NRCP Expert Class Reactor, Member bares Performance and Music Culture in the Philippines

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Dr. Maria Alexandra I. Chua, Regular Member of National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP) Humanities Division and currently the Director of the University of Santo Tomas Research Center for Culture, Arts and Humanites, shared her reaction on the lecture Dr. Renato B. Lucas, during Council’s Expert Class Episode 12 titled, Filipino Music Performance Traditions, are they a fading Cultural Memory?, and bared the reality of performance and musical industry in the Philippines on December 2, 2021, via zoom.

Dr. Chua stressed that the area of musicological study has long been marginalized in the field, especially on music scholarship. She informed the participants that in the Philippine setting, the knowledge about musicological study and decision performers is very little.

According to Chua, without performance, music is silent.

“The need for music to be heard and experience is indeed crucial in the articulation of artistic and cultural expressions”, she said.

She added that performances as an embodiment of music, culturally marks one's perception of oneself.

She commended the initiative of Dr. Lucas to address the little knowledge through his proposal of the establishment of an the Museum of the Imagination of Philippine Music as a repository of music performances that would house live stage and musical performances.

Dr. Chua also left a caution to the danger of music being a museum of ice that is held nearly as a ‘thing or material’. According to her, the one aspect that needs to be addressed is the tendency for cultural forgetfulness.

She pointed out that the value of research should not be underestimated as it produces and provides significant meaning and value to these musical objects which can be made available in the future.

“Maybe it was never forgetting that was the problem but rather failure of our generation to bring the knowledge, significance, value, and meaning of our music culture traditions to the next generation,” Chua said.

She also highlighted how NRCP took a major stride as it funded the Musika Filipino Project, which intends to closely examine the broader field of popular music industries, material legacy, sheet music, recordings, performance, and traditions, and how music is relevant to our everyday life.

This NRCP project will empower economic opportunities and more importantly its connection to the Filipino cultural memory

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Written by Irish Danielle Hagellado

Published: 15 December 2021

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