Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook on Philippine Music History 1880-1941

Saysay Himig is an anthology of fifty short essays that narrate the musical stories of the Filipinos from the time when the intellectual culture began to thrive and articulate the emerging sense of nationhood in the 1880's to the start of the Japanese occupation in 1941. This period covering half a century is crucial to the history of the nation because many of the institutions which eventually made up the core of political, economic, and sociocultural networks in the Third Philippine Republic -- inaugurated in 1945-- were established. This book is significant because it contributes to the knowledge and understanding of the role of music in the shaping of a modern identity and society in the crucial nascent years of Filipino nationhood. The essays trace the development of transcultural Philippine music and musical practices, and they provide an alternative assessments of our nation's history, focusing on the production and circulation of cultural nationalist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.