The socially responsive chorus: Music as a vehicle for political reflection in the Philippines

• In Event: Round-Table Session 1
  In Round-table Session: Teacher Education and Educational Programming to Promote Peace and Conflict Resolution

Proposal

Since June 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration ushered in a new form of urban terrorism, in which residential neighborhoods became violent spaces for conflict and death in the name of the legally enacted Drug War (Gutierrez, 2016). Encouraged vigilantism against alleged drug lords claimed over 7,000 lives within seven months of Duterte’s administration in power (Kine, 2017). In the wake of such violence, an internal national discourse about Duterte’s actions has been largely indiscernible (Almendral, 2017). Within the rapidly growing body of research on arts-based practices within peacebuilding, music is identified as one of the most dynamic peacebuilding communicative efforts (Bang, 2016), as seen in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sudan, and in the Israeli/Palestinian context (Robertson, 2016; Sandoval, 2016). Additionally, music has demarked some of the most volatile periods of Philippine political history during the twentieth century. Songs of the People Power Revolution during President Ferdinand Marcos’ administration in the 1970s and 1980s became forms of protest and collective resistance (Official Gazette, 2014). Because a traditional mode for dialogue in news outlets does not exist in Filipino communities with regards to the Duterte administration’s socio-political violence, music may form the necessary basis for a larger discourse on the current violence to take place (Bang, 2016; Shaw, 2012). This paper explores the relationship between socially responsive dialogue in and outside of universities, and the potential for music to become a channel for facilitating reflective thought and conflict resolution, by examining how Philippine choral directors in Metro Manila universities frame their understanding of the current violence under President Duterte’s administration through concert programming strategies and explanations of artistic interpretation in music rehearsals with students. The Drug War’s current impact on Philippine urban communities and the need to contextualize music’s peacebuilding capabilities in the Philippines exist as gaps in academic research. This paper investigates these gaps to understand the modes of artistic and constructive conflict engagement the Philippines uses in response to violence today.

This paper uses ethnographic data conducted in July 2017, from confidential, semi-structured 30-minute to 1-hour individual interviews with choral music instructors and student choir members in five Metro Manila universities with strong academic and historical presences, and well-established music programs. Informants discussed their thoughts on music’s role in citizenship formation, activism and conflict, their musical practices within formal and informal educational settings, and their perspective on music’s importance in global, national and communal contexts. The study employed a snowball sampling strategy and interviews were administered in English. Additionally, iterative 2-hour participant observation sessions in music rehearsals were conducted to understand how choral conductors pedagogically impart music education and practices as socially responsive literacy to their students.

Data analysis explores the significance of meaning-making and dialogic responsiveness through critical curation of choral concert repertoire, and aims to contribute pedagogically to choral studies and music education teacher training development. Ultimately, “music (and singing in particular) functions as a socialising agent and as a symbol or vehicle for expressing emotions and patriotism, religious feeling or fraternity” (Durrant, 2005, p. 96). This idea of socialization through music in an embodied, dynamic and kinesthetically engaging art form such as choral singing synthesizes various elements of music that disseminate a multifaceted and coordinated rendering of meaning and learning, through words, articulation, dynamics, pitch, intonation and artistic interpretation (Pearce, 2004). With these various parameters offering communicative properties for the Philippine people, there is a coalescing of narratives that forges a national identity that can speak to a collective’s sentiments, demarking the ways in which choral music, as a Western-based artistic practice, is adapted and transformed as a socially-informing medium through which dialogues of the global South can be realized.

Additionally, Brian Street’s New Literacy Studies approach (1993) posits that the study of literacy itself has expanded to employ “more anthropological and cross cultural frameworks” (p.1), namely by contextualizing critical sociological and interpersonal comprehension within the frame of “ideological literacy” (p.7). The ideological conception of “literacy learning involves more than learning new skills, it means making changes to social practices and relationships, and negotiating new social roles, and identities” (Maddox, 2005, p.125). Literacy’s multidimensionality as both interpersonal and functional construct identifies music as a form of critical and multimodal literacy with which individuals create socially responsive dialogue through collective, embodied practices.

This paper highlights cross-disciplinary insights between international educational development and music education, and demarks the processes of how artistic modes of literacy work towards conflict resolution in socio-politically violent contexts.


References

Almendral, A. (2017, February 10). In Philippine Drug War, Death Rituals Substitute for Justice. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/02/philippine-drug-war/

Bang, A. H. (2016). The Restorative and Transformative Power of the Arts in Conflict Resolution. Journal of Transformative Education, 14(4). pp. 355-376. DOI: 10.1177/1541344616655886

Durrant, C. (2005). Shaping identity through choral activity: singers' and conductors' perceptions. Research Studies in Music Education, 24 (1). pp. 88-98. ISSN 1321-103X.

Gutierrez, J. (2016, August 02). Body Count Rises as Philippine President Wages War on Drugs. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/asia/philippines-duterte-drug-killing.html

Kine, P. (2017, January 24). Deadly Milestone in Philippines' Abusive ‘Drug War.’ Retrieved February 14, 2017, from https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/24/deadly-milestone-philippines-abusive-drug-war

Maddox, B. (2005). Assessing the impact of women's literacies in Bangladesh: An ethnographic inquiry. International Journal of Educational Development, 25(2), 123-132. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2004.11.017

Official Gazette. (2014, February 25). Dancing to the Tune of the Revolution: 5 songs of EDSA. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from http://www.gov.ph/2014/02/25/dancing-to-the-tune-of-the-revolution/

Pearce, W. B. (2004). The Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). Theories of Communication Incorporating Culture. pp. 35-54.

Robertson, C. (2016). Musicological ethnography and peacebuilding. Journal of Peace Education, 13(3), 252-265. DOI:10.1080/17400201.2016.1234618

Sandoval, E. (2016). Music in peacebuilding: a critical literature review, Journal of Peace Education, 13:3, 200-217, DOI: 10.1080/17400201.2016.1234634

Shaw, J. (2012). The Skin that We Sing: Culturally Responsive Choral Music Education. Music Educators Journal, 98(4), 75-81. doi:10.1177/0027432112443561

Street, B. (1993). Introduction: The new literacy studies. In B. Street (Ed.), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy (pp. 1-21). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Author

• Julianne Parayo, Teachers College, Columbia University