[Originally published in FO A RM Magazine, Issue #5 (Autonomy). This article accompanied others by Jonas Baes, Ramon Santos, and Subhash Kak in a special section of the magazine devoted to Philippino composer/ethnomusicologist/pianist José Maceda. ]

Techniques of Ambiguity: José Maceda and a Music of Shares by Matt Marble

In 1947 he played a series of recitals featuring Beethoven's 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?1.

What has all of this got to do with coconuts and rice? And so Maceda could no longer ignore the disparity between the traditions of Southeast Asia and the oppressive influence of contemporary Western culture. Indeed, within his work Maceda would attempt to dissimulate the cultural autonomy of Occidental music and its foundation in logic and causality. In place of this foundation, he would seek to propose an audible set of values and an awareness of eco-social relations derived from Southeast Asian culture. Indeed, it is because Maceda would never leave his own Occidental 'roots' that the resulting contradictions we find in his work reflect so clearly the complexities and ambiguities of a long standing musical and cultural paradigm.

Leaving the concert hall and his piano performance career behind, Maceda
began study in musicology at Queens College and Columbia University, followed by studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He eventually received a doctorate in ethnomusicology from UCLA (1961-63). He travelled to Japan, China, eastern and western Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam; in each place he researched and archived recordings of the indigenous music he encountered there.During this time Maceda was also active as a curator and conductor of avant-garde music with which he often included indigenous musical works. After many years of ethnomusicological research and archiving, Maceda composed his first large scale musical work, Ugma Ugma, performed for the first time in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. Combining techniques he found in Southeast Asian cultures (particularly the Philippines) with those of the European avant-garde (notably in the work of Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varese), Maceda sought to obscure rhythmic pulse and to ambiguate discrete pitch through collective sound making practices. With Varese and Xenakis, Maceda felt that traditional Western musical practices had been cracked open. There was in this music room for a new aesthetic - one open to masses of sounds, indefinite pitch, and unmeasured time. Within this opening he believed that such aesthetic sensibilities, hand in hand with certain values of the increasingly superceded traditional cultures of Southeast Asia, would find the attention they deserved and provide a an alternative to the logic and causality founding Occidental culture and a new theory of music. His early works were marked by their consistent use of Southeast Asian instruments, large numbers of participants (up to 800,and often involving audience participation),outdoor or site-specific settings, and elements of theatre and ritual (often derived from traditional Philippine collectivist practices).It is in these early works that Maceda's concepts of a musical humanism and nationalism manifest themselves with utmost force and contradiction.

However, by the 1980's, Maceda had begun to incorporate more and more European instruments into his compositions. This shift was due primarily to his being offered more opportunities to compose works for these instruments, but perhaps as well to the fatigue and challenge of organizing his larger ritualistic events. Consequently ,in his scores he began to utilize more exact notation, in the European tradition, and the performances of his works were taking place predominantly in the concert hall. Towards the end of his life he was composing works for smaller ensembles and giving special attention to the instrument with
which his own musical activity had begun, the piano. Still a professor at the University of the Phillipines and Executive Director of the Ethnomusicology Department, José Maceda would die of cancer-related respiratory failure on May 5th,2004 in Quezon City.2

Though the sonic aspects of Maceda's music such as drone, color and rhythmic ambiguity are not new to contemporary or experimental sound practices, he is unique in situating these otherwise superficial percepts within an eco-social context and, ultimately, around an ethical foundation. Maceda did not begin his compositional work seeking merely to represent these values through cultural symbols and musical metaphor. Rather, dissolving the audience into the work and dissimulating the spectacular situation, Maceda essentially sought to use music as a means of directly composing or re-composing an ideal eco-social relationship, or a culture. Moreover this cultural re-composition would come to the fore as a gesture of revivalism of ancient traditions supporting a new Philippine nationalism.3

Over the course of many years of research and composition, certain concepts began to crystallize and were subsequently reinforced within Maceda's musical works. These concepts, based on what I call various 'techniques of ambiguity' derived from indigenous Asian practices, merge the organization of sound with the organization of people. It was at a conference at his 1984 Society for Ethnomusicology Seeger lecture that Maceda affirmed his three most important compositional concepts: color, drone, and classification (Tenzer,2003).

