southeast Asian ones. Philosophically underpinning the similarity lay what he saw as a transcendence of the dualisms of postAristotelian thought through a less self-conscious, ostensibly more natural and impersonal approach to music, as suggested, in his own manner, by Xenakis himself: 10 In 1954 I denounced linear thought (polyphony) and demonstrated the contradictions of serial music. In its place I proposed a world of sound masses, vast groups of sound-events, clouds and galaxies governed by new characteristics such as density, degree of order, and rate of change, which required definitions and realizations using probability theory. (1971:182) Xenakis' conceptualization, with its goal of achieving universality through replicating natural phenomena via mathematical models, was more abstract than that of Maceda, with its grounding in traditional rural practices. Maceda was thus less interested in Xenakis' techniques than in his musical results, which, to Maceda, could approximate the collective sonic output of events like Southeast Asian village rituals. It is paradoxical that Maceda could find the music of the Western avant-garde to be both universal and applicable to Southeast Asian values; as it were, one man's crystals are another man's coconuts. As one technique of grappling with tensions inherent in reconciling these domains, Maceda juxtaposed large groups of native Philippine instruments in his first compositions. In these formats he wrote layers of precise and intricate rhythmic patterns to produce timbral fields in which individual elements combine into regions of drifting colors and drones. A note to a performance of Agungan (1966) explains: Agungan uses six gong families or qualities of gong sounds to project the variety of sounds that can be produced within a certainhomogenousness of soundsthe sounds of gongs. In this artificialorchestra, a musical permutation of sound events is based on isolated sounds produced by the people who play these instruments;however, the organizationof these sounds is not a mere copy of native musical invention. Ratherit is a result of new concepts seeking to draw out the physical qualities of non-pitch sounds. Some of these qualities are sound den-

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sity (when the peaks of about sixty gongs are heard together in mixtures of time delays); color (mixtures of scale structures, instrumentalblends, types of attacks, effects sounded by mallets of various materials, hand slides, dampenings, etc.); and rhythm (there is no metric regularityof phrases anywhere). In a second phase of works, he assembled participatory, ritualistic eventpieces. For Pagsamba of 1968 and Udlot-udlot of 1975 he designed activities for large auditoriums or outdoor spaces involving groups of hundreds or more singing or playing gongs, bamboo clappers and buzzers, blurring the audience-performer distinction. In such cases a few rhythms or phonemes would be distributed among the participants, sometimes aleatorically by giving groups of performers freedom to reiterate a few simple designated patterns at will, and at other times with fully worked-out versions scored for fifty or more performers, aspiring toward a similar sonic result. In 1974 he urbanized ritual music in the style of musique concrete, marshalling twenty Manila radio stations to simultaneously broadcast parts of his Ugnayan. He prepared a unique set of village music sounds for each station, creating a mix for the millions that could be experienced communally wherever people gathered with portable radios and combined the sounds in ways that they chose. Figure 3 gives a page from Udlot-udlot. Since the 1980s Maceda has composed intricately scored works for smaller ensembles, including Western chamber groupings and mixed groups of Western and Philippine instruments, as well as for enormous Western orchestral ensembles. The progression from the graphically notated looseness of the second-phase compositions to the complexity of recent ones is best seen as an aesthetic development rather than a shift. Both idioms draw on Southeast Asian sounds, but it is the intended performers-mainly untrained 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 anthropologist Harold Conklin documented music of the Hanunoo of Mindoro, then a forestdwelling, un-Christianized group of some six thousand. Something of the inner soundscape Maceda gradually developed for his compositions may be evoked by comparing the music corresponding to the Varese score presented above (or that of a Xenakis work such as Achorripsis) with the recording by Maceda and Conklin of a Hanunoo festivity, kalipay. ' This field document is only 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 connections, appropriately leaving the rest to imagination. Nor have I made any attempt to visually render this obviously spontaneous and freely coordinated joyous activity. (In the absence of this recording, readers could substitute any similar one depicting a multiplicity of simple, separate and simultaneous musical activities using comparable instruments in a collective context.)

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Ethnomusicology, Winter 2003

Udlot-udlot (1975).

Figure 3. From Maceda's

UDLOT-UDLOT

(HESITATIONS)
Jose Maceda (1975) TlME

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center of the circle. Each player hits, pounds, blows his intrumenttwice: one at the end of counting the 1st number, and another at the end of counting the 2nd number. Each player should count his numbers at a speed different from one close to him.

