JONAS BAES on PATANGIS-BUWAYA [2003]
Special thanks to Mr. Jonas Baes for providing the rights for SMCC to share the article.
JONAS BAES on PATANGIS-BUWAYA [2003]
PRÆLUDIUM:
TEN YEARS since the inception, completion and premiere of my work PATANGIS-BUWAYA in 2003, I am having this article published online through the Society for Malaysian Contemporary Composers, and from the kind invitation of my good friends Chong Kee Yong and Yii Kah Hoe. PATANGIS-BUWAYA is perhaps one among my works that has acquired what I may consider as a life of its own....in fact, a socio-political one at that. Premiered in Tokyo in 2003, it has been rendered about ten times to this date; and in different social contexts, cultural environments, and even around varied political conditions. Its concept of being scored for four wind instruments from any culture is integral to the very epistemology of the music, allows the music to compose itself through passage of time and within varied living spaces; it is intended for the coming generations and not merely for the present, as every performance of the work is a mere temporary one. For its tenth year, PATANGIS-BUWAYA will have its US Premiere as it will be featured in the January 14th presentation of the historical Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, California. It will be rendered by a local contemporary music group WildUp, and will also feature the playing of 100 bamboo bird whistles by the audience—an idea infused during the Malaysian premiere of the work in 2008 and 2009.
As a personal celebration of the tenth anniversary of the work, I have allowed the online publication of the following article on PATANGIS-BUWAYA. Dealing with the question of the philosophy of praxis in the inception and eventual realization of this work, the following article was presented at a conference of the University of the Philippines College of Music in September 2011. Since my work in music composition very much connects with my work in the sociology of music, the list of references include some of my recent articles published in academic journals. The following article may be used as reading material for composers, musicologists, those other fields of the social sciences or cultural workers. However, any part of the paper may not be quoted without written permission from myself or from the central committee of the Manila Composers Lab.
JONAS BAES
Composer/Ethnomusicologist
Associate Professor, University of the Philippines College of Music
Diliman, Quezon City 1101PHILIPPINES
January 14, 2013
PATANGIS-BUWAYA:
Research and a Philosophy of Praxis for a New Music Composition in Southeast Asia
By JONAS BAES, PhD
University of the Philippines
Manila Composers Lab
THIS ARTICLE is about the PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS and its focus is my composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA: a work for four wind instruments from any culture, thought of while on a long mountain trek, completed while engaging indigenous groups in an internal refugee camp; and then premiered in a Buddhist temple in 2003. My compositions generally relate to a larger scenario of contemporary music from Southeast Asia, which tries to assume symbolic power through a certain kind of cultural difference, relative to a global practice of what is labelled as “new music” (sometimes called “contemporary classical music”, or the avant-garde). As will be shown here, my work goes even further to my personal experience and the socio-political milieu of my formative years.
In Southeast Asia, “new music” composers occupy a unique place in the field of production for the heritage of tradition that finds its way into their works. While the compositional process is in itself praxis—i.e., the interlock between theory and practice, therefore theoretically-informed practice—the assimilation of tradition as source material in new music privileges yet another kind of praxis: music research and/or ethnomusicology.
Composition and ethnomusicology have developed as separate fields—the former is bent on creative invention, the latter on empirical inquiry. Over the generations however, the praxis of both fields seems to have healthily “encroached” each other, especially here in Southeast Asia: composers have used some degree of empiricism in the use of traditional elements as well as in the engagement with communities, while at the same time ethnomusicologists have exhibited creativity in the presentation of their work. In attempting to address both the discourses of ethnomusicology and composition I will further show however that the nature of research and creative work on my composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA sits uncomfortably into any of both fields. From readings of classic works by Antonio Gramsci (1971) as well as Paulo Freire (1971), and enlightened by the conditions in the production of Aloysius Baes’ prison songs and the protest music movement during the time of the dictatorship in the Philippines; and later to Maceda’s diffused sound masses that are also a critique of the production of surplus labor; and finally to Spahlinger’s extracted sound moments drawn from post-structuralist philosophy, I illustrate the ontology of my praxis and attempt to show from its awkward position within the fields of composition and ethnomusicology, an understanding of the very ontology of praxis.
Journey into the Philosophy of Praxis
In his so-called Prison Notebooks [1971] the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci is thought to have used the term “philosophy of praxis” as a camouflage to his conceptual writings on Marxist historical materialism [Haug 200:8-10]. The philosophy of praxis on the whole pertains to “..... [a] fusion...; a making into one...of thinking and acting “[Gramsci: 1971:.35/Notebook 7:35]. Recent debate however, questions if in Gramsci’s thought, the philosophy of praxis refers to the impetus served by Historical Materialism, which put into action amounts to revolution. Though this assumption has had a general acceptance to leftist politics, Riechers argues that the use of the term ‘philosophy of praxis’ actually pertains to Gramsci’s critical views of Marxism itself, signalling his “actual departure from Marxism [Riechers cited in Haug 2000:10-11].