DRONE AND ITS RELATION TO MELODY

[Drone] is a pillar which supports music itself, like a law of nature. Though originally utilized within indigenous practices, often imitating and interacting with the din of Nature, most post-colonial cultures have encountered drone as the continuous noise of modernity. Meanwhile minimalism, psychedelia, ambient, noise and other such 'musical' genres that have developed since the 1960's have successfully popularized the use of drone in Western musics. Still, the richness of drone itself spans a broader range of cultural use. It was from this broad temporal and cultural perspective that Maceda, placing drone at the center of his work, would seek to articulate the cooperative and metaphysically based practices of Southeast Asia.

Maceda has defined drone generally as being not only a sustained sound, a con- tinuation of the long vibration of gongs, but also a constantly repeating phrase of one or more pitches played by one or several instruments for the duration of the music. The continuous and repeating sound may be an identifiable pitch or not, a series of pitches making a phrase, or it may form a group of repeating sounds. Moreover, several instruments may each play a repeating sound, and together they may constitute a drone. The repetition
may form irregular or regular beats - a sound or sounds grouped into one, two or four beats (Maceda, 1986). Here indeed we have the foundation of Maceda's musical practice.

However, in contrast to the more commonly encountered tonal drone, which is
distinguished by having a tonal 'center' around which other tones define themselves (e.g. in classical Indian music, European ostinato, various styles of throat singing, etc.), it was the non-pitched 'pulsed' drone which most interested Maceda. The pulsed drone may either involve a group of non-pitched instruments (e.g. an ensemble of bamboo clappers), or it may involve a group of pitched instruments (e.g. a gong ensemble). But in either case, the use of these instruments evades the creation of a central or reference pitch. In SE Asian music drone is principally formed by the regular repetition of percussion instruments (gongs, drums, and cymbals). In more rural SE Asian areas, and often rooted in more ancient practices, instruments of bamboo and wood predominate and are used to create drones of indiscriminate pitch, which Maceda often associates with deeper spiritual engagement.

As well, in the respective musics of Javanese gamelan and Thai Pii Phaad, Maceda
has also noted the structural role of hierarchy and the count of 4 as being of fundamental importance in the creation of drone. Such hierarchy, Maceda emphasizes, is based on a logic other than the Aristotelian causality giving rise to the theoretical basis of Western harmony. Through his research, Maceda found such techniques of ambiguity, often giving way to drone, to be commonly employed and constitutive of a distinct practice of refined construction. I n counts of four, where the fourth count is most important, there is ambiguity. Any of the four or five tones of a pathet may use that fourth count. It is a subtle art to construct a system of pitch arrangement that hides or obscures, or reveals what the gong tone or principle tones are by using that fourth count as a point of arrival for one of two cadences or their inversions in each pathet. (Maceda, 1990) However, it was not only drone but the relationship between drone and melody in SE practices, which Maceda placed in stark contrast to their relationship in Western music practices.

Maceda understood that [t]he use and maneuvering of pitches to construct melodies demand techniques which are dependant on culture. That is, they do not just happen. (Maceda, 1986) Melodic sensibility pre-requires a familiarity with a set of established objectively derived tonal distinctions and relationships as well as a set of subjective developmental anticipations and mnemonic referrals. A melody cannot exist without its cultural propagation, which functions as an expression of a cultural mindset: A bilateral relationship between drone and melody describes not only the music but also the thinking behind the music, for the different combinations of drone and melody represent an expression of a group of people, perhaps a reflection of a social organization, a representation of values, and a view of time. (Maceda, 1986) In many SE Asian musics, drone and melody relate to one another in such a way that the melody is not anchored to the drone. Or, the melody is not involved in cadences or modulations based on a single reference pitch constituting the drone. As each pitch in the scale is treated with equal importance, the pentatonic (5-tone) range, with which many SE Asian melodies are composed, is such that the tonal center in these musics is opened to greater fluctuation,blurred by an infinite array of colors,within a context of diminished opposition.

Compare this to the relationship between melody and drone (or 'fundamental
pitch') in Western music, which has been nurtured into a progressively more complex logic both concerning temperament (the codification of note values and scalar relationships) and harmonic opposition (dominant-tonic).Such totalizing classifications and a non-neutral oppositional logic have lead the western composer to choose certain tones as being structurally or narratively more important than others, with all being subservient to their alignment in a harmonic cadence.4 Reified through notation and the numerical reckoning of mensural systems,Western music has become increasingly detached from any such feedback with nature and the dynamism of its physiology.5 For Maceda this cultural divergence was directly tied to different views of time.

