Association for Asian American Studies Conference, New Orleans, 2011
The racial invisible: European aesthetics and Black and Filipino performance during the U.S. colonial era in the Philippines
ABSTRACT: When conducting the highly applauded military concert band from America’s colony, John Philip Sousa exclaimed that, with his eyes closed, he thought it was the U.S. Marine Band playing. This was the highest praise that he could bestow on the Filipino bandsmen of the Philippine Constabulary and their Black American conductor, Lt. Walter H. Loving. With Sousa’s eyes closed, all domestic and colonial constructions of race were erased, thus allowing him to properly hear the Band’s artistic abilities, which rivaled but did not surpass his level of musical superiority. This was a common way by which American audiences resolved the contradictions of racial and colonial ideologies, discourses that constructed both Filipinos and African Americans as incapable of mastering the cultural pinnacle of Western civilization–European art music. If ethnomusicological discussions of “race” construe it as difference, how then can we understand musical performances in which racial difference is “invisiblized” or “minimalized” rather than accentuated? Concepts such as cultural relativism and hybridity rely on racial formations and cultural differences to be visible and audible, but they do not properly interrogate situations in which it is made seemingly invisibl
Society for Ethnomusicology
2009 November 19
Mexico City
PANEL:
Beyond Westernization: Southeast Asian appropriations of the romantic pop “ballad” in transnational perspective
TITLE:
Music and the Muslim Separatist Movement: Magindanaon Songs of Love and Rebellion during Martial Law in the Philippines (Mary Talusan, Ph.D., Tufts University)
ABSTRACT:
After the declaration of martial law in 1972, Muslim Filipino activists joined forces to take up arms against increased military presence on their home island of Mindanao. Intense violence and political upheaval continued through 1980 with periodic eruptions until the end of martial law and the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. While Muslim Filipinos’ ethnonationalist sentiment hinged on the concept of a shared religion and history distinct from the rest of the Philippines, the musical vehicle through which rank-and-file supporters conveyed desires for political and religious autonomy was not, however, indigenous songs such as bayuk. Magindanaon rebel singers employed the melodies of American rock ballads—such as Bryan Adams’s “Straight from the Heart”—to frame protests of the Philippine government’s incursion into their homeland, the fight for their religion, and longing for love. In this paper, I investigate how and why the stylistic conventions of American popular music became the platform for rebels to sing Magindanaon lyrics expressing political protest, ethnonationalist sentiment, and romantic love during and in the aftermath of a violent period in southern Philippine history.
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Tufts University, Department of Music
2009 March 30
Boston, MA
“Sounding Sentiments through the Gongs: Musical Language in Muslim Filipino Courtship”
Mary Talusan Lacanlale, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral associate at Tufts, will present a chapter from her book-in-progress Women’s Courtship Voices: Music and Gender in the Muslim Philippines. She will analyze how courtship is made possible by the musical language of the gandingan or “talking gongs” in a Muslim Filipino society that traditionally forbids unrelated, unmarried young people to speak to one another.Center for the Humanities at Tufts
2009 February 17
ABSTRACT
I trace the theme of courtship across a number of Magindanaon musical genres to examine the ways by which women articulate sentiments of romantic love. By doing so, I argue that an analysis of musical performance provides a way to hear these sentiments thus uncovering women’s agency in courtship and choice of marriage partner. Scholarly literature is absolutely silent on this matter, describing the choice of marriage partner as belonging solely to the man. While two musical genres I investigated provide ways to enact, facilitate, and communicate actual courtship, the dayunday is an improvised courtship drama, a staged show or type of musical theater in which singers act out a courtship scenario. It is a contemporary form of entertainment invented sometime during the 1970s, the period of martial law and intense armed rebellion in Mindanao, the Muslim Filipino homeland.
Tropical Renditions: Musics of Filipino America
2009 February 5-6
Conference sponsored by UC Riverside, Southeast Asian Text, Ritual, and Performance (SEATRIP) and Department of Music One of four speakers, gave presentation on early Philippine-American encounters of the Philippine Constabulary Band in the U.S. (1904 World’s Fair, 1909 Taft Inauguration, and tours of America’s major symphony halls).
UC Riverside, CA