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

Tenzer: Jose Maceda

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of these sounds in the recording. Whether this fluidity is due to the unsteadiness of hand-held microphones or the relative movements of participants "on the ground" is inconsequential, since kalipay is naturally no proscenium performance but a village activity. What we hear are layers of changing timbres in constant motion, and in discrete registers. One's attention passes from the fluctuation of rich partials emitted by gongs struck at varying places on the surfaces, in a frenetic, unsynchronized cluster of simple rhythms, to the ebb and flow of delicate masses of strummed or bowed strings, and the occasional cacophony of human shouts and ululations as the merrymaking reaches a critical mass of intensity. And in all of this sound the pitch language is essentially reduced to one or two tones per participant, so that what one experiences is an action primarily of colors. As a creative listening exercise simulating the kinds of sonic connections Maceda inferred over the years, it is illuminating to juxtapose recordings of this type of sound-event with music of Maceda's avant-garde influences. It becomes effectively possible to hear Xenakis in the Philippines. Further illustrative of this aesthetic are Figure 4, an excerpt from Maceda's Suling-suling (1985), a work scored for ten flutes (Southeast Asian bamboo ones are encouraged in the composer's note to the score), ten bamboo buzzers, and ten flat gongs; and Figure 5, from the 1995 Two Pianos and Four Winds (clarinet, French horn, bassoon and trombone).12 These pieces, typical of his post-1980 music, each consist of a single movement of around thirty minutes. The length and characteristic slow pace make excerpting difficult; yet in both of these cases, as in a Xenakis score or Le Corbusier drawing, the shapes traceable by the eye convey some flavor of the musical result. In Figure 4 the flutes, divided in two groups, execute a simple hocket pattern on clustered chords while the percussion groups pyramid in and out, charting intricate subdivisions of the beat, staggered both internally and with respect 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. A different outcome is achieved with the chamber ensemble in Figure 5. Here the polyrhythmic dialogue of the winds is constrained to a quasi-polyphonic and pentatonic idiom, while the pianos' octaves, poly-pentatonic when taken in toto, ring out in contrasting dynamics and registers, layered and gong-like. Such a dense texture substitutes harmonic color for the characteristic melodic prominence of Southeast Asian pentatonic heterophony. In both cases what 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 contradictions inherent in their diverse sources of inspiration. Inconsistent from a certain perspective, his words nonetheless illustrate how categories like "European modem" and "Southeast Asian traditional" can be made to merge

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Ethnomusicology,

Winter 2003

Figure 4. From Maceda's Suling-suling (1985:mm. 266-69).

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

Tenzer: Jose Maceda

107

Figure 5. From Maceda's Two Pianos and Four Winds (1995:mm. 50-53).
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the same ardor, he added, "Yes, there is a counterpoint of sounds here, which could not have been possible for me without my studies of Palestrina or Xenakis. Yes, this is Western music, Western music played with bamboo tubes and men's voices." "So," I asked, "are you saying that on the one hand it'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 activism comprises the social philosophy of his compositions themselves, innovations in concert programming, conceiving and organizing symposia, and professional community-building. The massive ritual-like performance forces called for in his earlier works attempted to involve as many Manilans as possible in contemporary music, as well as to expose them to the Philippine thought at the music's basis. Ugnayan, the broadcast piece that used radio stations as if they were musical instruments, was heard-in some form-by hundreds of thousands if not millions. This and other coordinated public happenings (together with later government awards and recognition) promulgated Maceda's name well beyond musical circles in Manila. His fieldwork experience distinguished him from most other Asian composers. Toru Takemitsu in Japan, for example, absorbed Asian musics without fieldwork.

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Although Takemitsu spoke of Japanese principles like ma and incorporated shamisen, biwa and shakuhachi into his ensembles, their sounds were essentiallyas exotic to him as the gamelanwas to Debussy (Takemitsu1995:5667; Corbett2000:178). Maceda'sgoals were in some respects more ambitious, seeking to build a new basis for contemporary music, from instruments to techniques to performance. As a thinker and creative musician in this spirit, one with few peers in his part of the world, he set an important example.13 In a series of writings in the 1960s and '70s Maceda explained Southeast Asian musical principles and proclaimed them as antidotes to what he saw as the excessively Westernized and technologized musical culture of the region (Maceda 1964, 1974, 1979). Some of the prose from these years resonates presciently with James Clifford'sinsistence that "historiesof emergent differences" give a truer picture of late twentieth-century experience than do narrativesof a monolithically hegemonic Western modernity (1988:17). Considering congruences between the Latinatenations Braziland the Philippines, Maceda observed: The sense that binds Europeansculturallywith other peoples of different and the and stocks-the Algerians the French,the Filipinos the Spaniards, Monwith goliansandthe Russians-maybe takento meanthat"Europeans" a GrecoLatinview or a Christian cultureare found not only within the geographical of but boundaries Europe, alsoin otherpartsof the world,andamongpeoples of variedstockslivingunderdifferent physicalconditions... (1964:223) is in A changeof perspectiveanddirection evidently the air.Whilenew theofromthe Westitself-from Europe the United and riesof changekeep streaming States-it appears another perhapsrichersourceof ideasis neededand that and foundin the verylives of nativepeoples all over the world,whose cultureprovides freshgroundsfor anotherway of thinking,feeling, and doing things.A and culturesin Brazil, well as the interas mixtureof Latin, African, Amerindian action of Latinand nativetraitsamonga Malaysian people in the Philippines of for furnish uniquegrounds a meetingandmutualenrichment these cultures.
(1964:227)