Engaging this temporal divergence immediately brings us into the metaphysical
aspects of Maceda's composition and thought. Drone is a center of time which controls melody and the space around which the melody moves.It is a pillar which supports music itself, like a law of nature. Drone expresses notions of infinity... (Maceda,1986) Veering towards the infinite or the indefinite, Maceda hoped to invoke a 'spiritual consciousness' through his music. He encountered this spiritual disposition of the ear in the musical techniques of SE Asia, [which] fills time along notions of continuity, infinity and indefiniteness in a non-secular metaphysical world, and of hierarchy in a secular 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. (Maceda,1986)

On the other hand Western music has concerned itself with increasingly identifiable 'objects' (e.g. musique concrète). From Medieval polyphony up to the early works of Schoernberg, we bear witness to a bell curve of cultural attention, shifting its emphasis from the way sounds interleave, their moving in and out of prominence within the mix, toward the way sounds can be made to coincide and to arrive at a clear destination, and finally returning to the interleaving mix: durational flux - stability of the instant - durational flux. At the crest of musical stability (Mozart, for example) we hear melody as determined by and expressing the harmony. All is unified in being directed towards the harmonic progression and cadence, the instant of alignment and identification.

Such rational abstractions move us away from the time of the living body (its
temporo-spatial constitution in the World) and its immediate ecological involvement, expressed in the natural proportions/rhythms internally derived (e.g. human locomotion, heart rate, respiration, etc) or in imitation of external cyclical phenomena (e.g. animal/insect noises, phases of weather, solar,lunar, & seasonal cycles,etc)6. Moreover,this ecological engagement via memetic interaction formed the foundation of ancient Philippine and other indigenous peoples' sound practices.

As we shall see,in his own music Maceda tended to avoid melodic development of any kind - that is,a use of melody according to a developmental process oriented around cadential synchrony. Approaching a work as being founded on drone allowed Maceda to work with the ambiguities and differences inherent in ensembles of people and instruments and as well with their varying cultural contexts, whose distinction remains dependent on such differences. Engaging many of the above techniques of ambiguity, melodic development in Maceda's work is almost always diffused into shades of color forming or rising out of a drone, such as when light passes through a vapor.

DRONE: ADING

Though its improvised text may express any manner of things,the ading, in the tradition of the Kalinga people of the Northern Philippines, is a love song typically sung by women. It is characterized by two techniques mentioned earlier: repetition and permutation. In this manner, part of the ading is sung by a group of people who create a drone by collectively repeating a single tone, while the other part is sung by a group of people who permute a small collection of pitches in a manner that diffuses melodic development. Both these styles are more typically broken into 'phrases' and are often followed by short rests. The traditional ading may also be identified by the stylistic use of glissandi, or sliding pitches, which are used in most of its phrases (Maceda/Hood,1972).All of these characteristics have been used to their full extent in Maceda's 1968 composition of the same name.

The score for Maceda's Ading shows that a group of 20 people using scrapers (column 5) sound continuously from beginning to end, forming a continuous drone-color throughout the entire work. Those playing the string zithers (column 4) add an evenly pulsed layer on top of this continual drone. A group of 100 singers and an unlimited number of audience members collectively form their own intermittent drone, produced by a group of 20 people (in addition to the audience) repeating a tone,while 80 people asynchronously intone melodic phrases.Three other groups of 20 add their intermittent sounds. All work together to create a single continuous sound of changing color. Performances will vary based on the number of participants; however, Maceda uses a proportional ratio to maintain a consistency of color relationships (100:100:600-1,000). Maceda's use of ratios will be re-emphasized when we engage his concept of classification.

COLOR

As it is typically understood in regards to music,the term color is synonymous with timbre and refers, acoustically,to those qualities of a sound which make it distinct from another sound of the same frequency and intensity.Taken up in various manners by various composers,it is not surprising that there have evolved styles of composition solely focused on aspects of color - epitomized by the French spectralist composers of the 1960's but also in the idiosyncratic work of individuals such as Alvin Lucier, Giacento Scelsi, and Chou Wen-Chung. In like manner, Maceda regarded many of his compositions as a single sound of changing color. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Maceda's conception and
appreciation of color did not cease its probing at the level of acoustics, perception, or aesthetics. It is worth reiterating that there was a cultural component, at the level of the human and its ecological convolvement, which for Maceda gives musical color its more profound, lived significance.

