Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946

Sounding Modernities

meLê yamomo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319691756
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319691763
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

Applies, for the first time, sound culture/sound history in analysing cultural history in Asia

Takes a productively transnational approach

Explores the intersections of sound culture, theatre history, performance and media studies

© The Author(s) 2018

meLê yamomoTheatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946Transnational Theatre Historieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69176-3_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1 The Sound of Modernity

meLê yamomo¹

(1)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

meLê yamomo

End Abstract

Sound(ing)s of Modernity

The arrival of modernity is often described in visual terms: imposing new buildings, garish new fashion, the increase of visual stimuli and spectacles of consumerism. But less often mentioned was the concomitant proliferation of sounds, and how people dealt and organised what they were hearing. It is only recently that historians began to hear and listen to modernity. Sound scholars Joseph F. Smith (1973), Don Ihde (2007, c. 1976), Steven Connor (1997, 2001), Friedrich Kittler (1999), and Jonathan Sterne (2003), for example, have historicised how the Western civilisation understood the human self. Sound historiography that examines the sociology of past soundscapes of nature and European cities, architectural acoustics, and historical media is the theme in the works of Charles Burnett (1991), Alain Corbin (1995), Bruce R. Smith (1999), Penelope Gouk (2007), Karin Bijsterveld (2013), and Viktoria Tkaczyk (2014, 2015).

However, sound historian Mark Smith in the introduction to Hearing History expresses the relative absence of historical work on non-Western sounds, mentioning that:

While there is some important, even path-breaking work on, for example, African sound and Australian aurality, it is the product of research by anthropologists, ethnologists, or ethnomusicologists and thus lacks an explicitly historical dimension, or it tends to treat sound only incidentally, as is the case with work on the history of time and time consciousness. Some of this work on African and Australian subjects is largely linguistic in its approach.¹

And as ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann pointed out, ‘[e]ven more striking is [its] absence from current debates of Third World scholars interested in auditory perception.’² In the past five years, a handful of sound scholarship on Southeast Asia (SEA) has emerged. Marcus Cheng Chye Tan’s book, Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance, is a study of soundscapes in contemporary Southeast Asian theatre.³ Bart Barendregt’s edited volume and the research project ‘Articulating Modernities’ at the University of Leiden employs the synecdochic use of ‘sonic modernity’ to investigate popular music in a transnational analyses of cultural modernity in colonial and contemporary Indonesia and the Malay world, and has begun to probe the questions of acoustic history in SEA.⁴ This volume aims to contribute to the historiography of sound listening and production in Manila and Asia Pacific.

To listen to the soundscape of the early global and modernising Manila in our mind’s ear, we rely on the accounts of earwitnesses. During the first century of colonisation, we read the records of Spanish missionary accounts of their acts of listening in the mission sites. In the nineteenth century, as Manila was implicated into the emerging modern global economy, we hear more earwitness accounts from tourists, travellers, and expatriates from Europe, the US, and Manila’s neighbouring Asian cities. Voices, other than those who had an evangelical and civilising mission , were recorded in personal biographies, travel reports, and articles from newspapers that began to circulate in the region. Expatriates and businessmen visiting neighbouring colonies wrote in comparative, if not competitive, tone. Travel writings by British , French , and Belgian visitors to Manila in the nineteenth century reveal undertones of admiration for the colonial project that is Manila; of amusement with the local people, customs, and culture; and of rivalry for political and economic interests in the city.

In modern global Manila, the church bells that used to be the only signal sounds that provided aural organisation in the community, interspersed and slowly gave way to new signalling sounds that restructured how the citizens of Manila heard and listened to their city. Steam engine ships docking on the city’s harbour multiplied 11-fold from a 1000 to 11,000 between 1860 and 1880. In addition, the number of inter-island vessels connecting Manila to the rest of the archipelago increased, as well as the commuter steamers traversing Manila via the Pasig River all the way to the suburbs and to the province of Laguna. The propeller engines and whistles of these steam vessels interspersed into the sonic environment of Manila’s quotidian life. Another notable aural addition to Manila’s soundscape that many accounts remarked on reverberated after the great earthquake of 1880. Destroyed Manila buildings were rebuilt using galvanised iron sheets for roofs, which were considered safer and more economical than the tiles previously used. This means that during monsoon and typhoon season, the city now rattled and creaked of metal sheets. US expatriate Joseph Earle Stevens wrote on June (the peak of thunderstorm season) 1895: ‘[A]t present about all the music and fireworks we have are derived from the thunder-storms that play around the sheet-iron roofs as if they meant business. But in spite of the terrific cannonade of sound and the blinding flashes of lightning nothing seems to get hit, and the iron roofs may act as dispersers of the electric fluid even though attracting it.’⁵

On 3 December 1883, five tram lines linked the major points of the city and provided the first modern public transport system for the urban population. The horse-drawn street cars whose hourly sounds of galloping, of wheels running on metal tracks, and of its arrival horn provided the rhythm of urban mobility in the city.⁶ On 20 December 1888, the steam engine-operated Malabon line that ran all the way to the suburb of Caloocan, a working-class neighbourhood on the north side of the city, was opened.⁷ For five years starting in 1887, the cacophony of industrial construction resonated from Manila northwards as the first railroads to Dagupan were laid. The steam train was inaugurated in 1892. Manila’s envelopment within the rest of the modern world was also marked by the faster tempo by which news arrived and was delivered to the city when telegraphic lines linked the city to Hong Kong and the rest of the world in 1880. In 1890, the first telephone was installed in Manila, permanently changing the sounds and processes by which Filipinos listened to and expressed information (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

North of the Pasig River 1892 (©University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Dean C. Worcester Collection)

Non-natives of the tropics coming to Southeast Asian cities have long entries of the visual as well as aural descriptions of the abundance of animals and insects that one encounters even in the cities. What they hear when the lights are turned out are vivid descriptions of the city’s domestic spaces at night. Ami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Overture
• Chapter 1 The Sound of Modernity
• Chapter 2 The Tolling of an Early Global City: Genealogies of Cultural Modernities
• Chapter 3 De Todo un Poco: Cultural Consumption in Modern Global Manila, 1848–1898
• Entr’acte: Sound Junctures of Global Modernity
• Chapter 4 Staging Modernity, Auditioning the Republic: Music Theatre and the Soni of the Nation
• Chapter 5 Modernities in Conflict: The Military Band Betwixt Empires and Nations
• Chapter 6 Echoing Modernities: Modern Globalisation and the Manila Musicians
• Back Matter