Such formulations informed the various concerts and symposia that Maceda organized from the 1960s, in which he engineered clashes of otherwise remote musical systems. Feeling free to adapt musical modernism to his own ends, he sought to promote local musical thought in collaboration with Western interventions, and to assert Southeast Asians' right to adopt elements of European culture in accordance with their own needs and interests. Rather than viewing the past as a static tradition and the present a dynamic modernity, Maceda envisioned a new continuity in which the two invigorated each other. At the 1961 East-Westsummit in Tokyo he had been struck by the overwhelmingly European leanings of the contemporary music scene in Japan. As Maceda saw it, the invitations that organizers extended to European lu-

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minaries (Berio, Maderna, Nono) reflected a wish to import their latest advances and techniques, but no inclination to transcend them with a native expression or even meet them on equal terms. In response, Maceda organized the 1966 UNESCO "Musics of Asia" festival in Manila. An international collection of scholars and composers attended, including Xenakis, the Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw, Japanese pianist/composer Yuji Takahashi, musicologists like Tran Van Khe and Mantle Hood, and many others.'4 Maceda's breakthrough was to have the musics of the European avant-garde performed at the symposium in direct sequence with a variety of Asian traditional genres. He wrote: The Symposium does not intend to be a wholly musicological affair.Besides an objective examination of music, it tries to introduce new ideas of experimentation and change which underlie the spirit of musical creativity in Europe. Asian music is also bound to change ... how is this change to take place? This is of course difficult to foretell-and to control. However by dealing with avant-garde music in the discussions as well as by preparing concerts in which Asian and avant-gardemusics are played in sequence, the symposium may suggest ideas and 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: In Asia-particularly in the Philippines where Latinand Orientalcultures merge, or in Tokyo, where moder Western and old Japanese traditions clash-there is an audience more culturallyprepared than that of New York or Paristo listen to a mixture of various Western and Asian musics on the same program. A musical re-awakening in Asia enjoys the privilege of being partialto a Western culture which the Eastunderstandsfarbetter than the West understandsAsia. (1964) Four years later, while in Brazil, he produced a performance bringing together candombl, his own music, and that of Xenakis (Figure 6b). Such symbolic actions stimulated the burgeoning activities of new music composers in Asia. The impetus for an Asian Composers' League (ACL) intensified after the 1966 symposium and developed further during 1968 discussions between the already established League of Filipino Composers and certain Taiwanese composers, notably Hsu Tsang-Houei (Hsu in Ryker 1990:219). Several gatherings took place in subsequent years under shifting auspices and with different constellations of delegate countries. Many composers in the region (particularly Japanese ones) had long been involved with the ISCM (International Society of Contemporary Music), an organization that provided a model. In existence since 1922, the ISCM held yearly new music festivals which, although international in intent, remained quite Euro-American 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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Figures 6a (Philamlife Auditorium, Manila 1964) and 6b (Universidade Federal de Bahia, 1968). Lists of works mounted at concerts organized and produced by Maceda. PROGRAM CONCERT AND ASIAN AVANT-GARDE OF MUSIC Philamlife Auditorium Novermber 1964 27, I. GONG FROM MUSIC MINDANAO a. Complete ensemble d.Kulintang solo gong solo b. Agung e. Complete ensemble gong c. Gandingan solo Soloists: Amal onthe and Lumuntud agung kulintang Kamansathegandingan on Medandug II. INTEGRALES ORCHESTRA FOR SMALL AND PERCUSSION (1926) INTERMISSION III. SOUTHERN CLASSICALENSEMBLE CHINESE MUSIC ofEight a. "Combination Notes," Classical for Ensemble Percussion and b."The Flower," forClassical Plum suite Ensemble 1. Early in 4. Pearl-like Buds Spring theSun 2. Smile theBreeze in 5. Thousand in FlowersBloom 3. Fragrance Flowing inthe Water IV. UGMA-UGMA FOR ASIAN AND VOICES Jose Maceda (STRUCTURES) INSTRUMENTS Manila,1964. Figure6a. Concert program,