We may look again to the Indonesian gamelan ensemble for which color plays a fundamental role. Each ensemble is tuned differently and as the size of intervals varies from one orchestra to the next, this variety is what constitutes "color" and diversity, a different view of music from one that unites intervals in a common tempered scale (Maceda, 2001). In a traditional Philippine Kalinga feast, ceremony rice wine is placed in a coconut shell and offered to the spirits. Then, as participants play the six gongs associated with the Kalinga Topayya ensemble, they search for a balanced texture where no one player is louder or ahead of the other. Soon they are on their way, each enjoying the peal of gongs they seldom hear and only on these occasions. After a while, they exchange instruments to savor the tones of other gongs, for there are preferred ones with more resonant and longer tones. (Maceda,1998a)

In Philippine and Indonesian music, we see that color, the unique timbre of instruments, their ongoing combinations and substitutions, is a fundamental aspect of playing and listening to music. This is directly reflected in Maceda's own music in that many of his scores encourage the substitution of instruments. His Suling-Suling, has been performed by varying traditional instruments in the Philippines, China, and America, seeking to instrumentally reflect the culture performing the work.This interest in instrumental/ cultural substitution has been pursued further by other contemporary composers such as Jonas Baes,for example in his work Wala-Wala (see Baes, this issue).

Maceda was inspired particularly by the collective agricultural practices of rice farming in S.E. Asia in which he believed group singing demonstrate[s] how a concept of collectivity manifests in work and [how] group decision is ingrained as well in music. (Maceda,1998a) For Maceda,this cooperative labor remains inseparable from the collective effort required to form aggregates of sound into 'musical' color. Maceda was very critical of the use of technology to 'artificially' reproduce sounds for achieving ideal forms (e.g. 'musique concrète' and 'electronic music' in general). His own use of technology (Cassettes 100, Ugma-Ugma) displays a contrasting approach by which technology is used not to create a conceptual or spectacular space but a practical space, in which technology becomes an extension of human ability, another means by which to navigate and interact in an audible World.7 The formation of complex sound colors by a group of people rather than through the ease of technological re-production thus requires those involved to 'work together' in the same manner as traditional farming of rice obliges a 'co-operative' labor.

Maceda's interest in color led him to seek what he called the 'blurring effect.' My concept of melody is no longer a melodic line. I became interested in sounds that are combinations, several sounds going on [...] I would like to propose that you can have interesting sounds without single tones being identified as such and having a meaning as such. When you have forty tones, it's another meaning; it is the concept of blurring a melody. (Brown,2005).The 'blurring effect' constitutes much of Maceda's compositional practice, his derivation of colors from a continual drone. In order to achieve this effect his early works required large numbers of people, while his later works displayed an increasing economy of means.

Unlike the well-tempered and cadentially oriented melodies of Western harmony, Philippine melodies tend towards an asynchronous layering of melodic phrases (as we have noted in the ading). This layering of disjunctions blurs the metric pulse at the same time as it diffuses any melodic 'development' as such. And so one's ear ceases to attend the rapport between the sounds but, rather, the chiasmatic color which they give rise to in combination. In his early work Maceda often composed with 'blocks of color', alternating sections/ masses, rather than alternating elements within a single section. Maceda's later work, written on staved music paper, introduces a similar effect but with more precise
translations of these techniques at the elemental level.8 Even in his extensively
notated work these blocks of sound,as in the scores of Xenakis, remain visually
evident.

However, unlike Xenakis, who relied on the 'musical' potentialities of mathematics, Maceda placed the majority of his attention upon the 'musical' techniques of the social body. Color isn't merely acoustic; it is collective labor. Maceda's plight was in large part political, and yet he almost avoided aligning himself with a political ideology - the Marcos regime did appropriate his music for ideological purposes (see Santos, this issue).As regards the political role of the composer,there is perhaps a rich comparison to be made between Maceda's nationalist gesture and the revolutionary gesture of British composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), who, denouncing his avant-guard roots, aligned himself explicitly with a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology. The differences between their thought and its expression in music are at wide variance and Maceda's politics is quick to succeed to a kind of metaphysical spiritualism. Still,the idea of cultural liberation is strong in Maceda's work and echoes many of Cardew's 'musical' affirmations: "The most active forces in the world today are not cosmic forces, or atomic forces,or spiritual forces, but the social forces, the forces generated by large groupings of human beings" (Cardew,1974).

