José Maceda – the Filipino composer’s name is emblazoned on t-shirts worn by 100 participants, mostly young volunteers, moving purposefully though an enclosed public space. The dimly lit atrium of Kanagawa Arts Theatre (KAAT) has been decorated with stretched fabric, taut and brightly coloured or gauzy and translucent; touches that soften, while also reconfiguring that capacious entrance hall, helping to transform it into an atmospheric arena for performance. Beyond the tall building’s glass frontage a stream of urban traffic flows silently through the chilly Yokohama night.

The movements of the crowd within the atrium are closely coordinated, as though choreographed in observation of some arcane ritual. For half an hour they mill around, dance on the spot, climb stairs, hold stand-offs, ride an escalator, scamper on all fours, pause in smaller groups, tread stealthily, form a snake-like chain. Non-participants watch and listen, at liberty to alter their perspective, or simply to wander through the space, mingling with the performers. Some use their phones to capture what’s happening.

Each participant carries a playback device, an mp3 player or tape machine; some carry both. Arms are raised and waved to modify the character of the sound being broadcast. It fills the air and floods the ear. Performers’ postures change, as they seek to reach, for themselves, higher levels of attentiveness or greater intensity of experience. This event opens with a countdown and has a regimented appearance, yet individual performers are clearly caught up in an exploratory process. This is a collective activity that doesn’t exclude opportunities to make personal discoveries.

The occasion, in February 2019, was a staging of Cassettes 100, a piece written by Maceda at the start of the 1970s. This revival took place under the direction of Aki Onda, a Japanese musician whose own resourceful engagement with the medium of cassette tape has also produced memorable results. Other recent performances, in the Philippines, Singapore and Toronto, have opted to update, using mp3 players exclusively. Although Onda follows that trend, he decided to ask some participants to hold cassette machines, including boomboxes. These, he found, made audible difference to the dynamics of performance, with lower frequency sounds pulsating more dramatically though the atrium, while slight variations in cassette playback speed introduced an element of flexibility that digital technology is designed to exclude.

Onda’s interest in Maceda developed during the 90s, in Tokyo, from reading occasional magazine articles and, more significantly, a book of Maceda’s essays on ethnomusicology and on his own approach to composition, translated by Yuji Takahashi, a remarkable musician who had met Maceda at the apartment of Iannis Xenakis, in Paris, in 1964. In 2016, Onda became a curator for Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (TPAM). He was keen from the outset to include Maceda’s work in a TPAM programme, but had to wait until the 2019 season to devote two evenings to the Filipino composer. One, inside the KAAT concert hall, featured two compositions from the 90s: Music For Five Pianos and Two Pianos And Four Winds, performed by virtuoso musicians, including Yuji Takahashi and his sister Aki playing piano. The other evening featured those eager t-shirt wearing volunteers, animating the atrium.

Onda had visited Manila in 2017, when the centenary of Maceda’s birth was marked through a series of presentations of his work. “I attended the Cassettes 100 performance, restaged in the lobby of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the exact location of its premiere in 1971,” Onda recalls. “The participants ascended and descended stairs, interconnecting across three floors, Their movements created a looming, three-dimensional cacophony. I’ve always been interested in relationships between sound, space and performance, and I thought of the Kanagawa Arts Theatre atrium, which has similar architecture, but wider and higher.”

The impact of Cassettes 100 is unquestionably cacophonous, yet Maceda’s composition, channelled through those massed playback devices, is actually scored, meticulously, for a variety of traditional Filipino instruments, including gongs, bamboo buzzers, whistles, clappers, zithers and flutes. With painstaking care he wrote out each of its 100 component parts. Musicians were then engaged to record them, creating sound cells, which were transferred to cassette for amalgamation in performance by participants who may have had no formal musical training. The composition takes shape through distinct blocks of sound, so that at one moment it may be only flutes that emanate from the playback devices; at another moment, a combination of drums and zithers. The resultant montage also accommodates taped sounds of speech, rustling leaves and clinking pebbles, reflecting Maceda’s belief that music has its origin in such sounds.