Practically, the need to camouflage any reference to the Marxist concept is understandable, given that Gramsci’s paraphernalia have always been subject to scrutiny by authorities. But in my opinion, the writing of these notebooks is itself praxis; its various practical and conceptual functions through entries on subjects written as the need arose was in itself a theoretically-informed mode of action that partly questioned and progressed away from that brand of Marxism in Russia at the time. In this act of writing, there is no conscious motivation for creating mere “literature”; the notebooks were rather a dynamic and functional repository of ideas, translations, or explanations of concepts [especially for his sister-in-law]. They were for him a sort of companion; a tangible manifestation of his critical mind. Moreover, for Gramsci, writing was an act of resistance of a man imprisoned so that—as his peroration indicated—“[the state could] stop [his] brain from working for twenty years” [Monasta, 1993:3]. And even with imprisonment, the Mussolini government did not stop that brain from working; for it was in prison and within these notebooks that Gramsci conducted perhaps the most extensive research on a subject that remains significant in scholarly discourse: HEGEMONY.
This very act also brings to mind Freire’s later formulation in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1971] that WORD = WORK = PRAXIS, which illustrated a deeply conflated relationship between reflection and action. Freire’s formulation is the foundation for CONSCIENTIZATION, Freire’s broader project in the pedagogy of those living in the peripheries of development. Thus, as Glass [2001] would say, Freire’s philosophy of praxis refers to a mode of action geared to “[make] life more humane for those oppressed by economic and ideological structures that denied them their dignity and their right to self-determination” [p.15].
Gramsci’s prison writings and Freire’s mode of reflection and action bring to mind a personal formative experience. In the early years of Martial Law in the Philippines (1972-1976), my brother Aloysius was incarcerated in the political stockades of Camp Crame for his progressive student activities. It was there where he embattled depression and physical torture by writing songs. Consciously appropriating the musical style of folk songs in the Tagalog Region, and writing new texts in a poetic language akin to those known to an older generation, Aloysius’ compositions raised the morale of his fellow inmates, as he always composed a new song for every event in the stockade: a death, a torture, a disappearance. In retrospect, Aloysius’ rather over-determined musical style is akin to that notion of a “national-popular” which as expressed in Gramsci is yet to be attained [Gramsci, 1971: 130]. From late 1974, members of my family began to smuggle some of the songs from out of the prison, and subsequently disseminated them in cassette tapes and through underground networks. We were consciously contributing to a growing protest music movement in the country. It was for me a valuable experience that pertained to the production and dissemination of songs that were subversive by a repressive military regime.
While the tensions and struggles in the production of my brother’s prison songs helped shape, albeit indirectly, the ontology of my own compositional praxis, I found his musical style rather stifling . It strived for what Gramsci refers to as the “national-popular” and as such, this music is always subject to the existing musical hegemony. This is at the opposite end of my personal aesthetic ideals as an artist. Even from the beginning, I always valued a counter-culture; and in my continuing education, my praxis is to be further defined instead by the work of some of my teachers, who for me also represented a “counter culture”.
Jose Maceda’s critique of surplus labor in industrial society came as an afterthought in his work UDLOT-UDLOT [1975] but this became a conscious conceptual impetus three years later in his ADING [1978]. Both works utilize hundreds of performers; the aesthetic of the diffused sound mass is intertwined with the concept of creating a “machine complex” that idealizes the use of more people, in industrial society where human labor is replaced by machines [Maceda 1978]. About the same time, and in the other end of the globe, the German composer Mathias Spahlinger wrote EXTENSION [1979/1980; recording produce in 1993] a work that seems to have been induced by his readings of literature from the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, including those of Bruno Liebrucks and Theodor Adorno. The sound moments occurring within an over-extended period of time created “dead spaces” of incoherent music: “noise”, extractions from older music, and even sounds that could no longer be heard. This manifestation, in sound, of the dissolution of thought and language seems to show what pianist/composer Moritz Eggert [2009] claims as “the beginning of the end of new music” in Spahlinger’s EXTENSION.
In the next section, I will attempt to show how the work of Anotonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Aloysius Baes, Jose Maceda and Mathias Spahlinger helped define my own praxis as researcher and composer.
