Songs for nation-building

One thing leads to another. It does not come all at once, but little by little, ideas and events that first seemed unrelated eventually come together. That is how I decided to launch the 2013 edition of my book The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos at the Philippine Opera Haus in Bautista Street, Palanan, Makati.

The first happening came through a long-time friend who lives in San Francisco. He is a great lover of music, both classical and jazz. He told me how he would spend long hours listening to music, alone.  It was not just about listening at concerts. It meant hard work developing an ear and then love for it. I was converted. I learned that music was so multi-faceted it is as wide as life itself and often used as expressions of love, anger, frustration, despair and the entire gamut of qualities that come from being human.

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My friend, Belle Cunanan, once invited me to a Philippne Opera Company performance called Bagong Harana sometime ago. For the first time, I heard old familiar Filipino songs like Sarumbanggi with a contemporary ring to it. And yet like almost everyone until then I did not know about the Philippine Opera Company.

The Harana was beautiful and more. Here was a group trying hard to revive love of country through song. Harana was not just music or a concert of songs and dancing. The songs became a mirror to look into ourselves as Filipinos, “their relation to history, faith, nature and…. nationhood.”

In a brief description, the group said “it is more than a selection of well-loved Filipino love songs. It is a love letter to the Filipinos, to our history, our ideals, our lost past and the values that we must take with us as we journey, as a nation, into the future.”

Ang Bagong Harana showcases the best of all the Filipino composers from different music genres: Nicanor Abelardo, Ryan Cayabyab, Willy Cruz, Francisco Santiago, Antonio Molina, Resti Umali, George Canseco, Ernani Cuenco, Levi Celerio, Jose Estrella, Constancio De Guzman and Felipe de Leon, to name a few.

It features Philippine theater’s celebrated singers: Karla Gutierrez, Aizel Prietos, Charley Magalit, Janine Santos, Marian Santiago, Lawrence Jatayna, Jack Salud, Nazer Salcedo, Marvin Gayramon, Al Gatmaitan. It is directed by award-winning director and writer, Floy Quintos.

It has to compete with so many foreign pop acts and imported musicals. But as soon as they went public they realized they were not alone in wanting to revive traditional and contemporary Filipino songs. Neither did the songs have to be sung by established classical singers. A troupe of ten young, relatively unknown, but dedicated classical singers was enough.

“Ang Bagong Harana was envisioned as a love song to our country,” says Karla Gutierrez, who heads the Philippine Opera Company.

“We wanted to show audiences that there is so much wealth that modern Filipinos can mine from our traditional and contemporary music. In this age of globalization, it is all the more crucial for us to know who we are and what we have that we can call Pinoy.

A lot of performers may say that we are the best in the world. But we wanted to go a step further and prove it by using our own traditional and contemporary material. And we wanted to showcase young singers who have committed themselves to classical singing and to our traditional material.”

The show, as conceived by Floy Quintos, begins with an evocation of a lost innocence, as expressed through traditional children’s songs sung by the company. From there, the love song to country moves through various evocations — a kundiman suite, framed against the backdrop of revolution, a tribal suite based on the indigenous respect for the environment, a suite of folk songs framed against the backdrop of a fiesta, a tribute to Sylvia La Torre that reconnects with our bodabil roots. But more than just mining the past, Ang Bagong Harana moves swiftly into the present, using OPM classics like Fredddie Aguilar’s Anak to make pointed social commentary.

“It is a difficult effort to try and do something truly Filipino nowadays. But after the warm response that we got last year, we know that there is an audience that is hungry for this kind of entertainment that reconnects us to our souls. In this age of globalization, it’s the one thing we cannot face the future without.”

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That was how I decided that the 2013 reprint of the Untold Story of Imelda Marcos should be launched at the Philippine Opera Haus in Bautista, Palanan Street on June 20 at 5.30.  I could have launched it at any bookstore but I had a brainstorm. Why not have a book launch in an opera house of young Filipinos who understood the value of song in nation-building?

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And just as I was mulling the idea of a book launch in Philippine Opera Haus, I read about Pablo Neruda’s poems and how these have been made into songs.

According to an entry in Wikipedia, “Pablo was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto.

“In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature and became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He often wrote in green ink as it was his personal symbol for desire and hope with his poetry.

“Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him ‘the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.’

“ Years later, Neruda became a close advisor to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.”

Here is the first stanza from his Song of Despair:

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.


The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.


Deserted like the wharves at dawn.

It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!



Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.


Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.



In you the wars and the flights accumulated.


From you the wings of the song birds rose.



You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time.

In you everything sank!