In Cassettes 100 traditional instruments and current or recent technology collude to realise a radical structure. The piece effectively draws together seemingly incompatible strands within the outlook of a man who didn’t start to write music until he reached his mid-40s. Initially, Maceda trained as a pianist, studying in Paris during the late 1930s with eminent teacher Alfred Cortot. In Europe he later became personally acquainted not only with Xenakis, but also Boulez, Stockhausen and other luminaries of the avant garde. On a trip to New York he visited Edgard Varèse whose work, along with that of Xenakis, he found especially compelling on account of its involvement with sound mass and spatialisation. He also appreciated the interest shown by Varèse in the energies of pre-Colombian art of the Americas, and by Xenakis in the galvanising power of ancient Greek ritual.

Overlapping fields of sound, which Maceda came to characterise as “drone and melody,” were however an identifiable element of Asian traditional musics. The Western avant garde, he sensed, was not so distant from indigenous Filipino culture as it might superficially appear.

Maceda’s own interests turned increasingly to continuities from the distant past still to be found in traditional music of the Philippines. Those continuities survived largely in villages whose remoteness had left them untrammelled by colonial interventions. Maceda travelled to those communities, where he took copious notes and made tape recordings of musical practices that were deeply engrained in cycles of the natural world, and in long established patterns of everyday human behaviour. He came to recognise that music in the life of such communities was inseparable from the staging of collective ritual. His use of newly available portable tape recorders in Cassettes 100 drew upon that insight. As in a tribal rite, non-specialists were drawn into a music-making process, assuming an active role as producers of the event, rather than passive recipients.

Maceda’s fieldwork resulted in a unique and substantial archive, housed at the Centre for Ethnomusicology, which he established in 1997 at the University of the Philippines, in Quezon City. He remained its director until his death in 2004. Onda spent time researching in that archive, which also includes recordings, scores and other documentation relating to Maceda’s own compositions. He was particularly struck by images of that premiere performance of Cassettes 100. “Maceda collaborated with two visual artists who hung colourfully dyed toilet paper from the ceiling, and there was stroboscopic lighting. It had a sort of wildness and strangeness, similar to a ‘60s Happening, which I found inspiring.” Organising the revival in Yokohama, he wanted to match that energy and sense of surprise, and decided to involve Yoko Higashino and Toshio Kajiwara, members of the ANTIBODIES Collective, a Kyoto-based interdisciplinary arts group. It was their role to choreograph the movements of those taking part and to refashion the look and feel of the space.

The impact of this striking piece is cumulative. Its texture seems to thicken as the atmosphere grows increasingly saturated, and physical space seems to become malleable in response to sound flowing through it. An unspecified, thought-provoking drama unfolds. A shadowy figure gyrates within a fabric dome; an inverted body spins in an illuminated sphere. These dancers break out and, for a while, claim the atrium as their own stage. One, scantily clad, eventually appears draped in a tangle of magnetic tape, before scampering amongst the forms of those t-shirt wearing participants, who have dropped to the floor after the music has reached its explosive climax. Then the atrium descends into total darkness.

Documentation of an immersive event of this kind is inevitably a diminished representation. Still, a record, such as this film, not only preserves a flavour of the occasion, that might well encourage further re-staging in other spaces, but also issues an invitation to enter into dialogue with ideas that feed into, flow through and arise out of Maceda’s work. His outlook was at once conservative and ecologically prescient. He mistrusted technology’s potential as a social determinant, and recognised value in long established continuities of human community. He respected collective identity, as it arises from common needs and desires, and recognised the potential for location to be fashioned through human agency, for place to take form within space. He also understood that such agency needs to harmonise with natural cycles and adjust to the rhythms and intrinsic character of the world beyond human definition. This is all reflected in his music, our inheritance and his legacy to the future.

Wire subscribers can also read a six page article on José Maceda by Julian Cowley in The Wire 421 via our digital archive