Tropical Tones: Ancient Anthems and the Colonial Canon in Southern Philippines

At the western extreme of the Mindanao peninsula, Philippines, lies the bustling port city of Zamboanga, home to a rich creole language and a refuge for ships. Millions of travelers descend upon its piers annually, drawn by the city’s many sensational delights, ranging from well-preserved centuries-old structures, fresh varieties of seafood, ivory sands, and exotic spices. But back when the Philippines was still under Spanish sway, it seems like Zamboanga had little to resemble its present glory. John Meares, a British trader, was left quite unimpressed when he dropped by the place in February 1788.

We find recollections of Meares’ visit to Zamboanga in his subtly named Voyages Made in the years 1788 and 1789 From China to the North-West Coast of America. In his patently Anglo assessment, the houses “have but little to boaft”; the church, which was built of stone, was merely “decent”; and the fort was in “an absolute ftate of decay”. But while the visuals may have been severely underwhelming, local sensibilities washed away the initial disappointment and softened his sentiments. “The conduct of the inhabitants,” he writes, “was governed by the moft pleafing decorum”. And although his eyes hadn’t enjoyed the experience, his ears soaked in the pleasantries of sounds inaccessible to sight. Of all the niceties the locals displayed, nothing appeased Meares more than their musical acumen. He and his entourage “were equally furprized at hearing a very tolerable band of mufic, which was compofed of natives of the country.” He then goes on to describe the entire musical ensemble and encounter:

“It confifted of four violins, two baffoons, with feveral flutes and mandolins. This unexpected orcheftra were acquainted with fome of the felect pieces of Handel; they knew many of our Englifh country dances, and feveral of our popular and favourite tunes; but in performing the Fandango, they had attained a degree of excellence that the niceft ears of Spain would have heard with pleafure.”

It is no surprise to Meares that the “[t]he Malayans possess, in common with other savage nations, a sensibility to the charms of music”. That seems easy enough to understand and difficult to discount: music is, after all, a universal expression of the human soul. But, what stirred his amazement was the fact that these “Malayan” musicians were “capable of attaining no inconsiderable degree of perfection in that delightful science.”¹ That is to say, it shocked him that people of colour were able to play in an excellent manner the music of white people.

His outright condescension, somehow veiled behind conciliatory praise, is to be expected. It would be anachronistic and historically unfair to expect him to be familiar with a world that was far detached and distanced from his own. Conversely, travel back in time to Mediaeval Europe, and surely, one can feel a touch of the bizarre at hearing the familiar melodies of Asia rendered so superbly by a people half a world away from the continent. So, despite the highly charged chauvinism in his text, and there’s never an excuse for that, there’s also an explicit current of sincere ignorance that contextualises and illuminates the experience of cultural exchange in a much slower time and much smaller world. Indeed, had he been to the Philippines far longer and explored its many islands, he would’ve been exposed to the many tunes and tones that filled the archipelago’s air, adding unique colours and tempers to its many communities and topographies. Because, if historical texts are to be consulted, one could almost say that the Philippine archipelago is both maritime and musical.

Before his journey ended amidst a concert of agony and pain, Ferdinand Magellan’s time in the Philippines was punctuated by several instances of musical mirth. As the capitan-general of the Spanish armada which arrived in the Philippines in 1521, Magellan was witness to both local dismissal and hospitality; of the latter, his chronicler Antonio Pigafetta recorded graphic descriptions of musical instruments and performances which were part of the celebrations they shared with some of the locals. When they were in the island of Cebu, Pigafetta recalls that the prince, nephew of the king, took them to his abode where four women stood waiting, each assigned to a different instrument.² The French manuscript of Pigafetta’s account names them as tabourin, signifying their percussive function. Once the performance commenced, together, the musicians performed a doulx, sweet, sounding tune.³

It’s difficult to tell for certain what the general response was towards the musical gesture. Pigafetta’s glowing review may have been shared by only a few of his companions. Or, it could be that most of them also enjoyed it. But what can be safely assumed is that the experience of hearing exotic tones and musical structures must have enveloped them in a mysterious echo, taking them far beyond the borders of their musical familiarities. Take an unsuspecting Coldplay fan to see Rammstein perform live for a similar scenario: they may or may not enjoy the experience, but it’s guaranteed that the experience will be unforgettable. To some, however, hearing the women percussionists of Cebu may have resounded faint notes trapped in memory. This was probably the case with Magellan.