Varese Edgard

Universidade daBahia Federal Cultural Departamento DE SEMINARIOS MUSICA Reltoria 14.11.68-21 hs. dia DE EAFRO-BRASILEIRA MUSICA DE CONCERTO VANGUARDA JOSE Direcao: MACEDA SINFONICA UFBa ORQUESTRA DA EESTUDANTES PROFESSORES DOS SEMINARIOS DE MUSICA DE DE OLGAALAKETU CANDOMBLI DE CONJUNTO PROGRAMMA e de do Toques Dancas Candomble o conjunto Cantigas, para terreiro Olga de Francisco (Olga Alaketu) Regis de II. Jose Maceda: e vozes Estruturas instrumentos Ugma-ugma. para III. Yannis Xenakis: Achorripsis IV. Jos6 Maceda: e vozes homens de Musica percussao Kubing. para Bahia,1968. Figure6b. Concert program, I.

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delegates from Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Republic of China (Taiwan), and South Korea in attendance. Later, with meetings held most years, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Israel, Australia and New Zealand gradually entered the fold. The People's Republic of China began sending representatives in 1981 (Ryker 1990:7). The ISCM held its first Asian meeting in Hong Kong in 1988, jointly with the ACL. These events stimulated a world of contemporary music that remains little known beyond the region, and which owes much of its vitality and direction to Maceda's inspiration. I attended the impressive 1997 ACL conference in Manila, whose theme was "New Theories of Composition from Music Ensembles in Asia." One of my compositions was performed and I read a paper about my research on Balinese music. The six-day series of diverse events brought together nearly 250 composer delegates from twenty-two countries and a planning staff of eighty. On one evening, a twilight concert of new choral works by composers from New Zealand, Taiwan, the Philippines and China was followed by a recital of kontemporer works from the central Javanese music conservatory and dances of the Formosan (aboriginal) Tsou and Ami. Taiwan's China Found Workshop Ensemble presented screechingly dissonant scores of new music, performed on Chinese instruments with astonishing extended techniques. A workshop session was shared by a Samulnori troupe and a live electronics ensemble. A superbly rehearsed orchestral concert with the Philippine Philharmonic featured nine new and innovative works from seven Asian countries. Seminars and discussions ranged from theories of composition to ethnographic studies of Chinese minority traditions. A recurrent, implicit theme of the conference was that composition, theory and ethnomusicology should interact symbiotically and are impoverished if remaining separate.
15

What Has Maceda

Achieved?

For many historical and cultural reasons, Philippine musics and their offshoots have not enjoyed the global appeal of, for example, sub-Saharan African musics. Accordingly, Maceda's field tapes have not been influential for popular music, or intersected in any way with the transnational music industry and its concerns with money and power. His collections archives at the University of the Philippines, with their trove of unexplored material, are in disarray and in need of cataloguing. Published versions of his field recordings are few and rare.16 These have attained nothing like the renown of, for example, Simha Arom's recordings of the Central African Aka, with their secondary circulation of millions of dollars' worth of contemporary record sales and royalties (see Feld 2000:261).17 Similarly, Maceda's compo-