Philosophy of Praxis and the Modes of Engagement with Indigenous Internal Refugees
When I heard in January 2003 that almost an entire community from Caagutayan in Mindoro Island had to leave behind their ancestral domain and seek refuge in a certain province of Southern Luzon, I knew I had to find out where they were. I have done research in Caagutayan in 1983; and there engaged the Iraya-Mangyan people at every chance I could until 1987. Into the 1990s, I met some of them and followed- up by attending forums on ancestral domain, solidarity celebrations like the SANDUGO festival. In 2003, however, I found Iraya-Mangyan of Caagutayan among the disparate groups of indigenous internal refugees from Mindoro and Rizal; sheltered in a place they call Kanlungan.
The Iraya-Mangyan is among seven linguistic groups in Mindoro Island [about 100 kilometres from the National Capital Region] who have lived marginally towards the central highlands. Caught in the mainstream of development aggression, the cataclysmic changes in their way of life resulted from the encroachment of lowland Christians, the entry of of missionaries, and of gigantic transnational mining and logging companies which catapulted at the beginning of the 1970s. On the one hand, the influx of outsiders has pushed the various communities further inland from their traditional dwelling places at the foothills, so that the forests no longer served as effective "zones of escape." On the other hand, encroachment had caused the Iraya-Mangyan to inter-marry with some lowlanders and settle in towns, even outside the island, working as wage labourers. However, for those still living in the forests, the situation turned to worst when they were caught in the crossfire of armed conflict.
Nine military battalions were however deployed in 2002, supposedly to conduct "clearing-up operations" in the island. Mindoro was allegedly becoming a stronghold of communist movement. The result was, as one elderly Iraya-Mangyan declared, a condition "worst than even during the Martial Law years in the 1970s; [the mountain people] have been suspected of being either communist guerrillas or sympathizers; others were forced to guide the soldiers through the mountains; and many were threatened, and worst, others have been summarily executed" [quoted in translation]. This was a strong case of "low-intensity conflict." It was a quagmire that had forced communities like those from Caagutayan to leave behind their livelihood and ancestral domain, and with the help of concerned non-governmental and church-based organizations, find refuge first at the National Capital Region and later in other provinces in Luzon.
Engaging with internal refugees meant that it is necessary for a researcher to transcend his role as academic; this means that the researcher must set aside his schema of thinking of the object of research...the people..as “objects” or “subjects” but as people responding to social conditions that are more powerful than they are. In my case and in this particular engagement, the praxis of ethnomusicology evolves into the praxis of advocacy—or better yet, it is where ethnomusicology evolves into praxis. In my opinion, ethnomusicology is yet to allow itself to be fully informed of the condition of those like the internal refugees and shape its mode of action accordingly. Adelaida Reyes-Schramm, while writing on the music of Vietnamese refugees (1986), focused mainly on how tradition permeates in the guise of innovative forms, fitting much into the discourse of ethnomusicology, but seemingly less into the human conditions of the refugees. I am suggesting therefore that ethnomusicology to open up to a more active stance, when the subjects of their inquiries face conditions like those that confront internal refugees.
After hearing the disturbing stories of torture, abuse, illegal detention, even rape and summary executions, I knew that the first course of action on the part of those engaging the people in the refugee camp had to address their day-to-day living. In the internal refugee camp, resources were very limited to provide for the refugees. A year before, I reluctantly produced from my 1980s recordings a CD of Iraya-Mangyan music entitled NOSTALGIA IN A DENUDED RAINFOREST. I was reluctant in 2001 because I wasn’t sure how producing this CD would directly benefit the Iraya-Mangyan. However, I saw that every chance at the refugee camp. Right there it was timely to give all the CDs to the refugees so that they could put them on sale to advocates and other interested people during the many forums conducted on their behalf. The symbolic “returning” of their songs now in the form of a CD was clear to many of the people, most especially when an ageing Mangyan came up to me and said with much emotion “SALAMAT SA PAG-A-ALAGA MO SA IGWAY” [“Thank you for taking care of our songs”]. That called to mind a statement made by Steven Feld in Sydney in 2001 that recordings are “memory gifts” extended to us by those we engage with [Feld, Trajectories Forum, Sydney July 2001]. It felt like, as an Iraya-Mangyan said, “returning their land to them” [quoted in translation]. A few years later, they find out that it was very difficult to sell, even with the cultural networks that were supporting them
PATANGIS-BUWAYA and the invention of praxis
I thought of PATANGIS-BUWAYA as a compositional counterpart to the symbolic “return” of Iraya-Mangyan songs in the form of a CD production. First the work appropriates the word patangis-buwaya, or “making the crocodile weep”, a statement used by the Iraya-Mangyan elders to describe the ideal performance of music played on the bangsi bamboo flute. The term is rooted to the legendary hero Aletawu, who at the end of the narrative is seen angrily hunting down the evil Baleyayasun for raping and causing the death of his wife Diyaga. It is said that just as Aletawu was leaving to retaliate, called his hunting do with a flute, whose sound was so full of anguish, it made even the crocodiles weep.
