Ugnayan through history.

On New Year’s Day of 1974, Jose Maceda’s  51-minute composition  was aired on 20 major radio stations in the Philippines. Each station played a separate track—the instrumental piece, the tracks supposedly representing ‘village music sounds’, featuring indigenous Filipino instruments such as bamboo zither, nose flute, yoke and brass. To hear the entire work, at least 20 listeners, each with a transistor radio and each tuned to a different station, needed to congregate in a public space.

Maceda originally titled the work “Atmospheres”, imagining the massive span of airwaves that his music would cover. The idea was to create a sound sculpture as big as the archipelago.

The project was later renamed Ugnayan, which is the Tagalog term for connecting or connection. It could also mean “coming together”, “working together”, or – as the First Lady proposed—a project of unity. This way the title fitted better into the Marcos government’s agenda to reimagine the Filipino national identity.

The entire project was made possible by the absolute control of the Cultural Center of the Philippines under the leadership of former First Lady Imelda Marcos. A series of circulars were released prior to the airing to prepare the Filipino people for this “unity project of the First Lady”.

In 2010, the work restaged as part of celebrating contemporary composers, led by UP Center for Ethnomusicology and the Department of Music Theory and Composition of the UP College of Music. This time, the UP College of Engineering provided assistance in setting up an array of 20 car FM transmitters with a radio frequency booster or RF booster, and shared powered supply to simulate 20 radio stations. The frequencies selected were the frequencies in between major radio stations, which local portable radios in the performance venue would be able to pick up without much trouble. Using personal and portable radio devices as simulation to the original Ugnayan performance, brings in the community and shared experience that Maceda originally envisioned, a shared spatial and sensorial sonic sculpture, but on a smaller scale.