CLASSIFICATION

Increasingly the universal access to past tools of music production and to the emotions they engender makes it possible for modern society to peer into them and test their relevance in the contemporary world. The guide to thinking behind the organization of music of old human traditions is a guide to a search for new musical expressions, or new life styles, without which, or without a human basis for music making, electro-magnetic hardware and a prepared software of musical production alone, would be insufficient to give life, meaning and a humaneness to any musical expression they convey. (Maceda,1986)

New musical expressions,or new lifestyles... This concern for the sonic constitution and re-creation of a way of life is being increasingly regarded by ethnographers (especially as 'auditory culture' becomes a recognized field of study).9 Deeply informed by his own ethnographic background, Maceda's approach to music com- position was, in effect, an attempt to re-compose culture and to re-affirm a contemporary nationalism - not representing but actualizing the people of the Philippines. To carry out such a project Maceda would seek to preserve and creatively re-evaluate an archive of collectivist sound-making techniques, to actively promote an Asian mathematics alternative to the totalizing logic of the West, and to articulate the significance of various eco-social morphologies which structure and give meaning to various sound practices. Maceda considered these concerns as part of a larger field of interest, what he called a 'classification of things'. Tenzer has summarized this concept as being the recognition of a multiplicity of worldviews based on varying physical or structural relationships and the cultural belief systems with which they co-evolve (Tenzer,2003).

Maceda's perspective refused to approach music as an isolated phenomenon. In com-posing a work of music he looked to a vast cultural confluence of mathematics, philosophy, spirituality, architecture and mythology. Certainly, the concept of classification is indebted to - and entwined with - the nature of Maceda's ethnomusicological profession. Indeed, his scores often resemble the notations and graphs he derived from his field data. In any case, Maceda saw his research, for example his vast archive of S.E. Asian recordings, as a receptacle of ideas,a trove of compositional techniques alternative to the Western tradition. But he insisted that these musical materials only find their meaning in relation to the cultures which give rise to their use. How can you approach music as a study of culture, instead of only as acoustics/science, etc.? The tools for this are not just electronics, they are all the instruments of the world. What made me go into ethnomusicology was the perception that there was something that went beyond dominant/tonic relations and their modernist extensions. There are certain generalities that we now know about Asian music that form a background that may help us as contemporary musicians to decide on where to go. Over one thousand cultures, each one repeating or redoing his own culture in order to make another culture -- there are so many components now, very different from the European culture which had no precept of anything else. (Brown,2005)

One significant aspect of Maceda's interest in classification involved his increasing concern for number, proportion, and mathematics. This was immediately important in achieving the blurring effect: how many people does it take? More importantly, this interest was especially relevant to his desire to propose an alternative to the abstract Pythagorean foundation of Western temperament and harmony. Ultimately, the role of numbers in musical structure would have to be clarified and its elucidation would bring out possible links between a Chinese and a West Asian view of Mathematics (Maceda,2001). Rather than engaging systems of measure which pre-determine the relationships between discrete phenomena, Maceda preferred a music based on relative and mutable proportions and material substitutions.

Maceda's interest in mathematics was also concerned with describing and exploring the musical space or environment and its role in structuring collective sound practices and their styles of cultural expression. In an article published in The Journal for Asian Music, Maceda articulates commonalities between number, music, and architectural forms of royal Europe and of the courts of Asia.He traces their pervasive use of the 4 count as a division of time and as well as a division of intervals by ratio to the cultural significance of the square in various architectural forms (as with Asian temples, e.g. the Borobudor of central Java, the Angkor Wat temple of Kampuchea, et al). This use of the 4 count in Southeast Asian cultures is perhaps originally based on varying dualisms in the form of oppositions [which] are widely spread in the region. They refer to up and down river, the mountain and the valley, the sky and the earth, directions of east and west, and in music to damped and undamped sounds of gongs, hemitonic and anhemitonic scales, and leader-chorus singing (Maceda,2000). Such dualisms are well represented in Western culture though often - as Maceda cites Jacques Derrida - in the form of non-neutral binary oppositions, which give priority to one position over another: man/woman, white/black, good/evil, right/left, speech/writing, ad infinitum. However the use of the 4 count in the above mentioned court musics, as we have already noted, serves to ambiguate such non-neutral oppositions. In this issue of FO A RM, Subhash Kak, inspired by and dedicating his article to Maceda, examines more closely these intertwinings of music, architecture, and mathematics.

Elsewhere,Maceda correlates the colorful ringing tones of flat gong music with circular dancing forms that he met in Northern Luzon,Vietnam, and Taiwan (Maceda,1998).Such circular forms are used within Maceda's own works (e.g. Udlot-Udlot and Pagsamba) and stand, perhaps, in contrast to the square forms he articulated within Asian and European court musics. Engaging ritual, environment, listener intentionality, and choreography, Maceda's interest in the eco-social morphologies of differing sound practices is one of his most unique contributions to the core as well as to the fringes of what we call 'music' and, as well, to field of ethnomusicology. The understanding of such socio-sonic forms was what drove his interest in a comparative ethnomusicology, in the sciences and mathematics of SE Asia, and ultimately in the application of what he would term a "classification of things".