I found it very significant to talk about tradition with the refugees. Stories were and legends were drawn from a few elders and told to children, beginning from an afternoon listening session devoted to the NOSTALGIA ...CD. It was here where I thought of telling the story of the Iraya-Mangyan to others in an entirely different mode. I wanted to tell their story through a music composition.
The composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA appears on score as a one-page grammar of a syntactic structure. The actual music is to be realized by the performers, utilizing their own musical language, therefore alluding to their backgrounds as practitioners. Written for an ensemble of four wind instruments coming from any culture, its score may be comparable to a lead-sheet of a standard jazz tune, which jazz musicians are to realize in their own way [e.g., I consider this concept much similar to Chick Corea playing “Autumn Leaves”; the standard tune is a mere springboard for us hear more of Chick Corea through the original tune]. The process of performing PATANGIS-BUWAYA involves agency that warrants the performers’ facilities for reflection and action....or in the sense of Gramsci and Freire, PRAXIS. In the process, musicians are also made aware of the narratives of the Iraya-Mangyan people, which serves as the imagery in the spontaneous invention of events in the music. The musical score is like a grammar that can be further manipulated, or subject to mutation.
PATANGIS-BUWAYA is therefore a composition that “composes itself”; it is viewed with a dynamism that makes it remain to be an unfinished project. Its various protean forms appear through its changing instrumentation, the musicians’ agency, and the milieu where any performance is taking place; this is the essence of its aesthetic. Every situation of its performance will manifest something different: a new music festival in Kuala Lumpur, will produce an entirely different manifestation of the work from a radio broadcast in Budapest, for instance. Moreover, the political conditions of production will be entirely different in a performance of the work by German recorder ensemble in Tokyo, from a performance by traditional flute players in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. However it is most interesting to see how traditional musicians in Indonesia and Vietnam appropriate the idiom of new music; and such will be the direction of this project in the coming years. Over the years since its premiere, PATANGIS-BUWAYA has been rendered for an average of once a year in different places, and with different instrumentations The “orality” intended with the kind of notation and mode of performance is my long ambitious project, that will perhaps exceed my lifetime to invent a “tradition” that allow for the struggles of those like the Iraya-Mangyan internal refugees to be known by a greater portion of the world.
In the end, the uncomfortable fit of my work to both the field ethnomusicology and composition is perhaps due to the fact that a political stance of the nature I allude to is unbefitting of ethnomusicological inquiry; while “temporariness” of my compositional work seem to deny the already reproducible complexity that developed out the practice of new music today. But I welcome such uncomfortable fits. I believe that such is the nature of my praxis. For me, praxis itself should transcend boundaries.
January 2013
YouTube links to PATANGIS-BUWAYA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmtVEBCH_JM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktPyKbT9fLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2syr07wIywI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULo4UzBaWRU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRvE7idzKeE
References
Baes, J [2012] “When there is no more music...or....Dumagat Internal Refugees in the Philippines and the issues of ‘Cultural Objecthood’” Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse v11 (Special Issue)
Baes, J [2011] “Malaysian Composers, Geopolitical Spaces and Cultural Difference” Perfect Beat v12-n1
Baes, J [2011] “Mangyan Internal Refugees from Mindoro Island and the Spaces of Low Intensity Conflict in the Philippines” Shima v1-n1
Baes J [2003] PATANGIS-BUWAYA programme notes form the premiere in Tokyo. Tokyo: Japan Federation of Composers and the Asian Composers’ League
Baes, J [2001] NOSTALGIA IN A DENUDED RAINFOREST. IRAYA-MANGYAN MUSIC FROM MINDORO, PHILIPPINES. CD Production, National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Tunugan Foundation
Baes, A [1973-1976] “Songs from Stockade 4” unpublished compilation
Eggert, M [2009] Personal Communication November 2009
Feld, S [2001] “Bosavi String Band Music” paper read at the Trajectories 1 Colloquium, Sydney Australia
Freire, P [1971] Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Herder and Herder
Glass, RD [2001] “On Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Praxis and the Foundations of Liberation Education” Education Researcher v30-n1
Gramsci, A [1971] Selections form the Prison Notebooks [Hoare, Q and Smith, GN, eds, trans.] NY: International Publishers
Haug, WF [2000] “Gramsci’s Philosophy of Praxis: Camouflage or Refoundation of Marxist Thought?” Socialism and Democracy v14-n1
Maceda, J. [1978] ADING. Programme notes to the premiere, University of the Philippines, September 1978
Monasta, A [1993] “Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education v23-n3
Spahlinger, M [1993] EXTENSION for violin and piano. Liner notes to the CD production Hat Art CD 6131
JONAS BAES on PATANGIS-BUWAYA [2003]
PRÆLUDIUM:
TEN YEARS since the inception, completion and premiere of my work PATANGIS-BUWAYA in 2003, I am having this article published online through the Society for Malaysian Contemporary Composers, and from the kind invitation of my good friends Chong Kee Yong and Yii Kah Hoe. PATANGIS-BUWAYA is perhaps one among my works that has acquired what I may consider as a life of its own....in fact, a socio-political one at that. Premiered in Tokyo in 2003, it has been rendered about ten times to this date; and in different social contexts, cultural environments, and even around varied political conditions. Its concept of being scored for four wind instruments from any culture is integral to the very epistemology of the music, allows the music to compose itself through passage of time and within varied living spaces; it is intended for the coming generations and not merely for the present, as every performance of the work is a mere temporary one. For its tenth year, PATANGIS-BUWAYA will have its US Premiere as it will be featured in the January 14th presentation of the historical Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, California. It will be rendered by a local contemporary music group WildUp, and will also feature the playing of 100 bamboo bird whistles by the audience—an idea infused during the Malaysian premiere of the work in 2008 and 2009.
