José Maceda

An important discovery of the original 1974 recording of a José Maceda masterpiece emerges with the first complete release of Ugnayan, one of the most ambitious and controversial works in 20th-century experimental music. Recorded as 20 channels broadcast simultaneously on all of Manila's radio stations to the population gathered in public spaces with hand-held transistor radios, Ugnayan was a massive production that realized Maceda's vision of music at the scale of an entire city.

José Montserrat Maceda (1917-2004) was a Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer named a National Artist of the Philippines for Music in 1998. After studying at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and later working with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, Maceda developed a unique compositional approach that merged European avant-garde techniques with traditional Southeast Asian instruments and musical concepts. The work was supported by the Marcos regime and intended to meld values of indigenous Filipino culture with modernist aesthetics. Though politically problematic and largely misunderstood, the effort involving the public in an avant-garde, environmental music performance was an unprecedented achievement that has not yet been surpassed. The premiere took place on New Year's Day 1974 at 6 PM, with all thirty-seven radio stations in metropolitan Manila turning over their channels for Maceda's fifty-one-minute sound diffusion.

Xenakis-like clouds of sounds from bamboo instruments, cymbals, gongs and voices are precisely notated in a 100-page score using complex polyrhythmic relationships that realize Maceda's unique textural style in its most concentrated and intense form. The composer supervised the separate recording for each radio channel onto high quality analog tapes, creating what he originally titled "Atmosphere" before Imelda Marcos renamed it Ugnayan (meaning "interlinking" in Tagalog).

The work represented a radical proposition for its time, calling for mass crowds to congregate in public spaces just two years after martial law had been declared in the Philippines. Despite massive promotional campaigns, audiences struggled with the work's alien sound world, as only a small portion of the population was familiar with indigenous Filipino music due to centuries of colonial Westernization. Maceda's approach drew from his extensive fieldwork documenting traditional music across Southeast Asia, research that would later be inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register in 2007. His innovative "sound mass" compositions prioritized texture and timbre over melody, creating immersive sonic environments that challenged Western musical conventions.

The result is the most stunning example of this important and neglected composer's work yet released, offering listeners the opportunity to experience one of experimental music's most ambitious social experiments in its complete form.