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sitions, because they require large numbers of performers, are costly to mount, dependent upon government and private subsidy, and yield an inconsigns them consequential or negative financialreturn.Their avant-gardism to limited popularity and appeal. Personally, Maceda has benefited from a remarkablenumber of internationalgrants, awards and recognitions, and he is a well-known public figure in Manila,but he lives modestly, in a small oncampus home. Minimalas the compromising forces of money and commercial influence have been, in gathering perspective on Maceda's achievements we may also consider what role the more difficult-to-assessallures of status and prestige have played for ethnomusicologists in general, and Maceda in particular. These are the conventional "innocent"compensations of academia, the flip sides of knowledge advancement and intellectual influence, in which ethnomusicologists are entangled. Behind them lie possible moral undercurrents of exploitation, or the exoticizing of tribalpopulations, whose voices become mediated or supplanted by urban, academic agendas. On one hand there is something anachronistic about such a notion in this particularcase, because when Maceda began his fieldwork a half-century ago there had been literally no prior work in the region. He was an important part of the eager ethnomusicological consciousness of the day, and while hindsight may afford a critical judgement, that is only proof of the ethical complexity of fieldwork. As we have seen, Maceda worked to bring performers of Mindanaoan and other traditions to concert stages, and he advocated energetically and over a long span of time for broader awareness of and empathy for those music cultures.As a Filipinohimself, he could in many respects relate to those he studied as compatriots rather than ethnic Others. On the other hand, he was raised essentially as a Westerner in the Manilaof his youth. An adult life spent at the University of the Philippines as a professor representing the music of traditionalor pre-cosmopolitan peoples is different only in degree, not kind, from that at a comparable (though likely wealthier) Western institution. To complement this view of Maceda's ethnomusicology, we may also ask where he fits along the spectrum of twentieth-century composers, especially with regard to the practice of cultural appropriation. Western art music composers of the era engaged provocatively and consistently with other traditions, generating a diverse range of reactions and experiences that recent musicology has begun to describe in appropriatedetail (Feliciano 1983, Bellman 1998, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000). At one end of this spectrum of interests and commitments, there are such relatively superficialnon-Western engagements as the commentary of Xenakis (cited in endnote 7), Claude Debussy's paeans to Javanese music, or Messiaen's philological interest in ancient Hindu rhythms. These stand in contrast to Maceda'sabiding, Bart6k-

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like dedication to research and publication, and the careful articulation of the relationships between his scholarship and his music. Moreover, while Bart6k lived near to central Europe and operated fully within its geographical and cultural spheres, Maceda has faced the additional challenge of nurturing modernism in isolation from the generating centers of Western culture. Maceda did not seek to avoid the challenge by simplifying his music, as can be seen in the complexity of pieces like his 1992 orchestral Distemperament, involving upwards of three dozen independent instrumental parts in complex rhythms, dynamics and phrasing. The music, with its technically demanding instrumental parts, is notated painstakingly on small-staved, oversized vellum, with lightly ruled vertical lines facilitating the proper alignment of the parts. Yet despite their resemblance on paper to Xenakis' styles of abstract architectonics, such works attempted to actualize some Southeast Asian quality, and were animated by Maceda's vision of cultural and social renewal. By studying and applying older indigenous musical thought, Maceda and his younger colleagues sought to engineer a benevolent form of appropriation. Inspired by a new and empowering sense of musical history that extended much farther back than Spanish conquest, they sought a fusion of traditional and modern in their music and were unquestionably exhilarated by the implications of their endeavor. I was struck, when I met for lunch at the Quezon City campus in July 2000 with a group of music faculty (including composers Jonas Baes, Ramon Santos, and Chino Toledo), at how all evinced an affecting indebtedness and fealty toward Maceda. They said that his compositions of the '60s and '70s were what had convinced them that a genuinely Southeast Asian new music was in fact possible, and had inspired them to produce not only orchestral and chamber works but also event-oriented pieces like Maceda's, which, they felt, collectively effected a degree of cultural change. From my perspective their claims were justified if somewhat exaggerated by idealism. The composer in me resonated with their enthusiasm, but the skeptical ethnomusicologist was more equivocal. They may indeed have reason to feel as they do, given the very fact that they have careers as comto some extent the very exisposers in Southeast Asia. The shape-and tence-of these careers owes a great deal to Maceda's original posing of the question about coconuts and rice. But their event-pieces were fleeting, onetime events, akin to university new music concerts elsewhere. Presented on the University of the Philippines campus, few performances permeated the awareness of students beyond Abelardo Hall, the music building. For its part, the Asian Composers League, an especially important outcome of their activities, continues to hold its international gatherings, but

