Nature's Presences: Traditional Music of Indigenous Peoples in Southern Mindanao, Philippines (2016)

Nature's Presences deals with traditional indigenous music among the Manobo Dulangan, T'boli, Obo, and the Tagakaolo in Southern Mindanao. Shot in the picturesque Lake Sebu, the heartland of the indigenous peoples from this region, the documentary shows that traditional music remains practised despite the rapidly accelerating and deep Visayanization of places where the T'boli have been the first to settle in prehistory. Songs learnt from the ancestors are still acquired through imitation and these have been put to a number of pragmatic uses, from managing negative emotions (thus aesthetically transforming raw sentiments like anger to the level of art) to the tasks of putting a baby to sleep and of indulging one's self in leisurely music-making after work. Some songs are the basis of instrumental music like that rendered on bamboo polychordal zither togo, while others, especially those played in whistle flute sloli, disclose human attachments to nature and with Others. Aside from songs, these people have rhythms that propel dancers who move as a mimesis of myths from the distant past, notably that of T'boli madal tahu which is about the creation of the world and of the symbolic passage of death to life or fertility among the Tagakaolo. These "rhythms" are also simulated via delicate and undulating melodic contours on what is now an endangered music instrument of the Philippines, the lip-valley flute. Quintessentially archaic, this music depicts the sounds of small creatures in the natural environment- the bird, the snail, the squirrel, and the cicadas of this relatively wooded area. Nature's Presences is the first volume of the series "Resilient Music at the Margins" funded by the National Research Council of the Philippines, in cooperation with the University of the Philippines College of Music, in 2016-2017.