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By Sherma E. Benosa
Today’s works in progress, tomorrow’s
who’s who in music. Such is the core concept
of the Music Underkonstruction project which encourages young and
talented Filipino musicians to pursue a serious career in classical
composition by giving them the chance to have their pieces performed
by an orchestra in a concert hall, before a discriminating audience.
Now on its fourth
year, the project has produced 22 original new works: five for
orchestra, five for orchestra and voice, six for orchestra and
violin, and six for orchestra and choir.
Underkonstruction 4, which required the
composers to produce pieces for orchestra and choir with the
libretto drawn from the poetry of National Artists for Literature,
has yielded six new composers: Kabaitan Bautista, Louise Ybañez,
Erwin Fajardo, Marie-Louise Calvero, Juro Kim Feliz and Roberto
Gonzalo Sarreal.
A member of the University of Santo Tomas (UST)
Conservatory of Music Development Program, Ustemundo ethnic
ensemble, and UST Liturgikon Vocal Ensemble, Kabaitan Bautista is a
scholar of the Klassical Music Foundation. His composition, Sa Loob
ng Isang Oras (In an Hour) for violin and orchestra, was a product
of Underkonstruction 3. For Underskonstruction 4, he took
inspiration from Jose Garcia Villa’s I Can No More Hear Love’s
Voice.
Louise Ybañez is not new to Music
Underkonstruction, her works having been part of the project’s
2007 and 2008 runs. A member of the University of the Philippines
(UP) Composers of New Music and of the Philippine Chapter of the
Asian Composers’ League, she took inspiration from Jose Garcia
Villa’s Ud for her piece for this year’s Underkonstruction.
A fifth year composition student at the UP
College of Music, Erwin Fajardo is a keyboadist and songwriter for
indie bands such as Sound and Liquid Jane. His piece for Music
Underkonstruction 4 was inspired by Francisco Arcellana’s I
Touched Her, Yes.
Marie-Louise Calvero is a fourth year student at
the UP college of Music. Introduced to classical music at a
very young age, she has already composed several concert pieces,
among them Apodos (2006) and In Extremis (2007). She is the chairman
of the UP Composers of New Music and a member of the AUIT Vocal
Chamber Ensemble and the UP Camerata Voices. Her piece was inspired
by Virgilio Almario’s Elysia (Elysium).
Juro Kim Feliz, also a composition major at the
UP College of Music, has been featured in Underskonstruction 3, with
his composition Ipagdugtong ang mga Piniraso: Ikalawa premiered by
violinist Alfonso “Coke” Bolipata and the Metro Manila Community
Orchestra (MMCO), the orchestra-in-residence of Miriam College, led
by conductor Professor Josefino Chino Toledo. Also a pianist and a
koto performer, he was a participant in the Asian-Pacific
Contemporary Music Festival 2009 held in South Korea where his work,
Ipagdugtong ang mga Piniraso: Ikatlo for 12 musicians was premiered.
For Underkonstruction 4, he drew inspiration from Virgilio
Almario’s poem, Pangungulila.
Finally, Roberto Gonzalo Sarreal is a fourth
year composition student, also at the UP College of Music. He plays
the clarinet and the tenor saxophone. As a composer, he has created
pieces for small chamber groups and for wind instruments. His piece
for Underskonstruction 4 was inspired by Virgilio Almario’s Pater
Noster.
‘Hearing the Future Symphonic’
The new compositions yielded by this year’s
Music Underkonstruction premiered at the Cultural Center of the
Philippines on July 15 in a show billed “Hearing the Future
Symphonic.” Interpreting all six compositions were the AUIT Vocal
Chamber Ensemble directed by Katz Trangco, and the MMCO.
Other than the premier of these new
compositions, also highlights of the show were the repeat
performance of Toledo’s Ekontra: Kongruo: Iunktum, a
three-movement work for piano and orchestra featuring pianist Luci
Magalit; repeat performance of Nilo Alcala’s Diary of a
Sinaesthete; and the performance of two works for violin and
orchestra—The Dream Catcher by Kim Nimrod Cruz and Le genou et
l’épaule des tissées étoiles by Feliz Anne Macahis. Featured
soloist was violinist Alfonso Bolipata.
Thumbs up
In his evaluation of the project, Professor
Ricardo de Ungria, commissioner of the National Commission for
Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Subcommission on the Arts, praised the
young composers for rising up to the challenge of creating new
compositions within certain parameters.
He wrote: “It must have been a daunting
challenge to these young composers to express themselves within the
strict parameters of creativity set for them—namely, to write for
orchestra and choir, and to deal with literary texts from the canon
of writers. It was like getting students of painting to paint
narrative murals on medium-sized churches, or asking them to produce
either full-length novels or epic poems in rhymed hexameters.”
And so while he found the composers’ common
solution of having the poetry texts recited rather than sang to be
“flat and uninspired,” he admitted that the young composers
displayed admirable talents. “The concert was bustling with
musical ideas and energy that could only come from the young. For
all their youth, the composers proved they had talent enough to
cover and span the latitudes of space inherent in the musical form
given them. This latitude should serve them well down the road of
the musical path they had taken—if they keep to it.”
A brainchild of Toledo, Music Underkonstruction
is a project of the Institute for Orchestral Development in the
Philippines in cooperation with the NCCA, Cultural Center of the
Philippines, Miriam College, Metrobank Foundation and The Philippine
Star.
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