The Secret Language of Music: Mary Talusan explores the subtle communication of talking gongs

[Christine Balmes]

The Secret Language of Music
Mary Talusan explores the subtle communication of talking gongs – and
now guitars – heard in the southern Philippines for centuries, and
makes them her own
By Marjorie Howard

Music is everywhere in some villages in the southern Philippines:
shimmering gongs ring out special sounds for celebrations, ceremonies
and rituals. The gongs also serve as a way for people to talk to each
other, with musical phrases communicating words and sentences, even
allowing young men and women to court each other.

Mary Talusan learned to play the kulintang, gong music from the
southern Philippines, as part of her research, and now performs it,
too. Photo: Alonso Nichols

Halfway around the world at the Granoff Family Music Center, Mary
Talusan sits at a computer in her office and clicks “play” to start a
video. A Filipino man softly hammers out his musical message: “I’m
looking for a girl with a beautiful face,” he says, using the subtle
language of the gongs to flirt with a young woman.

You’d have had to grow up among the Magindanao people of the
Philippines to fully understand the talking gongs, says Talusan, a
Mellon Scholar at the Center for the Humanities who studies the music
and culture of the country where she was born. On November 23 she will
join her friend and mentor, Danongan Kalanduyan, and his company, the
Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble, on stage at the Tufts Festival of
Southeast Asian Music.

The Filipino music is called kulintang, the gong-drum ensemble played
by Muslim minority groups in the southern Philippines. Kulintang also
refers to the main instrument, a set of eight embossed bronze gongs in
graduated sizes and tuning. The gongs sit on a horizontal rack and are
played with wooden sticks. Kalanduyan, whom Talusan calls guro, or
teacher, is one of only two Muslim Filipino teachers of this tradition
in the United States and is considered a master of the art form.

Click on the play button to see the Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble in
concert.

For Talusan, the study and performance of kulintang is the ideal
meshing of her interests. Born in the Philippines, she came to the
United States with her family at the age of four after her parents
received fellowships at Tufts University School of Medicine. She
studied cello as a child, performing with the Greater Boston Youth
Symphony Orchestra, and knew she wanted a career in music.

Growing up, though, she became intrigued by stories she heard from an
uncle about a group of people in the southern Philippines who managed
to keep their own music and culture. They had resisted pressure, not
only from Western culture, but from Spanish colonists who had declared
all native Filipino culture “evil” and banned indigenous music.

As a graduate student in music composition at the Peabody Institute in
Baltimore, she heard Indonesian gong music, called gamelan, and
remembers being “completely blown away” by the intricate rhythms and
dance. When she learned her country had a similar tradition, she
changed her focus.

She went on to earn a doctorate in ethnomusicology at UCLA, where she
also learned Tagalog, the native Filipino language. She lived in the
Philippines from 1999 to 2000, while on a Fulbright fellowship doing
field research in a Magindanao community and studying the language,
culture and music of her native country. She has returned several
times since, most recently in August with the help of Mellon research
funds.
Marching to a Different Drummer

The Magindanao are Muslims from the southern island of Mindanao. In
traditional Muslim society, says Talusan, men and women of marriage
age are not allowed to speak to each other. Because of this ban, “they
learned to talk through gongs. What they’re doing is kind of mimicking
their language in their music,” she says.

“It’s almost a way of interviewing potential husbands,” Talusan says.
“The guys come and take turns on other instruments, and the woman
talks to them by playing an instrument. A man might say, ‘I’m
interested in you,’ and she can respond, musically. It’s socially
acceptable. The parents are sitting there, and relatives are all
around.”

Though talking gongs are a tradition going back centuries, a newer
form of music called dayunday, which is played on a three-stringed
guitar, sprang up when the Philippines was under martial law in the
1970s and 1980s. It sounds nothing like Western guitar music, but
instead mimics a Southeast Asian lute called the kudyapi.

Dayunday, explains Talusan, is an improvised stage drama in which
performers of the opposite sex sing about love and desire. The actors
take turns singing improvised lyrics and accompanying themselves on
the guitar. The show usually depicts two men competing over the hand
of a woman, something audiences especially enjoy because the men
jokingly insult each other and engage in slapstick comedy.

Click the play button to see a video of a dayunday guitar performance
recorded by Mary Talusan in the Philippines.

Talusan clicks on another video. In this one, a woman sits between two
men, each playing a guitar. Not a word is spoken as the music
continues. Suddenly the woman shyly covers her mouth in feigned
embarrassment and the audience murmurs. One of the men, using musical
phrases rather than words, has played an off-color limerick, something
the audience immediately understands, even though not a word has been
spoken.

He goes on speaking through his music, taunting the other suitor by
insulting him and emphasizing his own positive traits. Talusan
translates: “I’m young and better looking. I’ll take care of you; that
guy cannot feed you. You’ll go hungry.”

Talusan is currently working on a book, Women’s Courtship Voices:
Music and Gender in the Muslim Philippines, exploring an aspect of
society that she believes has been ignored. Customarily, a man tells
his family he wants to marry a woman, and the two families negotiate a
dowry.

“What has really been elusive,” she says, “is how women feel about the
courtship and marriage.” Studying music and what it means to the
people who perform and listen to it is a profound experience, Talusan
says. “The music is beautiful, and the people of the southern
Philippines, who kept their traditions, are fascinating.”

Talusan learned the music the hard way. When she was in the
Philippines about eight years ago, she studied kulintang with a niece
of Kalanduyan. It’s an oral teaching that Talusan, trained to learn
music from written notation, had a hard time with. “I spent many hours
of frustration trying to manage the melody and complex rhythms, but
I’ll never forget how to play these pieces,” she says.

By learning the music orally, she adds, “I was better prepared to
improvise, which is the most important feature of playing kulintang.”

She has played in various venues in the U.S., and is pleased the music
is finding its way into American pop culture. She even recently joined
Apl.de.Ap, a Filipino-American member of the group Black Eyed Peas, to
record kulintang music for his upcoming solo album. The question for
those in the know will be, of course, is there hidden language on that
recording?

The Tufts Festival of Southeast Asian Music, sponsored by the
department of music, presents music and dance of the Philippines and
Cambodia, featuring kulintang, on Sunday, November 23, at 3 p.m. Also
part of the festival, the Boston Village Gamelan will perform on
Saturday, November 22, at 8 p.m. Both performances are free and will
take place in the Granoff Music Center’s Distler Performance Hall.
Marjorie Howard can be reached at Marjori...@tufts.edu.

http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/2008/11_1/features/02/