Pagsamba, ritual musif for a circular auditorium; 33 mins Performed with the Tagalog text of the Catholic mass; 116 instrumentalist; 100 voices; 25 men's voices. As a piece of music, Pagsamba is concerned with the idea that in the sound spectrum without a definite “scale”, a wide latitude of musical forms need not be limited to electronic sounds. In this work, 100 performers each playing on separate musical instruments – whistle flute, clapper, buzzer, scraper and sticks – produce together complex sounds placed in oppositionto vocal sounds with two kinds of soundwaves. A mixed group of 100 voices utter high and low pitches in dense and thin combinations while 5 groups of male voices, each group consisting of 5 persons, chant, half-sing and half-mumble disjointed phones. Two gong-groups (8 gandingan and 8 agong) provide the lower-rangers as prolonged and short sound-attacks. Drones, “hanging” melodies, opaqueness, transparency, screens and diffusion are some of the vocabulary sought for in this musical language. Space is also a part of the structure of this musical creation which is conceived for a circular hall. Each of the 100 instrumentalists, each of the 100 vocalists, and each gong player occupy a seat along with the audience facing the center of the hall. The 5 groups of men are situated in different sectors of the circle. Any person whether musician or listener, whenever he may be seated, would receive an impact of sounds different from those viewed by another seated in another segment of the circle. As liturgy, the Tagalong text of the Catholic mass is strictly followed. The forms of this text-triangular in the Kyrie, verse in the Gloria and prose in the Credo – mould the shape of the music. Other languages can be used instead of Tagalog, and other musical instruments (electronic and “live”) may be substituted for those used in the present version. With these substitutes, the resulting music could have another liturgical form with a text of its own. As an experience, Pagsamba may be conceived of in different ways – as a stereophony of live sounds produced by individuals, as music that can be transmitted by computing and electronic machines as malleable sound which can assume different shapes following the sounds of similar musical instruments found in areas of varied cultures – in Brazil, Mexico, Hawaii, Africa, Indonesia. As electronic rendition of this work would follow the score exactly, but one must hurdle technical problems of setting 241 loudspeakers placed around a circular hall, each speaker animated by a separate sound-track. Although 241 people are less perfect than the machine in producing exact time values, they can be installed more easily like objects in a circle and together, they can produce sounds which the machine cannot do for the moment. *program notes from First Performance of Pagsamba of Music for a Religious Ritual, Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice, UP Diliman, 24 January 1968.