As a personal celebration of the tenth anniversary of the work, I have allowed the online publication of the following article on PATANGIS-BUWAYA. Dealing with the question of the philosophy of praxis in the inception and eventual realization of this work, the following article was presented at a conference of the University of the Philippines College of Music in September 2011. Since my work in music composition very much connects with my work in the sociology of music, the list of references include some of my recent articles published in academic journals. The following article may be used as reading material for composers, musicologists, those other fields of the social sciences or cultural workers. However, any part of the paper may not be quoted without written permission from myself or from the central committee of the Manila Composers Lab.
JONAS BAES
Composer/Ethnomusicologist
Associate Professor, University of the Philippines College of Music
Diliman, Quezon City 1101PHILIPPINES
January 14, 2013
PATANGIS-BUWAYA:
Research and a Philosophy of Praxis for a New Music Composition in Southeast Asia
By JONAS BAES, PhD
University of the Philippines
Manila Composers Lab
THIS ARTICLE is about the PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS and its focus is my composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA: a work for four wind instruments from any culture, thought of while on a long mountain trek, completed while engaging indigenous groups in an internal refugee camp; and then premiered in a Buddhist temple in 2003. My compositions generally relate to a larger scenario of contemporary music from Southeast Asia, which tries to assume symbolic power through a certain kind of cultural difference, relative to a global practice of what is labelled as “new music” (sometimes called “contemporary classical music”, or the avant-garde). As will be shown here, my work goes even further to my personal experience and the socio-political milieu of my formative years.
In Southeast Asia, “new music” composers occupy a unique place in the field of production for the heritage of tradition that finds its way into their works. While the compositional process is in itself praxis—i.e., the interlock between theory and practice, therefore theoretically-informed practice—the assimilation of tradition as source material in new music privileges yet another kind of praxis: music research and/or ethnomusicology.
Composition and ethnomusicology have developed as separate fields—the former is bent on creative invention, the latter on empirical inquiry. Over the generations however, the praxis of both fields seems to have healthily “encroached” each other, especially here in Southeast Asia: composers have used some degree of empiricism in the use of traditional elements as well as in the engagement with communities, while at the same time ethnomusicologists have exhibited creativity in the presentation of their work. In attempting to address both the discourses of ethnomusicology and composition I will further show however that the nature of research and creative work on my composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA sits uncomfortably into any of both fields. From readings of classic works by Antonio Gramsci (1971) as well as Paulo Freire (1971), and enlightened by the conditions in the production of Aloysius Baes’ prison songs and the protest music movement during the time of the dictatorship in the Philippines; and later to Maceda’s diffused sound masses that are also a critique of the production of surplus labor; and finally to Spahlinger’s extracted sound moments drawn from post-structuralist philosophy, I illustrate the ontology of my praxis and attempt to show from its awkward position within the fields of composition and ethnomusicology, an understanding of the very ontology of praxis.
Journey into the Philosophy of Praxis
In his so-called Prison Notebooks [1971] the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci is thought to have used the term “philosophy of praxis” as a camouflage to his conceptual writings on Marxist historical materialism [Haug 200:8-10]. The philosophy of praxis on the whole pertains to “..... [a] fusion...; a making into one...of thinking and acting “[Gramsci: 1971:.35/Notebook 7:35]. Recent debate however, questions if in Gramsci’s thought, the philosophy of praxis refers to the impetus served by Historical Materialism, which put into action amounts to revolution. Though this assumption has had a general acceptance to leftist politics, Riechers argues that the use of the term ‘philosophy of praxis’ actually pertains to Gramsci’s critical views of Marxism itself, signalling his “actual departure from Marxism [Riechers cited in Haug 2000:10-11].
