The boxed set of four video documentaries with accompanying research monograph titled “Music-Cultural Flows and Exchanges in Pulangi River, Maguindanao: The Making and Circulation of Gongs and Bamboo Music Instruments” is now available. This is the research grant output of Dr. Jose S Buenconsejo of the University of the Philippines funded by the National Research Council of the Philippines.
The documentary videos were filmed in the provinces of Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat in 2022-2023. It explores the shared and unique indigenous music traditions among the Muslim Maguindanaon and their neighbors, the “lumad” groups Teduray and Manobo Dulangan.
Music instruments such as the kulintang, two-stringed lute kudyapi, and vertical bamboo flutes are shared across the three ethnolinguistic divisions but not the bamboo polychordal zither and idiochord kagul, which the Maguindanaon no longer have. The absence of these cultural markers in Maguindanao lowland suggests cultural transformation after Islam diffused into the landscape a long time ago, a duree of contact and maritime trade that continues today, albeit connected to a different social process of migration as in the transnationalization of kulintang and kudyapi. A much deeper cultural flow can be discerned, however, in the sound aesthetics of “drone and melody” in wooden and bamboo instruments.
Below are the titles of the documentaries.
Video 1: Si Tokan: Ang Manggagawa ng Kulintang sa Maguindanao Ilaya
Video 2: Ang Kapitana: Women in Teduray Music and Ritual
Video 3: Water of the Mountains: Traditional Music among the Manobo Dulangan
Video 4: Karatuan: Kudyapi sa Lumang Maguindanao
Journal of Philippine Music 