Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:02am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Imperial Hybridity Session Chair: David Irving | |
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The Two-Way Exchange: Filipino-American Hybridization in Eliseo Pajaro’s Philippine Symphony Eastman School of Music In 1952, Eliseo Pajaro premiered his doctoral dissertation piece, Philippine Symphony, with the conductor Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra. This piece was the culmination of his graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music and combined Filipino folk music with Western orchestration practices and formal structures. After he graduated with a PhD in composition in 1953, he returned to the Philippines and spent the rest of his career as the cofounder of the League of Philippine Composers, Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, and Dean of the University of the Philippines Conservatory (Kasilag 2001). Pajaro advocated for “serious music” in the newly-independent nation, as hybridization of Western and Filipino music contributed to “New Society” by portraying the Philippines as an advanced, forward-thinking nation (Pajaro 1973, Castro 2011). Despite Pajaro’s impact on Filipino arts and culture, his musical legacy is largely forgotten in the United States. Using archival documents from the Eastman Special Collections and newspapers from the United States and the Philippines, I construct a narrative of Pajaro’s early career to circumvent institutional amnesia. Concert programs, manuscripts, and historicized newspapers point towards a two-way exchange between Pajaro and Eastman; although he was there to study composition and orchestration from American professors, he was also there to introduce Americans to Filipino music and culture. I argue that Pajaro actually fulfilled his proclaimed role as a composer in the “New Society” through his doctoral dissertation, written before the height of his career. I then analyze Pajaro’s conception of Western/Filipino cultural hybridity through a close reading of the first movement of Philippine Symphony, demonstrating how he negotiated the constraints of sonata form with orchestration choices that highlight the symphony’s folk songs. Following ideas from music theorist Roger Grant (2022) who exemplified colonial power structures through analysis of missionary music, analysis in this paper serves to empathize with Pajaro and other 20th-century Filipino composers who valued prowess in Western music traditions to attain higher social and/or economic status. This paper sheds light on a forgotten part of U.S.-Filipino music relations and shows how analysis can provide insight into post-colonial identities. | |