CLASSIFICATION: UDLOT- UDLOT

Udlot-Udlot, composed in 1975, was an 'open-air ritual' for 3 groups of players (grouped as: Melody, Drone, and Color).This work gathers participants outdoors in a topographical arrangement. Unlike Maceda's other works, Udlot-Udlot has a kinaesthetic element, as the 'Drone' group is asked to walk within their circle every 10 minutes. This is a technique derived from practices of Northern Luzon, Vietnam, etc. Such circular formations are also notably prevalent in many traditional Native-American sound practices, generally creating a sense of equity amongst the participants.

Overall, in this work we see an example of the social body - collective human form - as a fundamental structural aspect of the form of the 'musical' composition. In this manner sounds are considered in the flesh; mind and body are here reconsidered through their interactive response within a shared space. Moreover, this spatialization of sound through the environmental arrangement of individual listeners/performers offers each participant a unique perspective in the collective work, while simultaneously dissimulating and multiplying the location work as a 'whole'.

It should be noted that Maceda uses a clock-based time, signaled by holding up large
cards, to cue all the changes during performance. This macro-scale time signaling is, however, blurred by the warp and woof of the color and melody sections. As to how many persons make up each group, Maceda, as we noted earlier in Ading, opts for ratios between the three groups rather than pre-determining a measure for each individually. A simple ratio of 1:1:1 (Dron:Color:Melody) permits spontaneous and simple changes based on the site of the event and the number of people present. Again, as we met in Suling-Suling, substitutions are encouraged, in this case for the mixed instruments ensemble making up the 'Color' group. Moreover, this work, as with many of Maceda's early works, encourages the participation of all present.

...ELLIPSIS...

In a world where new music horizons are being sought, it is this incursion into the past that may lead to a discovery of other thoughts and perceptions, in other words, too another humanism that cannot be extracted alone from technique and technology (Maceda,1998a).

Ultimately Maceda identified himself with the Western tradition - When I make
music I am not trying to add, for example, to Kalinga music; I am trying to add something to Western composition. (Brown, 2000). That is, he identified himself as a composer, as an author of an 'expression in thought'.Having established himself as a composer in the Western tradition, Maceda saw his role as mediating the reception of a new theory of music, the elements of which he believed were slowly emerging with another conception or philosophy of numbers, proportions and an appreciation of the socio-cultural significance of life in Asia (Maceda,1998b). He sought to offer a contribution of bamboo and gong music to a modern musical world unconscious of musical designs and thoughts of people living in a secluded world for centuries (Maceda,1998a).

In many ancient indigenous cultures,'music'was generally not a separate aspect of life admired as a form of self-expression.Rather,music was a ritually shared way of life, a collective labor-play, which was holistically involved in the ecological subsistence of a given culture.10 Ironically, Maceda attempted to bring this holism of the past into the idealized space of the European concert hall; and, while claiming to be a composer in the Western tradition,he also garnered the role of Philippine nationalist. It was in reviving these ancient traditions that Maceda believed a Pan-Asian renaissance was truly possible, the likes of which
he often compared to the reinvigoration of post-Medieval Europe through a renewed admiration for ancient Greek culture. Maceda was and still is not alone in such a pursuit. Another major figure is Chinese composer Chou Wen-Chung (b. 1923), advocating for a sound practice based in the Buddhist traditions of China. Ramon Santos has summed up this revivalist situation as follows: "Thus, modernism in Asian music is not exclusively, if at all, a search for a new Asian musical style, but a re-sensitization to an old musicultural tradition, re-expressed in stylistic multiplicity under a common ideological and spatial ethos. In this
regard, revivalism seeks to establish a linear continuity between tradition and an acculturated modern musical practice, as well as a collapsing of temporal space in esthetic re-sensuation of the contemporary Asian artist"(Santos,2002).