Practically, the need to camouflage any reference to the Marxist concept is understandable, given that Gramsci’s paraphernalia have always been subject to scrutiny by authorities. But in my opinion, the writing of these notebooks is itself praxis; its various practical and conceptual functions through entries on subjects written as the need arose was in itself a theoretically-informed mode of action that partly questioned and progressed away from that brand of Marxism in Russia at the time. In this act of writing, there is no conscious motivation for creating mere “literature”; the notebooks were rather a dynamic and functional repository of ideas, translations, or explanations of concepts [especially for his sister-in-law]. They were for him a sort of companion; a tangible manifestation of his critical mind. Moreover, for Gramsci, writing was an act of resistance of a man imprisoned so that—as his peroration indicated—“[the state could] stop [his] brain from working for twenty years” [Monasta, 1993:3]. And even with imprisonment, the Mussolini government did not stop that brain from working; for it was in prison and within these notebooks that Gramsci conducted perhaps the most extensive research on a subject that remains significant in scholarly discourse: HEGEMONY.
This very act also brings to mind Freire’s later formulation in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1971] that WORD = WORK = PRAXIS, which illustrated a deeply conflated relationship between reflection and action. Freire’s formulation is the foundation for CONSCIENTIZATION, Freire’s broader project in the pedagogy of those living in the peripheries of development. Thus, as Glass [2001] would say, Freire’s philosophy of praxis refers to a mode of action geared to “[make] life more humane for those oppressed by economic and ideological structures that denied them their dignity and their right to self-determination” [p.15].
Gramsci’s prison writings and Freire’s mode of reflection and action bring to mind a personal formative experience. In the early years of Martial Law in the Philippines (1972-1976), my brother Aloysius was incarcerated in the political stockades of Camp Crame for his progressive student activities. It was there where he embattled depression and physical torture by writing songs. Consciously appropriating the musical style of folk songs in the Tagalog Region, and writing new texts in a poetic language akin to those known to an older generation, Aloysius’ compositions raised the morale of his fellow inmates, as he always composed a new song for every event in the stockade: a death, a torture, a disappearance. In retrospect, Aloysius’ rather over-determined musical style is akin to that notion of a “national-popular” which as expressed in Gramsci is yet to be attained [Gramsci, 1971: 130]. From late 1974, members of my family began to smuggle some of the songs from out of the prison, and subsequently disseminated them in cassette tapes and through underground networks. We were consciously contributing to a growing protest music movement in the country. It was for me a valuable experience that pertained to the production and dissemination of songs that were subversive by a repressive military regime.
While the tensions and struggles in the production of my brother’s prison songs helped shape, albeit indirectly, the ontology of my own compositional praxis, I found his musical style rather stifling . It strived for what Gramsci refers to as the “national-popular” and as such, this music is always subject to the existing musical hegemony. This is at the opposite end of my personal aesthetic ideals as an artist. Even from the beginning, I always valued a counter-culture; and in my continuing education, my praxis is to be further defined instead by the work of some of my teachers, who for me also represented a “counter culture”.
Jose Maceda’s critique of surplus labor in industrial society came as an afterthought in his work UDLOT-UDLOT [1975] but this became a conscious conceptual impetus three years later in his ADING [1978]. Both works utilize hundreds of performers; the aesthetic of the diffused sound mass is intertwined with the concept of creating a “machine complex” that idealizes the use of more people, in industrial society where human labor is replaced by machines [Maceda 1978]. About the same time, and in the other end of the globe, the German composer Mathias Spahlinger wrote EXTENSION [1979/1980; recording produce in 1993] a work that seems to have been induced by his readings of literature from the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, including those of Bruno Liebrucks and Theodor Adorno. The sound moments occurring within an over-extended period of time created “dead spaces” of incoherent music: “noise”, extractions from older music, and even sounds that could no longer be heard. This manifestation, in sound, of the dissolution of thought and language seems to show what pianist/composer Moritz Eggert [2009] claims as “the beginning of the end of new music” in Spahlinger’s EXTENSION.
In the next section, I will attempt to show how the work of Anotonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Aloysius Baes, Jose Maceda and Mathias Spahlinger helped define my own praxis as researcher and composer.
