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Reviewed by:
  • Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila
  • George Yuri Porras
Irving, D. R. M. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. x + 394 pp.

According to D. R. M. Irving, Filipinos have traditionally summarized, “in an ironic formula,” the 353 years of their country’s history before finally becoming a Republic in 1946 as “three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in Hollywood, and three years in a concentration camp” (12). Irving takes the reader on an impressively coalesced historical and ethnomusicological journey of the Philippines, focusing primarily on the country’s “three hundred years in a convent,” particularly that of its most important city, Manila, a key strategic Imperial Spanish colony and center of communication between Spain and Asia. As the largest Spanish-occupied territory in the region, the archipelago’s important geographic location created a milieu of musical transactions between Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan during the early modern period and beyond. To engage the reader in this discussion, Irving utilizes the musical concept of “counterpoint” as 1) a metaphor for the syncretism that eventually occurred throughout the Philippines, 2) a colony that absorbed European dominant musical practices, 3) an assimilator of these practices to its own music through the study and documentation of Filipino musics by Spanish missionaries, and eventually 4) a Filipino conduit of Spanish Imperial and religious subversion.

Drawing from Ferdinand de Saussure’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ideas of opposition “to explore the creation of musical meaning within cultural and social contexts of early modern colonialism and globalization,” and from Jacques Derrida’s challenges to “the ideological assumptions and contradictions that are implicit in the early modern documentation of crucial and formative intercultural encounters,” as well as Edward Said’s “contrapuntal analysis” revealing “distinct (and opposing) voices of the elite and the subaltern in colonial societies” (4–5), Irving connects the process of socialization and religious conversion to the intricate idea of “opposition” inherently present in musical counterpoint:

Without opposition we can have no high pitches or low pitches, no loud notes or soft notes, no fast speeds or slow speeds. Forget consonance and dissonance; never mind major and minor. All these qualities in music can be defined only [End Page 664] in relation to their antitheses. In similar terms, many cultures can only discover their own identity through opposition or difference.

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One of Irving’s common threads throughout the narrative of his book is the conflation of various methodologies of historical musicology and ethnomusicology in order to properly assess musics, which suggests perhaps a step further, that is, that in order to truly understand various cultural productions, disciplines may exponentially benefit from true collaboration across fields. To Irving, “counterpoint” is not just a musical analogy, but a social phenomenon of colonialism. He asserts that in a given society there are multiple voices, which function under rules imposed by, in the early modern period in particular, a colonial imperial power.

Irving divides his book into three main parts, each delineating a process of musical socialization and assimilation in the early modern Philippines. The first part (Chapters 1–2), “Contrapuntal Cultures,” characterizes Manila as a global city and key strategic point of musical transactions and intercultural exchange. This is particularly true of the vast interactions of commerce and musical practices between Europe, the Americas, and Asia through the encounters of various ethnicities in the archipelago, such as Filipinos, Chinese, Spanish, and to a lesser extent, Mexican and African diasporas, all of which not only created a complex system of social categories, but who also brought their musical practices (modes, rhythms, songs, instruments, and dances) with them. Similarly to what happened in the colonies of the Americas, music would become an important tool through which missionaries, by meticulous study of native musics and their assimilations to European musical practices, converted the population to Catholicism. Facilitating this syncretism was the existence of native musicopoetic genres, such as the auit, a precolonial song type (138); the loa, a precolonial Filipino musicopoetic genre that served similar praising and introductory purposes as Spanish loas (142); and the pasyon, a poetic form whose main theme was the life of...

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