Posted on Tuesday, October 07 2003 - 10:30 AM - Professors

Professor Bill Summers in the Music department sent the following about his research: In 1993 when the International Hispanic Music Study group was founded, the first members sought out individuals throughout the world who were doing research or performing music from the greater Luso/Hispanic world to invite them to participate. My task was to identify people in the Philippines who were scholars and/or performers of Iberian-inspired music. To my surprise there were no living scholars who studied the almost 400 years of music making before the U. S. invasion in 1898.

Three years of preliminary research preceded my first research trip to the Philippines in 1996. Since then I have published four articles including the first ever to appear in a music encyclopedia on the music history of the city of Manila, found in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Two additional articles are in the press. I have also delivered research papers and given colloquia on music from the Philippines in the U. S., Ireland, Spain and in the Philippines. This past fall I served as a research scholar and taught a seminar in the Institute for Intercultural Studies, University of Santo Tomás. This November, I will present my most recent findings during a panel discussion at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Houston.

My re-discoveries of music, archival records related to music, manuscript studies and historical reconstructions of major musical events have taken me to all of the archives and libraries in Manila and also to the island of Bohol, a center for Philippine Heritage Conservation, where I am presently conducting research on the largest collection of music to survive from a colonial-era church outside of Manila.

Today a very active group of young scholars, studying at the University of the Philippines and the University of Santo Tomás, are undertaking extensive and path breaking projects on the history of music in the Philippines. It has been particularly rewarding for me to have had the opportunity to be working in a geographic area with so rich a musical history that remains largely unexplored. Each fall when I return to Manila, new and exciting tasks await me. Visit Professor Summers' website.