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like new music organizations elsewhere, it performs and discusses music for a specialized audience consisting mainly of its members. New music in the Philippines, like the traditionalmusics on whose shoulders it now strives to stand, remains peripheral even within the Western music enclaves that engendered it. This work, like Varese's music, is liberated sound, not cultural liberation. Indeed, it would be expecting too much to hope for the compositions of Maceda and his colleagues to do more than embody his conception of liberation from excessive Westernization. For myself as a composer and scholar familiarwith Southeast Asian musics as well as the gamut of contemporary Western composition-ranging from hermetic modernism to various kinds of minimalism,neotonality, primitivism and cross-culturalhybridization-there remains a provocative and disturbing side of Maceda's venture. I sense an aura around the high modernism of Varese and Xenakis, emanatingin part from their rhetoric of autonomy and universality, that acts as if to shield their music from the possibility of hybridization.Even in light of Maceda's effort, achievement and optimism, I remain astonished to think of how radical it was to grasp modernism as being in dialog with Southeast Asian sounds during the '50s, '60s and '70s. It was like envisioning a Philippine shaman straightfrom the pages of National Geographic sitting down as an equal with a Parisianhomme des belles lettres for a panel discussion on culture and aesthetics. Could the implications not be complex, contentious, conditional? So little groundwork had been laid. Even in the contemporaryimagination,the friction that we can sense between modernist universality and Southeast Asian particularitydoes not dissipate. Yet Macedaenvisioned the coexistence of the two back then, and his idea of their miscegenation lit in him a hope that seemed to hold the potential to transformconsciousness in Southeast Asia. But it is no casting of aspersions upon Maceda to say that what he mainly ended up doing was transforming other composers, who continue to speak mainly to each other. Parisiansand shamans. At around the same time as Maceda, Levi-Strauss (1969:21-30) articulateda less sanguine juxtaposition between serialismand the BrazilianBororo. He extolled musical experience as a unique force "with an extraordinary power to act simultaneously on both the mind and the senses" and held that its qualities are both culturally specific and universal. But for him serialism risked irrelevance by abandoning "general structures whose universalityallows the encoding and decoding of individualmessages," and relying instead on "anever new internal logic." He wrote in this vein: It maythereforeturnout that serialmusic belongsto a universein which the listenercould not be carriedalongby its impetusbut would be left behind.In
vain he would try to catch up; with every passing day it would appear more distant and unattainable.Soon it would be too far away to affect his feelings; only the idea of it would remain accessible, before eventually fading away into the

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dark vault of silence, where men would recognize it only in the form of brief and fugitive scintillations. (1969:26) Granting that neither Maceda, Xenakis, nor Varese were serialists, LeviStrauss' 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, universality-and value-lies in the tones' potential as emancipated sound, its depiction of nature as an impersonal force. Theirs was a humanist vision, however debatable and contradictory, of a post-cultural, post-national, postethnic future. In contrast, Levi-Strauss's anthropological perspective favored as an a priori good the universal aspects of musical experience, but only if supported by cultural precepts shared within a society. He could not appreciate (much less endorse) the possibility that a core value of modern music is its aspiration to transcend culture, to seek the further musical consequences of the Western ideal of the ennobled individual. Maceda was drawn to both of these perspectives, but he could not fuse autonomous modem sound and a communitarian Southeast Asian practice without compromising one or the other set of values. His activities have led to inspiring rhetoric, original music, and the mobilization of new professional communities. But communities such as the ACL are so indebted to their Western models as to be essentially indistinguishable from them, such that the musical reconciliation they achieve has not been matched by a social one. With a modernist stance towards the universality of music sound having prevailed, it is fair to conclude that Western values have also. One might question whether these dualities and oppositions-between the modern and the mythical, between new music and old, between the urban Westernized world and rural Asia, between composition and ethnomusicology, the avant-garde and tradition, centers and peripheries, sound and culture-are in need of reconciliation. Engaged musicians such as readers of this journal may or may not feel such a need, while the world at large constantly reconfigures the tensions in the inexorable course of forming cultural hybrids. Given the presence of so many more economically viable musical stimuli around us, anomalous hybrids like those created by Maceda may remain undetected. Perhaps we near a point at which music like Maceda's, and the issues it raises, appear to us as but traces, reminiscent of Levi-Strauss' "brief and fugitive scintillations." Might Levi-Strauss find it striking that his premonitions of avant-garde music "fading away" into isolation would be actualized not only by the music's own recondite nature, but also by the cultural realities of the global economy? The once fiery polemics about European and American postwar music have dissipated over time. In its day and milieu that music was of the essence and crucial for the future. But today the shock of dissonance is easily ignored,

