Saysay Himig provides an indispensable resource for the study of Philippine music history. Under the meticulous editorial eye of Arwin Q. Tan, the scholars gathered together in this collection—leading specialists in the field of Philippine music—present authoritative and accessible essays based on fresh archival evidence. These explain crucial cultural and historical contexts and quote original source material to the modern reader in contemporary English translation, with many facsimiles of original documents and images. The essays range from source studies to social and cultural studies, from organology to the history of pedagogy, and from the critical analysis of art music genres to the study of music in the Revolution. They collectively reveal a vivid panorama of musical activity beginning in the last two decades of the Spanish regime, with a fascinating focus on the role of music in the Revolution period and in the dawn of the First Philippine Republic, and through the American period up to World War II.

David R. M. Irving
University of Melbourne

Saysay Himig is an anthology of fifty short essays that narrate the musical stories of the Filipinos from the time when the intellectual culture began to thrive and articulate the emerging sense of nationhood in the 1880s to the start of the Japanese occupation in 1941. This period covering half a century is crucial to the history of the nation because many of the institutions which eventually made up the core of political, economic, and sociocultural networks in the Third Philippine Republic—inaugurated in 1945—were established. This book is significant because it contributes to the knowledge and understanding of the role of music in the shaping of a modern identity and society in the crucial nascent years of Filipino nationhood. The essays trace the development of transcultural Philippine music and musical practices, and they provide an alternative assessment of our nation’s history, focusing on the production and circulation of cultural nationalist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Arwin Q. Tan
University of the Philippines

Editor: Arwin Q. Tan
ISBN/ISSN: 978971542858-3
Category: Humanities; Music; Performing Arts
Copyright: 2018
Pages: 446pp
Size: 7x10
Type: PB/SP