Gather, Keep, and Return: the Transformation of the University of the Philippines Center for  Ethnomuisocology

Keynote talk by LaVerne David C. de la Peña, PhD  (University of the Philippines)

Established in 1997, the University of the Philippines (UP) Center for Ethnomusicology is a center for music research with material collections on the music cultures in the Philippines, Southeast Asia and representative areas from other continents. Its core holding, the Jose Maceda Collection is comprised of archival materials including sound recordings, field notes, video, film, photographs and musical instruments put together by Dr.  Maceda and his associates since 1953. Recognizing the precious value of these materials, UNESCO inscribed it in its Memory of the World Register in the year 2007. In this presentation Dr. LaVerne de la Peña discuss the initiative towards community engagement and empowerment that the leadership of the center has decided to pursue as illustrated in two projects – an ongoing music repatriation initiative and at the establishment of community-based archives. The music repatriation program dubbed ReCollection aims to reintroduce recordings from the collection back to the communities where they were collected from, some as far back as the 1950s, by distributing special limited-edition CDs to various sectors in the community. The project allows the communities to reconnect with voices, sounds and memories, at the same time giving opportunities for present day researchers collect new data, thus ReCollection. The project has so far been successfully implemented in the municipalities of Sagada and Bontoc in the Mountain Province and in Kabayan, Benguet.   

During the pandemic, the Center had forged a partnership with the St. Mary’s School of Sagada in laying the foundations of a community ran archives, beginning with a series of online seminars. The venture aims to transfer skills and resources from academic experts and national cultural agencies, thus empowering the cultural community towards self-determination and ownership. 

LaVerne David C. de la Peña

LaVerne David C. de la Peña obtained his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Hawaii. Research areas include Benguet Kankana ey, Tagalog, and Filipino hiphop. His research includes burial rites and prestige feasts in Buguias Benguet as well as repartee singing and drinking events in Sariaya Quezon. Dr. de la Peña is currently the Dean of the University of the Philippines College of Music and the Director of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology.

Panel Discussion

The talk will be followed by a panel discussion with Sonic Entanglements and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS) partners on decolonization, repatriation, and sound archives in Southeast Asia. The discussion will take as its starting points the theoretical engagement and the archival intervention of the Sonic Entanglements project. 

Panel Members

Barbara Titus (DeCoSEAS/Jaap Kunst Archive|University of Amsterdam)
Sol Trinidad (UP Center for Ethnomusicology)
Citra Aryandari (Citra Research Center| Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta)
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer (University of Amsterdam|Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Layan Nijem (DeCoSEAS/Jaap Kunst Archive)

Moderated by

meLê yamomo (Sonic Entanglements/DeCoSEAS|University of Amsterdam)

Sonic Returns – Repatriating Sounds on Exile [Amsterdam]

How do we decolonize colonial sound archives? How do open colonial archives to horizontal accessibilities? How is the discourse in sound knowledges and sonic practices controlled by who has access to its archiving? How can we open decolonial discourses of sonic epistemologies through transfers of access and agency? These questions animate the scholarship, archival interventions, and community outreach projects of the Sonic Entanglements project led by meLê yamomo and funded by the Dutch Research Council. 

For its last initiative, Sonic Entanglements brings together archivists, scholars, and stakeholders of Southeast Asian sound archives to discuss issues of repatriating and reconnecting sound heritage with their communities. Sound and media scholar Jonathan Sterne (2003) calls sound media resonant tombs where the voices of the dead reside. meLê yamomo (2021) argues that sound archives are cemeteries of deceased sounds—removed from the communities that keep them alive through collective memory. In the next two weeks, Sonic Returns reframes the question: Are these recorded voices, music, and sound cultures just in exile waiting for their return to their communities? In this series of archival encounters, lectures, and panel discussions at the BBC/British Library, SOAS, CNRS France, Jaap Kunst Ethnomusicology Collection, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Berlin Phonogram Archive, Sound Archive of Humboldt University-Berlin, Sonic Returns mediate in the repatriation of sounds on exile.