Sometimes an energetic performance is the only way to garner
attention for cultural issues that are often ignored by the
public.
Archiving Filipino American Music in Los Angeles and Kayamanan
Ng Lahi Philippine Folk Arts present the AFAMILA Festival in the
Ethnomusicology Courtyard adjacent to the Schoenberg Music Building
this Saturday afternoon to celebrate Pilipino American cultural
preservation. (There is a nearly equal amount of consensus on both
sides between those who spell the nationality with a P or with an
F.)
“This festival is a great chance to give other people a
taste of the range of diverse talents that are all around us in the
L.A. area,” said Eleanor Lipat, an ethnomusicology graduate
student. “It’s exciting for me to bring that into one
space and invite the community to actually step into the
archives.”
The daylong festival, hosted by Los Angeles-based artist Farmer
John, will showcase diverse modes of performance such as music,
dance, spoken word and Pilipino martial arts. The festival will
also offer an eclectic blend of traditional, folk, rock, pop and
hip-hop music performed by Pilipino American artists ranging from
amateurs to professionals.
The festival will feature the Pakaraguian Kulintang Ensemble, a
rare traditional ensemble playing Pilipino gongs indigenous to the
Southern Philippines. The gongs are played at a quick, exciting
tempo with many playful improvisations. The performers wear
traditional, ornate textiles from the region. The word Pakaraguian,
in one of the Southern Pilipino dialects, means “the
celebration of music and dance.”
“When we first started the project, I wasn’t
interested in any particular ethnic group or style of music,”
said Archivist John Vallier, a UCLA graduate in ethnomusicology.
“The reason we started with the Filipino American community
was because they’re a significant part of the country, state
and particularly Los Angeles. (For such a large community) we
don’t have a lot of representation of Filipino music in the
archive.”
Though none of the performers are from the Philippines’
Southern region, many have developed an appreciation for the area
as they have made efforts to increase representation for Southern
styles of Pilipino music. This music comes mainly from Mindonao,
the southern-most island of the Philippines, inhabited by many
Muslim Pilipinos.
“(The music is) an endangered part of the Filipino culture
because Mindonao is the site of centuries-old conflict, with the
Muslim separatists trying to separate from the Philippine
government,” said Lipat. “The culture is threatened
with political instability, and our performance adds a tone of
urgency in trying to hold on to the culture, and to let people know
that it exists.”
AFAMILA has worked for almost a year to increase the number of
recordings of Pilipino music in UCLA’s Ethnomusicology
Archive, and has been able to do so through a funded partnership
with UCLA in LA.
“Archives are living, breathing entities in that
they’re as much about live performance as they are about
quiet, scholarly research,” said Vallier.
The festival will also feature a premiere video screening, which
will show highlights from Pilipino American cultural events
documented by AFAMILA for almost one year.
“We want to be setting up a model for collaborating with
the community by being a resource to them, and by being able to
benefit from them as an educational resource,” said
Lipat.
The AFAMILA Festival will publicize the accessibility of the
archives, which are available to UCLA students as well as the
public. The archive will be open for listening and viewing of
Pilipino and Pilipino American cultural recordings.
“Why archive?” said Vallier. “It’s a
pledge to the future. Without archiving, it’s easy to forget
our past.”