JONAS BAES: BANWA [Manila Performance] について・・・
JONAS BAES composed BANWA in 1997 as a commission from the ASEAN-COCI for the 3rd "ASEAN Composer's Workshop on Traditional Music" held in Thailand. It is inspired by Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities," with Baes' various engagements as cultural activist, and with his enticement with music among the various Bagobo communities in Mindanao. It was composed during Baes' engagement with those people in a field research project in that year.
One aspect of the music is the continuous scraping sound of four bamboo rasps playing from the four corners of the performance space. Amidst this continuous playing of scraping patterns, the bamboo rasp players begin filling-up this performance space with sound by distributing iron-nail "peace chimes" to the audience, who are instructed to play those chimes until the end of the music. Here the "imagined community" emerges from its state of "atrophy," making the audience integral participants in the filling-up and the transforming of the performance space into a forest of sounds.
The other aspect is a melodic structure sung by a soloist, and punctuated by instruments or voices; the setting or instrumentation of which depending largely on the cultural context of the locality where the performance is taking place. With this concept of fluidity amidst an ongoing rigid texture, BANWA has had its chameleon-like manifestations in the various performances of the work which [as of this writing] include Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
This very lively rendition of November 2008 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines is led by Prof. Eudenice Palaruan, who directs the entire performance by blowing on a "conch-shell trumpet" [budyong]. Also featured is Prof. Katherine Trangco-Cabral as vocal soloist; her singing is interjected with "hanging melodies," loud hacks, coughs, vocal calls and yells by a chorus consisting of students from the University of the Philippines College of Music. Punctuating the vocal melody is the Maguindanaon gong player Kanapia Kalanduyan playing a set of gandingan gongs, along with jazz saxophonist Joey de Guzman. The audience is animated by Dominic Quejada, Juro Kim Feliz, Marie Luise Calvero, and Feliz Anne Macahis who play large bamboo rasps while distributing more than a hundred iron-nail "peace chimes" to the audience. The composer Jonas Baes dedicates this version, as symbolized in the distribution of the iron-nail "peace chimes," to the current peace efforts in Mindanao.
More information on Jonas Baes is found in:
http://www.composers21.com/compdocs/baesj.htm
and:
http://www.munzinger.de/search/kdg/Jonas+Baes/21.html
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