![]() Her transcriptions of many of those songs, available in six volumes published by the Silliman Music Foundation, are not well known, unfortunately, especially since many of those volumes are already out of print. But for her efforts, we wouldn’t have any record now of many of the songs of our Visayan forebears. She ended up with some 400 recordings of the folk songs and, perhaps without realizing it then, priceless insights into the songs and the people out of which they came. At a time when nobody was doing anything with the folk songs of the region, her intensive research for The Folk Song Project funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant in the 1950s took her to remote towns and barrios in the Visayas and Mindanao. She also narrated dramatically a delightful Manubo folk tale about a mother rat, Dumpaw’s Lullaby (Cotabato), that involved audience participation in the parts where Dumpaw’s song is heard.It would be hard to find somebody more qualified than Priscilla Magdamo to talk about Visayan folk songs. With able vocal, piano, and guitar support from Diomar Abrio, Chino Añiga, Ian Caballes, Mayette Cabalsag, Melody Enero, and Bernard Montes, Precy (who earned a Masters in Voice and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University) enchanted the audience with her vocal and piano arrangements of ‘Day, Baling Mingawa (Valencia), Ahay, Tuburan (Aklan), Sukta ang Kabulakan (Cebu), Kutub Sang Una nga Tiempo (Aklan), Kon Duna Kay Kasakit (Northern Mindanao?), Ili-Ili, Tulog Anay (Aklan), Pagkaanindot Lantawon (Cebu), Nag-adto Ako sa Sapa (Aklan), and Ohoy, Alibangbang (Aklan). ![]() 1st at the COPVA Sala on the Silliman campus were treated to a delightful and much-too-short enlightening and inspiring session that highlighted creative ways by which our traditional Visayan folk songs can be presented to a modern audience. Since this calling song can still be heard sometimes in the hills around Valencia today with some slight variations in the melody (in the nature of folk songs), Precy has incorporated these changes in newer arrangements of the song.Those of us who attended her talk-and-demonstration on Dec. ![]() It’s one of the songs from Visayan folk music that Precy chose to arrange for concert performance decades after she first heard it. It exemplifies the desires and wisdom of the “folk,” their simple way of expressing deep universal human needs and emotion, its beautiful, haunting melody coming out of the culture of “unsophisticated” people who, nevertheless, possess that universal human impulse to create beauty and art and take the time to do it. This particular calling song is memorable for its simplicity and its haunting sound, but especially, I think, for its plaintive cry voicing that deepest of human longings, the need for the company of a fellow human being. Among the hill folk then, calling out in song and answering from ridge and bluff was an instant method of communicating with each other. Come over, we will talk.”“What shall we talk about?”“Just come, hurry! Don’t you pity me? For goodness sake!”Imagine this plaintive exchange cutting through the hills’ silence in this case, two women friends, their voices loud and clear, calling out to each other, their song echoing from ridge to ridge long before the invention of that must-have ubiquitous internet-age gadget that enables its owners to be just a thumb’s twitch away from each other.This musical dialogue was first heard by the young Priscilla “Precy” Magdamo-Abraham during World War II in the hills around Valencia (then called Luzuriaga) where her family had evacuated to escape the Japanese. ![]() Anhi, magsulti ta.”“Unsa man atong isulti?”“Anhi lang, dali! Di ka ba maluoy? Aduy!“Girl, how lonesome it is!Should I go over there or should you come over? Ouy!”“Girl, why are you lonely?”“I have nothing to do. By Myrna Peña-Reyes“’Day, baling mingawa!Ako bay muanha? Ikaw bay muanhi? Ouy!”“’Day, ngano man gimingaw ka?”“Wa man akoy mahimo. ![]()
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