Philosophy of Praxis and the Modes of Engagement with Indigenous Internal Refugees
When I heard in January 2003 that almost an entire community from Caagutayan in Mindoro Island had to leave behind their ancestral domain and seek refuge in a certain province of Southern Luzon, I knew I had to find out where they were. I have done research in Caagutayan in 1983; and there engaged the Iraya-Mangyan people at every chance I could until 1987. Into the 1990s, I met some of them and followed- up by attending forums on ancestral domain, solidarity celebrations like the SANDUGO festival. In 2003, however, I found Iraya-Mangyan of Caagutayan among the disparate groups of indigenous internal refugees from Mindoro and Rizal; sheltered in a place they call Kanlungan.
The Iraya-Mangyan is among seven linguistic groups in Mindoro Island [about 100 kilometres from the National Capital Region] who have lived marginally towards the central highlands. Caught in the mainstream of development aggression, the cataclysmic changes in their way of life resulted from the encroachment of lowland Christians, the entry of of missionaries, and of gigantic transnational mining and logging companies which catapulted at the beginning of the 1970s. On the one hand, the influx of outsiders has pushed the various communities further inland from their traditional dwelling places at the foothills, so that the forests no longer served as effective "zones of escape." On the other hand, encroachment had caused the Iraya-Mangyan to inter-marry with some lowlanders and settle in towns, even outside the island, working as wage labourers. However, for those still living in the forests, the situation turned to worst when they were caught in the crossfire of armed conflict.
Nine military battalions were however deployed in 2002, supposedly to conduct "clearing-up operations" in the island. Mindoro was allegedly becoming a stronghold of communist movement. The result was, as one elderly Iraya-Mangyan declared, a condition "worst than even during the Martial Law years in the 1970s; [the mountain people] have been suspected of being either communist guerrillas or sympathizers; others were forced to guide the soldiers through the mountains; and many were threatened, and worst, others have been summarily executed" [quoted in translation]. This was a strong case of "low-intensity conflict." It was a quagmire that had forced communities like those from Caagutayan to leave behind their livelihood and ancestral domain, and with the help of concerned non-governmental and church-based organizations, find refuge first at the National Capital Region and later in other provinces in Luzon.
Engaging with internal refugees meant that it is necessary for a researcher to transcend his role as academic; this means that the researcher must set aside his schema of thinking of the object of research...the people..as “objects” or “subjects” but as people responding to social conditions that are more powerful than they are. In my case and in this particular engagement, the praxis of ethnomusicology evolves into the praxis of advocacy—or better yet, it is where ethnomusicology evolves into praxis. In my opinion, ethnomusicology is yet to allow itself to be fully informed of the condition of those like the internal refugees and shape its mode of action accordingly. Adelaida Reyes-Schramm, while writing on the music of Vietnamese refugees (1986), focused mainly on how tradition permeates in the guise of innovative forms, fitting much into the discourse of ethnomusicology, but seemingly less into the human conditions of the refugees. I am suggesting therefore that ethnomusicology to open up to a more active stance, when the subjects of their inquiries face conditions like those that confront internal refugees.
After hearing the disturbing stories of torture, abuse, illegal detention, even rape and summary executions, I knew that the first course of action on the part of those engaging the people in the refugee camp had to address their day-to-day living. In the internal refugee camp, resources were very limited to provide for the refugees. A year before, I reluctantly produced from my 1980s recordings a CD of Iraya-Mangyan music entitled NOSTALGIA IN A DENUDED RAINFOREST. I was reluctant in 2001 because I wasn’t sure how producing this CD would directly benefit the Iraya-Mangyan. However, I saw that every chance at the refugee camp. Right there it was timely to give all the CDs to the refugees so that they could put them on sale to advocates and other interested people during the many forums conducted on their behalf. The symbolic “returning” of their songs now in the form of a CD was clear to many of the people, most especially when an ageing Mangyan came up to me and said with much emotion “SALAMAT SA PAG-A-ALAGA MO SA IGWAY” [“Thank you for taking care of our songs”]. That called to mind a statement made by Steven Feld in Sydney in 2001 that recordings are “memory gifts” extended to us by those we engage with [Feld, Trajectories Forum, Sydney July 2001]. It felt like, as an Iraya-Mangyan said, “returning their land to them” [quoted in translation]. A few years later, they find out that it was very difficult to sell, even with the cultural networks that were supporting them
PATANGIS-BUWAYA and the invention of praxis
I thought of PATANGIS-BUWAYA as a compositional counterpart to the symbolic “return” of Iraya-Mangyan songs in the form of a CD production. First the work appropriates the word patangis-buwaya, or “making the crocodile weep”, a statement used by the Iraya-Mangyan elders to describe the ideal performance of music played on the bangsi bamboo flute. The term is rooted to the legendary hero Aletawu, who at the end of the narrative is seen angrily hunting down the evil Baleyayasun for raping and causing the death of his wife Diyaga. It is said that just as Aletawu was leaving to retaliate, called his hunting do with a flute, whose sound was so full of anguish, it made even the crocodiles weep.
