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A musical concert billed “Ading” was held recently at the UP
College of Music to celebrate the unveiling of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Memory of the
World Register Citation on the Jose Maceda Collection.
A composer, an internationally renowned scholar
in ethnomusicology, and a professor in the UP College of Music,
Maceda recorded and collected traditional music in the Philippines
and in some parts of Southeast Asia from 1953 to 2003. He passed
away in 2004.
This collection, known as the Jose Maceda
Philippine Music Tape Collection, records the traditional music of
68 ethno-linguistic groups before these styles vanished or
substantially changed as a result of social change and cultural
globalization. Launched in 1992, the collection consists of 1760
hours of tape recordings in 1936 reels and cassette tapes, field
notes, photographs of different musicians and instruments, and some
films. It has been preserved and used by academic scholars in the
continuing study of Philippine traditional music.
As Dr. Ramon Santos, executive director of the
UP Center of Ethnomusicology, explained during the event, “We are
one of the first countries in Asia to have a collection included in
the Memory of the World Register. This reflects its exceptional
value and signifies that it should be protected for the benefit of
all humanity.”
The UP Center of Ethnomusicology is now bent on
improving the maintenance and storage of the collection:
“Protection and preservation ensures access, which is why we need
to increase our efforts in maintaining the collection and other
similar documentary works,” said Dr. Santos.
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