Writing for soundtrack 101

Thank you to the organizers of the “Knowing Indie with SineBuano” lecture the other Saturday at the University of San Jose-Recoletos Magallanes campus attended by officers and members of the MassCom Coordinates.

As communicators (of, say, developmental news), you have shared in our advocacy to learn more of so many things that colonialism, the World War II, the Martial Law, and even school curricula have deprived us; in fact, taken away so much from our very own persona, dignity, cultural pride, the makeup of the true-bloodied Bisdak.

Our language, for example, which was part of my discussion on “Writing from the Heart” as prelude to “Working for Work” (espoused by our creative director Diem Judilla), emphasizing on screenwriting, has lost so much of its beauty and soul. You even laughed when I shared to you that it is funny how you’ve grown this old and walked this far not knowing how to spell correctly the word “binignit” which is our term for “stewed tropical fruits and root crops in coconut cream”. It took sometime before you decided whether you would finally settle for benegnet, or binegnit, or benegnit, or benignit, or benignet.

And your eyes grew wide when you learned that, like any other language, we have a standard structure for sentences, syntax, inflection, declension, conjugation, comparison, properties, cases – naa tay grammar! Reactions varied when you heard that Sinugbuwano is not a dialect, it is a language!

The challenge I posed was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Remember when I said that the most taxing would be to be tasked to write a script of a period Bisdak movie, say 1950s? How would people speak at that time? How would they say “haller, wer na u? Her na me, wer na they? Der na they”?

I know you understand so well that when we emphasized the need to study our language, we didn’t mean unlearning a second or a third language. English is medium of international exchanges. That is key to our survival in the global village.

The message we did want to put across is that we need to study Sinugbuwano because with SineBuano, Cebu’s independent film scene, there are opportunities to shine in the field of writing for original soundtrack.

Say for example, if our budding screenwriters Anna Lyn Pepito and Jose Mari Robert Gonzales would want to collaborate on a story about the “linambay”, what would be the appropriate song/music to this most spectacular community folk theater that was so well-integrated into the rural life in Valladolid, Carcar – one of the earliest settlements in old Cebu?

How would the song/music be able to capture or project or even mirror the beauty and soul of other forms of entertainment in the olden days? Like the “balitaw” – stage play performed along neighborhood streets; or the kulililsing hari – the extemporaneous dialogue in the vernacular during wakes and novenas for the dead; and the “duplo” – our version of the Tagalog balagtasan.

Abi daw, unsaon man pagpahaom og saloma ning maong tingusbawan?

We are called to commit to learning the works of Hermenigildo Solon, Rafael Gandiongco, Ben “Iyo Karpo” Zubiri, Tomas Villaflor, Minggoy Lopez and Manuel Velez, among others, who created Cebuano music and sang their songs in zarzuelas and balitaws.

Many may call this move futile and outmoded in the 21st century, but we bank on the young Josenians to write music for SineBuano. To borrow the words of my former mentor in writing, “lying deep in the old Cebuano music and poetry were themes on romantic love, religious devotion, and reverence to the native land. These sensibilities were explicit in Vicente Ranudo’s ‘Hikalimtan’ and Ramon Durano’s ‘Ang Akong Gugma Kanimo’.”

We have given in to much of Western music that has failed to speak of our sentiment as a people. With the upholding again this year of patriotic pride after the death of influential people in our country – one musician, the other a charismatic leader — we can also choose to work on from here to improve our quality as a lot and arrive somewhere in a bigger picture, scored by the music of our very own crop of passionate songwriters.

Adelante!