• Tzadik label, 2001

• Format: CD

• Used

1 Pagsamba

2 Suling-Suling

3 Colors Without Rhythm

José Maceda is a Filipino composer of interdisciplinary works and musicologist.

Prof. Maceda studied piano with Victorina Lobregat at the Academy of Music in Manila, where he graduated in 1935, and with Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1937–41. He later studied piano privately with E. Robert Schmitz in San Francisco from 1946–49 and musicology at Columbia University and Queens College, City University of New York from 1950–52. He then studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and ethnomusicology at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1957–58 and the University of California, Los Angeles from 1961–63, where he earned his PhD.

Among his many honours were grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1957–58, for study in the USA) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1968, for research in Africa and Brazil), the honour Ordre des Palmes Académiques from the government of France (1978), the University of the Philippines Outstanding Research Award (1985), the John D. Rockefeller III Award from the Asian Cultural Council in New York, New York (1987), the Philippine National Science Society Achievement Award (1988), the award Tanglaw ng Lahi from Ateneo de Manila University (1988), and the award Gawad ng Lahi from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1989). He later received the Fumio Koizumi Prize for Ethnomusicology in Tōkyō (1991), the National Research Council Award in the Philippines (1993), the award Araw ng Maynila (1996), the Nikkei Award in Tōkyō (1997), the award of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide (1997), and the title National Artist of the Philippines from the government of the Philippines (1997). He was later named an Officier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite (1997) and a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (2001), both by the government of France.

As a musicologist, he devoted much of his time to ethnomusicological studies of the music of the Philippines and Southeast Asia from 1953–2004. He undertook music research in the field throughout the Philippines and in eastern and western Africa, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. He wrote extensively about his research for publications in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UK, and the USA, as well as the book Gongs and Bamboos: A Panorama of Philippine Music Instruments (1998, University of the Philippines Press). Yuji Takahashi translated many of his articles into Japanese in the book Drone and Melody (1989, Shinjuku Shobo Company). In addition, the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City contains an archive of more than 2500 hours of his field recordings in 51 language groups, complete with musical instruments, photographs, text transcriptions, and translations.

He was also active in other positions. He performed as a pianist in France, the Philippines and the USA from 1935–57, during which time he introduced many new works, mainly by composers from France, and pioneered a French style of piano-playing in the Philippines. He worked with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in 1958. He later worked as a conductor of avant-garde music that he arranged for various organisations in the Philippines and for UNESCO from 1964–68, thereby introducing music by Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis and other composers alongside music from China and the Philippines.

He taught as Professor of Piano and Ethnomusicology at the University of the Philippines Diliman from 1952–90, where he was named a University Professor in 1988 and was professor emeritus from 1990–2004. He served as executive director of its Center for Ethnomusicology from 1997–2004. He gave lectures throughout the world, including the Charles Seeger Lecture at the meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Los Angeles in 1984, a lecture as the International Arts Symposium Speaker at the National Academy of Arts in Seoul in 1994 and a lecture at the Arts Summit in Indonesia in 1995. He later taught as the Rayson Huang Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong in 1999 and as Jean Macduff Vaux Composer-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2000.

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