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Home > Journals > PAHA > Vol. 5 (2015) > Number 2

 

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

Abstract

Excerpt: Historical musicology in the Philippines has grown in the past decade with the emergence of new music scholars. Maria Alexandra Iñigo Chua is one of them. Her pioneering study on the cantorales or choir books of the major churches in Bohol, particularly Baclayon and Loay, has uncovered a previously untapped facet of colonial music that is deeply rooted in the religious practices of the Catholic Church. Kirial de Baclayon año 1826: Hispanic Sacred Music in 19th Century Bohol, Philippines is a valuable study of masses, of which a few were putatively locally composed, including the Missa Baclayana. Most of the masses presumably originated from Spain and were copied by hand by an anonymous escriviente de solfa or church scribe of Baclayon Church in the nineteenth century. These masses and a few other sacred pieces were compiled in a book, the Kirial de Baclayon, which is now preserved at the Ecclesiastical Museum of the Baclayon Church. The size of the book and the expensive materials (including carabao hide) used in its making suggest the significant place that singing occupied in church activities in Bohol during the Spanish colonial era. Of interest is the Kirial’s use of square and diamond neumes on a five-line staff for notation, a method quite different from the ones adopted by the Benedictine Abbey monks of Solesmes in France in the nineteenth century and published in the Liber Usualis. The neume groupings there were different, and they were written on four-line staves.

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