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and, 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 and transformative. Once I asked Maceda why, in his opinion, the standard repertories of Western art music had made such tremendous inroads into urban East and Southeast Asia. His answer: Western music is a revelation-to people everywhere. And this in turn is bound to a legacy of humanism, Greco-Romanlogic and thought. But it is the particularity of this music's origins that makes the question of its continuation loom large. Now is the time to explore other logics and music potentials. (p.c., July 2000) What he intends with the phrase "question of its continuation" is precisely the crisis that modernism has undergone, its regrettable parting of ways with the sympathies of its public. And when he says that we should "explore other logics" he means traditional, Southeast Asian ones steeped in communality. I think I understand the forces pulling at him. In my long experience investigating Balinese music I encountered a world that fully met my need as a composer for sonic challenge, but also awakened me to the satisfactions of a modem-day collective music that plays a more vital role in its context than Western new music ever will. Yet the urge to find a common ground can be irresistible (Tenzer 2000:388). Maceda discovered this for himself in the Philippines, and sought to embrace what he found in his homeland without sacrificing a closeness to the profound revelations of Western music. For him the liberating openness of post-Varese sound was a foothold and an enabling link. Acknowledgments This article in its original form was presented as a paper at the Toronto 2000 Musical Intersections conference under the title "Jose Maceda: A Universalist's Paradoxes of Southeast Asian Music," on the joint panel New Histories of Western Music. I am grateful to my co-presenters that day, Bruno Nettl and Yayoi Uno, and also to Joseph Lam, for their comments. Thanks also to Vera Micznik, Marc Perlman, Elaine Barkin, and three anonymous peer reviewers for challenging readings of this expanded version. Notes
1. See Ryker 1990 and Nettl 1985. 2. After knowing his scholarship for some time, I met Maceda in Manilain January1997 at the Asian Composers' League conference. Our discussions were intense and lively. His Two Pianos and Four Winds, performed at the event, made a strong impression on me. I returned to Manilain July 2000 especially for a week of conversation and study with him. I joined him

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for againlater that year in California his residency asJean MacDuffVeaux Composer-in-Residence at Mills College, where he was the focus of concerts and symposia, and a number of his works were given American premieres. My accounts in this article are based on these several discussions and subsequent email contact, together with Maceda'swritings and those of others about him. (Feliciano 1983 contains an excellent chapter-length discussion of Maceda'swork in relation to other Asian composers.) I am deeply grateful to Jose for his warmth, hospitality and inspiration. His support of my work on this project also included the loan of a priceless package of personal memorabilia. He read and condones this article, but, naturally, I alone am responsible for it. 3. Maceda's Music for Five Pianos and Two Pianos and Four Winds are available in Japan on an ALMRecords CD (ALCD-54).Among the performers are Yuji and Aki Takahashi,internationally prominent pianists who commissioned the works and have been instrumental in introducing Maceda's work there. In July 2001 musician/producer John Zorn's Tzadik label in New York issued Colors Without Rhythm, Suling-Suling and the Catholic mass Pagsamba (TZ 7067). See the list of Maceda's works at the end of this article. 4. Eschewing system, for them, also meant eschewing shared codes of expression. This perspective had social and political resonance, especially within the new music community. The zeitgeist of individualismat midcentury rendered collective endeavors suspect because they all too easily raised the specter of the totalitarianismvanquished in the war. As Richard Toop wrote, "serialism,like any other approach to composition, is only marginallydescribed by the recitation of its surface mechanics. Its essence lies in the musical, philosophical and aesthetic ideas and conflicts which it helps to articulate ... The old banality about the 'totalitarian'character of serialism,ancient or recent, is probably best evaluated by looking at the composers who made such accusations, whose works would have been a great deal more acceptable to Goebbels and Zhdanov than the music they seek to attack"(1993:52-53). 5. He also said, in a 1953 radio interview, that "Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were great despite their systems," and he wrote, in a 1952 letter to LuigiDallapiccola, that "the intellectualism of the interval [i.e., the serial concept] is a factor which for me has nothing to do with our age and its new concepts" (in Oullette 1968:173). 6. See also Xenakis'sketches for the Polytopes, a sound-sculptureenvironment he designed for Montreal in 1971 (Xenakis and Revault D'Allonnes 1975). 7. Xenakis saw unsystematized music sound as ideally governed by "natural principles," a conviction which elicited from him this rare comment on world traditions, consistent with a certain orientalism: The force of a work is in its truth ... All truly creative people escape ... the exaltation of sentiments ... so as to listen only to the music, to have it within us. That is what confers its 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 them without ever having studied them? Because I appreciate them just as I appreciate the curl of 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 these relations are sufficiently rich, necessary and elegant, then the piece is a work of art. (1987:48) See also Xenakis 1971:183, 191-92. 8. Henry Cowell and Colin McPhee also attended this meeting, where Cowell reported that "the ethnomusicologists wanted to keep everything very pure ... they didn't want anyone to touch the cultures they were studying"(in Tenzer 1993:410). Maceda confirmed to me that the composers and ethnomusicologists had little interaction there. 9. Maceda'smost extensive ethnomusicological publications, in additionto the articlescited here, are his 1963 dissertation, a 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica entry, the Philippines article in New Grove's Dictionary (1980), and the book Gongs and Bamboo (1998).