Nevertheless,we mustn't hesitate to apply the same questioning and criticism to Maceda's work as he applied to the European tradition. There are several problematics raised in Maceda's work, notably in his earlier compositions, concerning the role of the composer and his/her use of political power to organize others, as well as issues of cultural translation/ representation, the dangers of nationalism, the boundaries and relationships between technology, nature, and culture, etc - most all of which we cannot engage here. Regardless, in Maceda's urgency to emphasize Oriental values (from an Occidental platform), he has also drawn the line of demarcation between the two more deeply, reinforcing the kind of qualitative opposition he sought to transcend. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that [t]he Southeast Asian tradition of thousands of years lives in a separate time from the modern world -- with a minimum of wants and constraints, a sense of peace and no tensions brought about by clear goals, time-tables and exact calculations -- now overwhelmed by a complex, controlled and efficient world.(Maceda,1986) In such proclamations there is certainly some truth, and yet we may also detect in these words an inflated nostalgia and a cultural roman- ticism worth calling into question, for this is the source of Maceda's humanism: an idealized set of human values reduced to their representation of SE Asian musical practices. As well, it cannot be ignored that as soon as Maceda's music entered the concert hall the flesh of his earlier ideals was sacrificed for its explicit involvement in the spectacle of representation. Consequently, this enclosure welcomed the separation of the musician from the listener and the representation of ideas in the concert hall rather than their actualization in the World.

Perhaps Maceda's increasing engagement with European compositional traditions was in part due to his inability to engage the Philippinos themselves. Audiences and participants from cosmopolitan Manilla, having already been absorbed into a global consumer culture, were not ready or willing to re-contextualize the ancient and increasingly unfamiliar traditions of their past. Ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer has also criticized this recontextualization of tradition and Maceda's attempt to translate these traditional values into European art music. Tenzer is blunt: "he could not fuse autonomous modern 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"(Tenzer, 2003). Tenzer's criticism here echoes the 'collective self-critique' Cardew penned when reflecting on the work of the Scratch Orchestra in the 60's and 70's: "In breaking out of the elite we succeeded only in forming a kind of commune and were just as alienated as before ... our various 'reforms' led us straight into a number of cul-de-sacs of bourgeois ideology..." (Cardew, 1974).

It is worth noting that many of Maceda's beliefs concerning music as a means of eco-social bonding/co-operation have been echoed in more recent research, concerning anthrogenesis,at the intersection of varying fields of study such as archeology, biology, cognitive science, anthropology, psychiatry and musicology. The products of this investigative confluence have been the proposition that, in the early stages of human development, coinciding with the initial construction and use of stone tools, music functioned as the primary means of developing techniques of mutual trust,coalition,and communication (Brown,2001;Bryant, 2003).But we must ask, what is the practical significance of such assertions for us and for our sound practices today? Or more pointedly - how do we, today and in the wake of globalism, reconcile the localized traditions of our respective pasts with the nomadic multiplicities of our present? Regardless, this balance
between past and present remains of primary importance for the composer, the musician and the human being. The issues and collective reflection of Maceda's work continue to give his music a forceful eloquence - one which may perhaps only be heard by those willing to leave the concert hall and listen to the World. I leave you with Maceda's affirming voice:

The time of the past is as modern as the present, and a linkage between the two times may be found in a balance which holds the speed and precision of logic and science within the boundaries of an equilibrium between man and nature. (Maceda,1986)

I would like to thank Chris Brown for sharing his resources and time; and as well for helping (along with John Zorn) to re-introduce Maceda's work to a broader community.

FOOTNOTES

1.As recounted by Michael Tenzer (Tenzer,2003).

2.A slightly more thorough biographical account of Maceda's life and work may be found at the
following site: http://composers21.com/compdocs/macedaj.htm

3.Such a musical nationalism was notably pronounced in the work,again both musicological
and compositional,of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok,among others.

4.However,by the early 20th century dodecaphony/serialism had begun to deconstruct this
hierarchy by giving each note in the chromatic scale 'equal' importance. Shortly thereafter
Varese and Xenakis would altogether leave harmony and melody for sound masses,recalling us
again to the din of the world.

5.According to Anne Marie Busse Berger this shift into mensural notation occurred around 1250
a.d.with the publication of Franco of Colgone's Ars cantus mensurabilis.(Busse Berger,2003)

6.The work of David Rosenboom,Alvin Lucier,David Dunn,and Adam Overton continues to
engage rhythms and process of the body and/or the environment as a basis for their composi-
tion.

7.The recent (net)work of Chris Brown,inspired by Maceda's radiophonic work,applies a sim-
ilar approach to the internet medium, through which international participants could meet
online and sonically improvise with one another.Brown's work can be seen,heard,and used by
all at the following web address:http://www.transjam.com/eternal/eternal_client .html.

8.This transition from blocks of sound to exact notation is also evident in the compositional
development of Morton Feldman.Like Feldman,Maceda was seeking a greater clarity of expres-
sion.As his aims became more clear,more defined,so did his notation.

