Udlot Udlot by José Maceda
Udlot Udlot, Manila 1975. Courtesy of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology
Held on 19 sep 2019
The Museo Reina Sofía opens a call to register for the performance piece Udlot Udlot, by José Maceda, in the areas surrounding the Palacio de Cristal. The call is aimed at anyone interested in music and does not require knowledge of music theory. Those that register will receive instruments and instructions, finally, will rehearse and play the piece as the conclusion to a recreational day.
Udlot Udlot was composed in Manila for “hundreds or thousands of performers”. Around eight hundred people first performed the work at the University of the Philippines in 1975, in conjunction with a lecture on Asian music. Since then, it has been performed on different occasions, for instance in San Francisco in 2003 under the direction of Maceda, and in 2010 in Suita, Japan. The work is a key part not only of this composer’s career, but also the ensemble of aesthetic performances which, on an international level and not always interconnected, altered the traditional relationship between stage and sound in the 1960s and 1970s.
Since the start of his career as a composer and musicologist, the musical interests of José Montserrat Maceda (Manila, 1917 – Quezon City, 2004) have spanned traditional music from the Philippines, East and West Africa, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Although at the beginning of the 1950s he came into contact with composers from the European tradition in Paris, from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (the Musical Research Group), created by Pierre Schaeffer, and with members Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis, his interest has never moved away from grass-roots and cult music from the Asian tradition. In the US, where he received a grant from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, he continued to research strands of ethnomusicology and, in 1997, founded the UP Center for Ethnomusicology in his country. In the 1990s, he wrote books and musical compositions, applying and integrating his investigations into the use of rhythms, timbres and materials from the traditions of both Asia and Europe.
Programa
Thursday 19 September, 2019
Municipal School of Music and Dance, Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera (Calle de la Farmacia, 13)
7:30pm – 9:30pm
Practical workshop on Udlot Udlot
Saturday 21 September, 2019
Retiro Park, Palacio de Cristal
11:30am – 12noon
The assembly of registered participants and distribution of instruments and instructions
12noon – 1pm
Dress rehearsal
1pm – 2pm
Concert presentation and Udlot Udlot performance
Education programme
Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Cristina Gutiérrez and Jesús Jara
With the support of
The Philippine Embassy in Spain, the Spanish Embassy in the Philippines, the UP Center for Ethnomusicology
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo
Related links
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
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