| From the editor:
"We are indeed fortunate to have the opportunity to publish this collection of articles on kulintang/kolintang. Together they represent a thorough presentation of up-to-date scholarship on most aspects of a single musical genre: instrumentation, performance practice, theory of music, cultural contexts for performance, and -- perhaps unique for such a collection -- an essay by one of the most prominent teachers of the art form on the history of its reproduction, recontextualization, and performance in America." |
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| From the introduction by Robert Garfias:
"It is difficult to believe that seemingly a few short years ago, the music of the Muslim peoples of the Philippines was little known outside that region. Prior to World War II, of the scant number of travelers who had visited the region, few had bithered to report anything touching on the music. What they provided was only enough information to suggest that this little-known region of the world had clear cultural links to the peoples and cultures of Indonesia. One could only wonder what the music might be. One of the pioneers in the study of the music of the Philippines was Jose' Maceda. His dissertation, The Music of the Maguindanao in the Philippines, the first serious written study of the music of this region, was submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963."
With the appearance of these articles, a little more than 30 years after Maceda's dissertation on Maguindanao music and my own ethnographic film and recording survey of the region, we now have a substantive body of published research on the area. This body of thorough and well-organized research represents a milestone in the addition of new knowledge to this important and, heretofore, only thinly researched music tradition." |
