Conference Agenda

In Edmond Audran’s comic opera La mascotte (1881), the young farm girl Bettina has the magical power of bringing good fortune to everyone around her as long as she remains a virgin. As a “mascot,” a charm or angel of good luck, her youth and innocence are safeguarded by the men who take turns as her custodians, who at the end are nevertheless outwitted by Bettina and her suitor, the shepherd Pippo. True to comedy, the opera concludes with the wedding of the young lovers and with the gleeful reminder that even though Bettina is no longer a mascot, her charm will surely be passed on to her first-born child. La mascotte’s fictional narrative offers a rich lens to examine the controversial yet pervasive spectacle and business of juvenile performance in the early twentieth century. As a work originally conceived for adult performers and audiences, it was part of a globally circulating repertoire of lyrical theater in which children were its main interpreters. This paper briefly traces the transnational history of La mascotte alongside the phenomenon of children’s operatic companies in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, I closely examine the performance tours of the Australian children’s opera company Pollard’s Lilliputians in the Philippines and the subsequent formation of Filipino children’s groups that performed Spanish zarzuela repertoire.

Situated within the larger context of British and American empires in the Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century, the converging histories of these Lilliputian companies illustrate how children were caught in between the business of theater and the shifting and racialized ideas about acceptable kinds of childhood experiences. The Pollard Company’s many appearances in Manila point to colonial spaces not only as lucrative markets for children’s performance, but also as contested spaces that fueled white anxieties about the negative influence of Asian cultures on young Australians. In the case of the Filipino groups, children in performance stages worked towards showcasing Filipino musicality and served as a form of cultural uplift for the native population at a time when the infantilization of Filipinos continued to shape American colonization of the Philippines.

Popular music blossomed in the colonial Philippines through its association with cabarets – sites where American culture penetrated the Filipino consciousness (Fernandez, 2000). Francisco Santiago (1889-1947), the first Filipino to receive a doctorate in music, expressed his fear of the popular as it generates a “dangerous tendency for imitation” (1931). Nevertheless, the growing local market for popular music encouraged Filipino composers to follow the hegemony (Schenker, 2016).

Filipino anthropologist Jose Buenconsejo (2018) credits Nicanor Abelardo (1893-1934) with transforming the kundiman, a popular song in the Spanish-ruled Philippines, into a sophisticated patriotic art song. After Abelardo's untimely death, his students obscured his fondness for the popular (Manuel, 1955) to foreground the image that his true art lies within the kundiman. Unbeknownst to Filipinos today, poverty forced Abelardo to take random jobs in Manila, then already a modern site of cultural diffusion and borrowing (Keppy, 2019). Abelardo learned different popular genres and absorbed the latest “dance craze” from the United States while playing the piano for silent films. Due to the “cosmopolitan” nature of his grounding, he traversed between teaching composition at the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music and conducting the orchestras of renowned cabarets in Manila, much to the great dismay of his academic colleagues (Epistola, 1996).

Using the concepts of heteroglossia and acculturation (Burke, 2009), this paper makes sense of Nicanor Abelardo’s “Naku…Kenkoy,” a song modeled after the American foxtrot with text by Romualdo Ramos. In doing so, I rescue the song from the stereotype of Filipino mimicry (Talusan, 2021). Situating Abelardo’s use of an American form within the broader Filipino soundscape, I then contrast his version of the foxtrot with those of his contemporaries to demonstrate how Abelardo and Ramos produced veiled references to blackface minstrelsy as a subversive commentary to the elite. The implications of this are particularly felt in cabarets where bodies of the elite are brought together in dance. I attempt to shed a light on how blackface minstrelsy, with its negative overtones suppressed, traveled across the Pacific and how Abelardo negotiated with an imperialist culture while still maintaining maximum agency over his work.

Time and space conceptions play and perplex through sound and music on Pinoy Big Brother (PBB), the Philippine edition of the global reality-television format. Hinged on a combined framework of sociological character study and surveillance as entertainment, the Philippine version has notably served as the local music industry’s foremost starmaking platform since the show’s premiere broadcast in 2005. While international Big Brother editions generally feature physical, strategy, and endurance-based challenges to determine which housemates acquire voting power and material rewards within the game, PBB favors performance tasks that showcase the musical talent of contestants, engaging viewers through song and dance. The most entertaining have often emerged triumphant.

Interrogating PBB’s convergences of hyperbolized aesthetics, sound design, storytelling, and musical staging, this paper listens to the soundscapes of excerpt segments and memorable musical moments from the program, building on the concept of phoney sonic space, while also developing a multimedia framework to grasp the show’s interplay of character hierarchy, plot manipulation, and musical innovation. The program blurs ideas of time and space by fashioning audio layers that entangle dichotomies of inside-outside, private-public, star-spectator, and real-reel conceptions. Shut off from the outside world with no access to phones or computers, the game’s concept remains reliant on technologies of recording and transmission through component variables such as audio speakers positioned around the house that broadcast music, sound signals, and Big Brother’s booming commands, as well as a television monitor in the living room, which displays audio-visual instructions for daily tasks.

Having successfully launched the careers of many artists in the mainstream entertainment industry, the program’s starmaking system (adopted by copycat reality-musical television shows) has standardized a national star infrastructure through the convergence of self-conscious authenticity, artifice, musical overstatement, and multimedia machinery. Regarded as collective cultural text, the show’s sixteen seasons, performances, and housemates-turned-stars are a manifestation of the production and spectatorial inclinations of a contemporary national entertainment industry. The intricacies of the program’s complex contexts and soundscapes serve as recordings of the evolving intrusions of media and how we respond to them.