Prior to him switching allegiance to Spain, he had been part of the Portuguese occupation of Malacca in 1511, so, Magellan had earlier firsthand encounters with Island Southeast Asian peoples and customs. His compatriot and contemporary, the Portuguese writer Tomé Pires, wrote in Suma Oriental, one of the foundational texts of early 16th century Southeast Asia, that music was at the centre of celebrations and communications in the region. The markets of Malacca, notes Pires, were filled not just with announcements of prices and commodities, the clang of merchandise and attempts at haggling, but they also reverberated with songs that tell of ancient heroic exploits.⁴ In the island of Java, they had “music of bells” and “the sound of all of them playing together is like an organ.”⁵ What memories were stirred in Magellan upon hearing the Cebuanos play something reminiscent of what he had witnessed a decade ago? No surviving text from Magellan nor from others describe what the captain felt at the time, regardless, he eventually did face the music and paid dearly with his life because he failed to realise that the overall tune of their prolonged stay was shifting to a different key.

World history would later sing of Magellan’s achievements, although there’s no generally agreed genre. The moving and melancholic piano piece by the British pop group Felt, titled Ferdinand Magellan, almost sounds like a panegyric bordering on a careful combo of melodrama and tragedy. Others, like British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, hear a different song altogether when reassessing Magellan’s life: one of consistent cacophony and aimless cadence. To Fernández-Armesto, Magellan was and is unworthy of the accolades showered upon him because his “failure was total”, explaining that the captain’s “tally of failures is almost as long as the list of his honorific homonyms.”⁶ Not to be left in silence and ever the musical people, Filipinos have also memorialised Magellan in a truly autonomous manner, neither portraying him as disdained nor dignified, but more ridiculed and bankrupt. In his first of many satirical classics, Filipino singer and composer Yoyoy Villame related anew the demise of Magellan in a catchy folk-track filled with snide remarks aptly called, Magellan:

“When Magellan visited in Mactan
To Christianize them everyone
But Lapu-Lapu met him on the shore
And drive Magellan to go back home
Then Magellan got so mad
Ordered his men to camouflage
Mactan island we could not grab
`Cause Lapu-Lapu is very hard
Then the battle began at dawn
Bolos and spears versus guns and cannons
When Magellan was hit on his neck
He stumbled down and cried and cried.”

Despite the amount of derision and mockery the notorious capitan gets, it seems like they only add to the weight of his name, further ossifying his place among the key figures in Spain’s imperial triumph. Meanwhile, the names of the people he wanted to subdue for colonial dominion are mostly forgotten. And many of those names were remembered through songs and music.

Along Visayan rivers, grieving women embark on a musical cruise called morotal to commemorate their recently deceased loved ones. In his report Relacion de las Yslas Filipinas, published in 1582, the Spanish soldier Miguel de Loarca vividly describes how mourning women along with three men get on board a balangay, a large boat, and proceed to sail along a river’s route. As they cruise, the women would weep while the men sang songs that “recount their exploits, the slaves whom they have captured, and the men whom they have killed in war.”⁷ Names of slain colonizers, including Magellan’s, must have been mentioned in the songs commemorating the warriors who resisted Spain’s intrusion.