I found it very significant to talk about tradition with the refugees. Stories were and legends were drawn from a few elders and told to children, beginning from an afternoon listening session devoted to the NOSTALGIA ...CD. It was here where I thought of telling the story of the Iraya-Mangyan to others in an entirely different mode. I wanted to tell their story through a music composition.
The composition PATANGIS-BUWAYA appears on score as a one-page grammar of a syntactic structure. The actual music is to be realized by the performers, utilizing their own musical language, therefore alluding to their backgrounds as practitioners. Written for an ensemble of four wind instruments coming from any culture, its score may be comparable to a lead-sheet of a standard jazz tune, which jazz musicians are to realize in their own way [e.g., I consider this concept much similar to Chick Corea playing “Autumn Leaves”; the standard tune is a mere springboard for us hear more of Chick Corea through the original tune]. The process of performing PATANGIS-BUWAYA involves agency that warrants the performers’ facilities for reflection and action....or in the sense of Gramsci and Freire, PRAXIS. In the process, musicians are also made aware of the narratives of the Iraya-Mangyan people, which serves as the imagery in the spontaneous invention of events in the music. The musical score is like a grammar that can be further manipulated, or subject to mutation.
PATANGIS-BUWAYA is therefore a composition that “composes itself”; it is viewed with a dynamism that makes it remain to be an unfinished project. Its various protean forms appear through its changing instrumentation, the musicians’ agency, and the milieu where any performance is taking place; this is the essence of its aesthetic. Every situation of its performance will manifest something different: a new music festival in Kuala Lumpur, will produce an entirely different manifestation of the work from a radio broadcast in Budapest, for instance. Moreover, the political conditions of production will be entirely different in a performance of the work by German recorder ensemble in Tokyo, from a performance by traditional flute players in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. However it is most interesting to see how traditional musicians in Indonesia and Vietnam appropriate the idiom of new music; and such will be the direction of this project in the coming years. Over the years since its premiere, PATANGIS-BUWAYA has been rendered for an average of once a year in different places, and with different instrumentations The “orality” intended with the kind of notation and mode of performance is my long ambitious project, that will perhaps exceed my lifetime to invent a “tradition” that allow for the struggles of those like the Iraya-Mangyan internal refugees to be known by a greater portion of the world.
In the end, the uncomfortable fit of my work to both the field ethnomusicology and composition is perhaps due to the fact that a political stance of the nature I allude to is unbefitting of ethnomusicological inquiry; while “temporariness” of my compositional work seem to deny the already reproducible complexity that developed out the practice of new music today. But I welcome such uncomfortable fits. I believe that such is the nature of my praxis. For me, praxis itself should transcend boundaries.
January 2013
YouTube links to PATANGIS-BUWAYA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmtVEBCH_JM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktPyKbT9fLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2syr07wIywI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULo4UzBaWRU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRvE7idzKeE
References
Baes, J [2012] “When there is no more music...or....Dumagat Internal Refugees in the Philippines and the issues of ‘Cultural Objecthood’” Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse v11 (Special Issue)
Baes, J [2011] “Malaysian Composers, Geopolitical Spaces and Cultural Difference” Perfect Beat v12-n1
Baes, J [2011] “Mangyan Internal Refugees from Mindoro Island and the Spaces of Low Intensity Conflict in the Philippines” Shima v1-n1
Baes J [2003] PATANGIS-BUWAYA programme notes form the premiere in Tokyo. Tokyo: Japan Federation of Composers and the Asian Composers’ League
Baes, J [2001] NOSTALGIA IN A DENUDED RAINFOREST. IRAYA-MANGYAN MUSIC FROM MINDORO, PHILIPPINES. CD Production, National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Tunugan Foundation
Baes, A [1973-1976] “Songs from Stockade 4” unpublished compilation
Eggert, M [2009] Personal Communication November 2009
Feld, S [2001] “Bosavi String Band Music” paper read at the Trajectories 1 Colloquium, Sydney Australia
Freire, P [1971] Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Herder and Herder
Glass, RD [2001] “On Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Praxis and the Foundations of Liberation Education” Education Researcher v30-n1
Gramsci, A [1971] Selections form the Prison Notebooks [Hoare, Q and Smith, GN, eds, trans.] NY: International Publishers
Haug, WF [2000] “Gramsci’s Philosophy of Praxis: Camouflage or Refoundation of Marxist Thought?” Socialism and Democracy v14-n1
Maceda, J. [1978] ADING. Programme notes to the premiere, University of the Philippines, September 1978
Monasta, A [1993] “Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education v23-n3
Spahlinger, M [1993] EXTENSION for violin and piano. Liner notes to the CD production Hat Art CD 6131