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10. Maceda often remarked to me that post-Aristoteliandualisms are musically reflected by tonic/dominant polarities or their substitutes. He defined a kinship between Xenakis and Philippine musics in terms of the absence of such polarities, "adifferent kind of logic." 11. Hanun6o Music of the Philippines (1955). Smithsonian Folkways Cassette Series 04466. 12. Referring to the recordings listed in footnote 3 above, Figure 4 can be heard on the Tzadik 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,is Chou Wen-Chung, whose writings from those of years (1968, 1971, 1978) promote a "re-merger" Western and Asianmusical thought. But Chou has been only minimally a fieldworking ethnomusicologist. As an influential teacher and composer, he has urged his latter-day students to revere old Chinese musical values, though his impact for most of his life was felt less in Asia than in New York, through teaching at Columbia University. In a New York Times profile of Chinese composers (Ostreich 2001) Chou disparaged the achievements of his notable disciples such as Tan Dun, whom he taught in China after the cultural revolution. Of him and other students Chou remarks: "Theyreflect the intellectual ambience in China today. They are not in the habit of going to libraries, doing real research, or debating issues. I'm disappointed. It's not the kind of situation I wanted. What I'm looking for is a spiritualdigestion of one's legacies." To which Tan replied: "Ithink Chou Wen-Chungprobably hates me. He thinks we haven't concentrated enough on basic studies. He doesn't understand why we write so much. But I will always be a wild child." world composers have confronted many of the isElsewhere outside the Euro-American sues Macedadid in distinctiveways, though few were as intensively scholarlyin their approaches. Blum (2001:198-99) provides a summary of their characteristic dilemmas. Profiles of African composers include Agawu's publications (1984, 1987) on Ephraim Amu, a Ghanaian, and Kimberlin's tribute (1999) to Ashenafi Kebede, an Ethiopian who lived in the U.S. The Nigerian composer Akin Euba, an activist like Maceda, has long advocated an African art music through compositions, writings, and conferences. 14. A fuller list of attendees includes musicologists Harold Powers, Robert Garfias,David Morton, ErnstHeins, BarbaraSmith, NarayanaMenon, Shigeo Kishibe, RulanChiao Pian, composers Chou Wen Chung, Eliseo Pajaro,Lucrecia Kasilag,Felipe Padillade Leon, and performers Hussein Malik (santur), Prasidh Silapabanleng (ranaad), Ravi Shankar(sitar), Mrs. Shigeo Kishibe (koto), Amahl Lemuntodon (kulintang), a gangsa topaya and sulibao ensemble from Luzon, Sun Pei Cheng (pipa and chin), and a nanguan Chinese ensemble. After the symposium Xenakis (5 September 1966) wrote to Maceda from Tokyo (author's translationfrom French): "Iwas very happy to meet you in Manilaand to see the work you are doing. Your generosity made a strong impression (and your work) and I am persuaded that the path 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, University of the Philippines. 17. Feld's analysis, although mentioning Stockhausen in passing, does not explore the recordings' connections to avant-gardemusic, presumably because of their minimal economic significance (2000:266-67). Particularlyrelevant, however, was the impact of Arom's publications on Gyorgy Ligeti.

References
Agawu, V. Kofi. 1984. "The Impact of Language on Musical Composition in Ghana: an Introduction to the Musical Style of EphraimAmu."Ethnomusicology 28(1):37-73. --. 1987. "Conversationwith EphraimAmu: The Making of a Composer." The Black Perspective in Music 15(1):50-63.

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List of Maceda's Compositions

to Date:
1963 1965 1966 1968 1971 1974 1975 1978 1983 1983 1985 1988 1990 1992 1993 1995 1997 1998

1. Ugma-ugma (Structures) for Philippine instruments and voice 2. Agungan for families of gongs 3. Kubing for bamboo instruments and men's voices 4. Pagsamba ritual music for a circular auditorium 5. Cassettes 100 100 participants with cassette recorders play together 6. Ugnayan for 20 radio stations and thousands of people in Manilaand environs 7. Udlot-udlot (Hesitations) for 30 to thousands of performers, mixed instruments and voices: a ritual music in the open air 8. Ading music for 100 instrumentalists, 100 singers and 600-1000 audience 9. Aroding for 40 mouth harps, 7 men's voices, and 3 tiny flutes 10. Siasid for percussion, 10 blown bamboo flutes, and 5 violins 11. Suling-suling for 10 flutes, 10 bamboo percussions, and 10 flat gongs 12. Strata for 10 buzzers, 10 pairs of sticks, 5 tamtam, 5 flutes, 5 celli, 5 guitars 13. Dissemination for Orchestra 14. Distemperament for Orchestra 15. Music for Five Pianos 16. Two Pianos and Four Winds 17. Music for a Chamber Orchestra 18. Colors Without Rhythm for Orchestra