9. Marina Roseman in her study of the sound healing practices of the Temiar people of the
Malaysian rainforest has noted that their using devices of overlapping alternation and alternat-
ed repetition,reinforce an 'egalitarian'social organization.Steve Feld in his extensive work with
the Kaluli people of the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea has developed the concept of
acoustemology to account for what he found in Kaluli song,"where voices overlap and echo
with surrounding forest sounds,with instruments,or with other voices to create a dense,mul-
tilayered,alternating and interlocking form of expression" (Feld,2004).

10.Ramon Santos has noted "the sharing and contribution of each participant is a direct mani-
festation of the highly communal existence of village societies in which life is sustained through
interactive occupational endeavors within the temporal framework of recurring seasons and
cycles of events" (Santos,2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attali,Jacques,Noise:The Political Economy of Music.Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1985

Berger,Anna Maria Busse; Levy, Fabien (ed.) "L'invention du temps mesuré au XIIIe siècle",Les Ecritures Du Temps.Paris:L'Harmattan, 2003

Brown, Chris; Zorn, John (ed.) "Pidgin Music". Arcana. New York: Granary Books/Hip's Road Press,2005

Brown,S;Merkur,B; and Wallin,N.(eds),The Origins of Music.Cambridge.MIT Press,2001

Bryant,Gregory A.and Hagen,Edward H.,Music and dance as a coalition signaling systemNew York:Walter de Gruyter,Inc.,Human Nature,Vol.14,No.1, pp.21-51.http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/papers/music.pdf,2003

Cardew,Cornelius,Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,http://www.ubu.com/his torical/cardew/cardew_stockhausen.pdf,1974

Feld, Steve, Sound and Sentiment, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press;2nd Edition,1990

Macéda,José,The Strucutre of Principal Court Musics of East and Southeast Asia,Asian Music.Vol.XXXII-2.(Spring - Summer), 2001

- Gongs & Bamboo:A Panorama of Philippine Musical Instruments,Quezon City:University of The Philippines Press,1998a

- Southeast with the China Sea as another Mediterranean (A background for an Identification of Musical Exchange in the Region), http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:xk967ROE0ZQJ:140.122.89.98/con-
ference/abor/pdfile/2_1_1.pdf+southeast+asia+and+the+china+sea+as+a+med
iterranean+maceda,1998b

- In Search of a Source of Pentatonic Hemitonic and Anhemitonic Scales in Southeast Asia, Acta Musicologica,Vol.62,(May - Dec.),pp.192 - 223,1990a

- Review Essay:Bipolarity, Ki Mantle Hood's Trilogy, Four Counts, and the Fifth Interval,Asian Music,Vol.21,No.2.(Spring - Summer),pp 135-146,1990b

- Music in the Philippines,Music.(with Mantel Hood).Leiden/Köln.E.J.Brill, 1987

- A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia,Ethnomusicology Vol.30 No. 1.11-53,1986

Roseman, Marina, Healing Sounds of the Malaysian Rainforest, Berkley: Univ. of California Press,1993

Santos,Ramon Pagayon,Revivalism and Modernism in the Musics of Post-colonial Asia, Bulawan 7. Journal of Philippine Arts and Culture. Manila: National Commission for Culture`and the Arts,34-61,2002 http://www.livinginthephilippines.com/philculture/culture&arts/revivalism_and_modernism_of_music.html

- A Concept of Time and Space in Asian Artistic Expression, International Society for the Performing Arts Foundation, http://www.ispa.org/ideas/santos.html,2003

Tenzer, Michael,José Maceda and the Paradoxes of Modern Composition in Southeast Asia,Ethnomusicology. Vol.47.No.1.(Winter).pp.93-120,2003

DISCOGRAPHY

Recorded composition of José Maceda:

Music for Indonesian Gongs, Metallophones, Bamboos, Flute, Contrabassoon,
and Voices. HYPERLINK "http://home.pacific.net.ph/~toledo/"Josefino Chino
Toledo/AUIT (National Commission for Culture and the Arts/Tunugan
Foundation,1999)

Pagsamba;Suling-Suling;Colors without Rhythm.(Tzadik:7067,2001)
Music for Five Pianos;Two Pianos and Four Winds.(ALM Records:ALCD 54)
Ethnographic Recordings by José Maceda:

The Music of the Magindanao in the Philippines. 2 Volumes. Los Angeles:
University of California (Ph. D., Ethnomusicology); Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms,1963

Philippines:Musique des hautes-terres palawan, Le Chant Du Monde,1992.