dr. jose maceda

Jose Maceda (1917 -2004)
, Dr. Jose Monserrat Maceda was named a National artist composer, musicologist, teacher & performer. hes ideas reach the early begginings of concrete music in paris & by his contemporaries like john cage stockhausen & pierre henry, he explored the musicality of the filipino deeply. maceda embarked on a life long dedication to understanding & popularization of filipino traditional music, maceda researches & field work have resulted on an immense number of recorded music taken from the remotest mountain villages & farthest island communities. he wrote papers that enlightened scholars . both filipino & foreign about the nature of philippine traditional music expression from a strictly eurocentric mold.

Usually performed as a communal ritual , his compositions like ugma - ugma 1963 pagsamba 1968 udlot udlot 1975 & 100 transistor radios are monuments to his unflagging commitments to philippine music. other major works including agungan , kubing , aroding siasid suling -suling.


His profession and his research took him many places in the Philippines, Sarawak, Thailand, Kalimantan, Africa and Brazil. Moreover, we celebrate & share with you jose Macedas amazing contribution as a pioneer ethnomusicologist & experimental sound artist whos works trancended both music & culture into the next level..

check out:

Gongs and Bamboo: A Panorama of Philippine Musical Instruments

Jose Maceda

Winner, National Book Award, Music, 1998

This panorama of music instruments starts with older bamboo and other instruments of undetermined age, going on to two types of gongs—flat in Northern Luzon and bossed in the South. These two areas may be viewed as pocket cultures comparable to other pockets in Borneo, Sumatra, other islands in Southeast Asia, and the mountain regions south of, and including, Yunnan province of China, thus placing the music of Luzon and Mindanao in a larger geographical context.