When juxtaposing the observations of Pires with the accounts left by Spanish colonial chroniclers, the music of Southeast Asia in general and the Philippines in particular slightly becomes more audible, although imagination is still needed to make sense of its ambiguous tones and textures. The stories latent in songs heard in the markets of Malacca and the potamos paeans in a morotal point to a shared propensity to immortalise events and persons through music. So one can draw a precolonial penchant for melodic mnemonics, an effective method of remembering stories and easily transmitting them across generations via songs and chants repeated, and probably revised, in every iteration. An affinity for percussion, from Java to Cebu, shapes the possible contours of the songs to help singers time their breaths and space their modulations. Put together, it seems likely that Filipino vocal harmonies were tightly woven in the rhythm of the songs performed. That is to say, indigenous Filipino music had its own set of rules and criteria, much like the musical systems of Europe. No wonder the Zamboanga musicians found it easy to adapt to western styles of music to effortlessly play European staples.

In Europe, adherence to musical canon was sacrosanct, strongly demanded of musicians by their mentors and, to some degree, by the audience. The writing of music was the chief domain of composers, and performers could only stray so much from what was established in sheet music, only allowing few avenues for improvisation such as cadenzas. Yngvie Malmsteen ripping an impromptu face-melting guitar solo just before the last movement in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor would have caused quite a stir and scandal. Creation was the creative activity of the composer, whereas for performers it was mostly interpretation. In contrast, Philippine musical practice had a strong tradition of emulating what was already made before, but it was a lot less restrictive, with larger rooms for novelty: there was no sheet music to follow, so performers had to rely on memory and invention. Both the acts of creating and interpreting were immediate tasks left to the performers, requiring high levels of mental activity and physical readiness during sets.

This impressive interplay of alert mental and motor skills was often displayed during performances of Visayan poetry called bikal, as recorded by the Jesuit friar Fransisco Ignacio Alcina in his 1668 History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands. The format is rather simple: “two persons, either two men or two women” engage in a lyrical joust with “strict rhythm and without the slightest pause for one or two hours”, and them saying to the other “anything they wish (in a satirical fashion)”, specifically “making public whatever faults they have, either physical (which is more common) or moral, when these do not detract from someone’s reputation.” Alcina recalls that it was a rather popular form of poetry, attended “with much laughter”. Despite the things hurled to agitate their competition, a jocular spirit prevailed, as bouts of bikal ended “without any attention paid any longer to the little ‘digs’ or faults which were spoken of.”⁸ The whimsical nature of bikal sets the foundations for later musical humour, best exemplified by Villame’s knack for satire. Beyond its local scope, it’s also interesting that it is archetypal of the modern battle rap famous among hip-hop circuits and circles the world over.

Words weren’t the only artistic ammunition the Visayans actively exchanged. With the locally made stringed instruments called kuriapi (played by men) and kurlung (played by women), they performed what Alcina described as “something incredible,” and that was to have musical conversations, “as if asking questions and answering (each other) simply with the strings and sounds of both instruments.”⁹

Of all the documented musical activities, the most universally liked, regardless of age or sex, was the ambahan. Perhaps it was generally favoured because it was also “the most simple”; however, describing it as such may not do justice to the actual complexity involved in the craft. What made it quite difficult was the fact that not only did it warrant musical proficiency, it also required a careful diction and a rich use of language. According to Alcina, the ambahan was “a kind of ballad” which “consists of two blank verses, each one of seven syllables.” Performers were therefore limited in their word choices. They had to be careful not to exceed the accepted length. Apparently, the Bisayans still found these restrictions too easy, so they added another condition. These two verses were required to stay coherent even if they were interchanged: “by placing the first in the second place, and the second in the first place, they must always make the same sense”.¹⁰

The challenge in putting together a perfect ambahan, the skill to make either the kuriapi or kurlung “talk”, the grit and wit to effectively agitate during a bikal, and the aptitude to come up with lyrics that fit the right rhythm in real time all make for the right ingredients to create capable and excellent musicians. The introduction of western instruments merely expanded the possible repertoire and range of music to be explored by the Filipinos. And in no time, they excelled at it. “In ancient times,” wrote Alcina, “they had but a few musical instruments; now they also use ours with remarkable skill.”¹¹ Such “remarkable skill” indeed, that when Meares visited a century later, he had the privilege to enjoy a humid Handel and a Filipino Fandango.

Click here to read more Visayan history.