Tinkle and thunder
This very day, somewhere in Eastern Visayas, the tinkle of gongs and the thunder of drums will be waking up the countryside, mesmerizing children and adults alike and causing them to feel, at least for a precious few moments, a rhythm unlike their daily routine. That will be the sound — and the gift — of a traveling band of percussionists called Kontra-Gapi, led by its indefatigable founder, the professor and performer Pedro “Edru” Abraham.
Kontra-Gapi stands for Kontemporaryong Gamelang Filipino, the gamelan being “the quintessential orchestra of Southeast Asia,” according to Edru. But of course, taken as a phrase, kontra gapi also means “counter-domination,” a likely reference to the overwhelming dominance, or the hegemony if you will, of Western art forms in our culture. Edru founded Kontra-Gapi in 1989, after he was asked to score a Strindberg play by Dulaang UP, with the requirement that the score be distinctly Filipino and Asian. Little did Edru realize that the ad hoc percussion band he formed for the play would become a permanent fixture on the Diliman campus and far beyond. In 1993, Kontra-Gapi was named the College of Arts and Letters’ resident ethnic music and dance ensemble, and it would soon reap local and international recognition for its unique synthesis of sound and motion.
“In Kontra Gapi, music is dance heard even as dance is music seen,” says Edru. “A performance is an occasion where the artists, in turn, sing, dance, mime and play as many as 10 instruments each. This total-theater approach embraces the audience not in the usual way as a conventional crowd but as an essential participant in the creative process, transforming the program into a unity — a tribe performing a ritual.”
The ensemble has performed all over the world, and with various other artists such as the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra, the American jazz group Bela Fleck and the Fleck Tones, Powerplay, APO, and Louie Ocampo, among many others. It has released two albums o fits music: “World Beat/Morld Music-Filipino” and “Gong at Ritmo, Lunggating Filipino.” The Eastern Visayas tour will bring free performances and lectures to 15 towns and cities in Samar, Leyte, and Biliran.
Given its student membership, Kontra Gapi keeps renewing itself, and membership in it has become a rite of passage for generations now of UP students. These members learn more than music; they learn what it means to be Filipino. As Anna Isabel Navarro, a BS Chemistry major, says: “I joined Kontra-Gapi merely thinking of becoming a member of a student performing group in the university. But in my several years of affiliation with the group, I’ve realized that we members are instruments of promulgating Philippine culture. And this time with the upcoming Visayas tour, it is a great honor for Kontra-Gapi to give back to our kababayans the traditions from which it has drawn its inspirations. This service is far greater than performing for international audiences. I hope that on this tour, the group will further enrich the art that it presents through cultural exchanges with the people of Eastern Visayas.”
Sometime next month, Edru himself will be marking another passage — his retirement from UP after many decades of distinguished service — and so the Eastern Visayas tour will be, in a sense, a fitting grand finale. Knowing Edru Abraham, however, I’m sure we haven’t seen or heard the last of him. In any case, here’s a throaty “Bravo!” for this merry band of distinctly Filipino and Asian music-makers.
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The recent passing of my wife Beng’s dad and that of so many other friends and acquaintances led me to contemplate the inevitable a bit more than I would have cared to do, and perhaps even more morbidly than I expected.
“Death is all around us” was what I was thinking, and it wasn’t necessarily in a mournful context. Last year, I wrote something in this corner about how, not too long ago, there was no “CSI,” and the most gruesome thing you saw on TV was the 6 o’clock news. Today, thanks not only to crime shows but crime channels, we can have “epithelials” and “blood spatter” with our breakfast, “perp” and “decedent” with lunch, and “blunt force trauma” and “gun shot residue” with dinner. People just don’t die on our TV screens; they get ripped apart, they go bad, and even when they go six feet under, sooner or later, they’ll get exhumed.
In other words, death is no longer taboo; it’s become part of the living culture, of one’s daily consciousness, and, yes, of the Internet.
I was reminded of this last week when my sister in Virginia e-mailed me to say that while she was sorry that she couldn’t come for my father-in-law’s wake, she was able to “visit” the wake online, through the funeral parlor’s “e-burol” facility. I’d heard about it — it was one of this particular parlor’s come-ons — and had noted the globular electric eye on the ceiling, just like the ones they have in casinos to survey the table action. This time, however, the eye was watching and catching the, uhm, inaction. “All I saw was the body,” my sister said from her time zone; in ours, everyone had left.
That was because — going against another Pinoy tradition, the all-nighter —our family had decided to lock things up at 11 pm and get a good night’s rest between one stressful day and the next. Papa was a theosophist who believed in reincarnation, and a very practical man, and it’s what he would have told Mama, Beng, and the rest of us: “Go get some sleep!”
Beng was thankful for technology in another way: where we used to have to buy newspaper space to announce the sad news, now there was SMS and Facebook to do the job, with far greater impact, because all the messages went to a targeted audience. Beyond the announcement itself, Facebook proved to be a good way of memorializing the departed, not just with photographs and memories but with videoclips. And just as with weddings and birthdays, no celebration today is complete without an AVP — in this case, professionally produced by no less than the deceased’s film-school summa cum laude, his granddaughter Eia.
So just as death has crept into technology, so has technology crept into the crypt. What I forgot to ask my sister about her e-burol experience was whether she had the option of sending her abuloy by PayPal.
And did I mention that the funeral parlor in question stands right behind our house, literally a wall away? Ironically, while the place was being built, and fearful of both mundane and otherworldly things, Beng and the neighbors strenuously campaigned against its opening, so close to campus. Good luck, I told them, and offered them a name for their movement — the “Opposition to Decomposition.” The funeral home promised to perform cremations and such processes elsewhere, in its main offices across town, so we had to endure a long, languorous, dolorous crawl through the traffic to get there when Papa’s turn came.
At least having an IT-savvy funeral home in my backyard brings another side benefit. It has Wi-Fi that goes well over the wall, the password for which (would you believe “deathxxxx”?) I got as a member of the grieving family. Whenever my own Wi-Fi goes down, that’ll be my lifeline.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
