*This article is written for Ripples: Celebrating 24 Years of the UPCE
Officially created by the UP Board of Regents on its 1110th meeting in 1997, the UP Center for Ethnomusicology is turning 25 next year. However, its beginnings go all the way back to the 1950s with the devotion and determination of Dr. Jose Maceda to systematically document the music cultures of an entire country, an ambitious enterprise he dubbed as An Ethnomusicological Survey of the Philippines. This resulted into the magnificent collection comprised of about 2,500 hours of field audio recording, some 421 containers of field notes and around 800 containers of related paper documents, 10,000 photographs and 1,000 musical instruments. We now refer to these as the Jose Maceda Collection which has gained international recognition by virtue of its inscription into the UNESCO Memory of the World Registry in 2007. As the Center’s core collection, it would later be joined by other prize collections donated by scholars such as Ramon Santos, Felipe de Leon, F. Landa Jocano and Felicidad Prudente.
Because of their vulnerability from the ravages of nature and time, the preservation of these distinguished collections became the overriding preoccupation of the Center. By 2018, the long and arduous task of digitizing these collections started by former director Ramon Santos a decade earlier was almost complete. The construction of a new building, the Jose Maceda Hall, also began around this time which would become the permanent home of the Center that by then was occupying two classrooms and toilet converted into a sound lab at the College of Music. It was also then that the staff decided it was time to plan for the 25th anniversary by drafting the Roadmap to 2022: A Five Year Program of Action Towards the 25th Year of UPCE. The roadmap was comprised of the following milestones the staff was hoping to achieve:
- Equip the center with state-of-the-art facilities at par with leading research institutions in the world;
- Improve services by adopting best practices and procedures;
- Stimulate a dynamism of research activities
- Further expand the collections and make these more accessible to the public;
- Enlarge and improve the production of new knowledge;
- Promote the awareness of ethnomusicology among students, teachers and community leaders; and
- Ensure the permanence and sustainability of the institution as a research unit within the university.
After much delay, the Maceda Hall was finished in late 2018 and the Center was finally able to transfer by the middle of 2019. The move itself took months of careful planning given the high value of the objects to be relocated. Still, the staff was able to accomplish a good portion of the Roadmap and looked forward to normalized operations in the new facility. Then, Covid happened.
Covid of course blindsided us as we were all actually preparing for other types of disasters. Today, we are still in the middle of the raging pandemic with no clear end in sight. But Covid is for us just another bump on the road. It will definitely delay our journey on the Roadmap, but we are not stalled. Perhaps the greatest way to celebrate our 25th anniversary would be for us to open our doors once again to welcome you in. We are looking forward to that wonderful day.
– Verne de la Peña, PhD
Director
UP Center for Ethnomusicology
