Yamomo, MeLê, Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific

Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 Sounding Modernities by meLê yamomo

Cham, Switzerland: Macmillan, Transnational Theatre Histories, 2018, 267 pp, ISBN 978-3-319-69176-3 (e-Book); ISBN 978-3-319-69175-6 (hardcover)

How did Manila sound during the nineteenth century? This is the cornerstone question in meLê yamomo’s Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 Sounding Modernities (2018). The question seems simple, but as yamomo demonstrates in the course of this rigorous study, it is one that poses significant methodological and theoretical challenges. Asking it, as yamomo shows, means tracing translocal histories of sound, of migration, of colonialism, and of nation-making. Furthermore, it also means doing so by finding one’s way underneath the several historical layers that pre-exist and have been masked by the nation-state. This cannot be done by retaining a presupposed centre-periphery framework. If, as yamomo argues, ‘Manila […] was the world’s first global city’¹, pursuing this seemingly simple question means locating Manila not as a receiver but as an epicentre of global circulations of performance. How did Manila sound during the nineteenth century? In yamomo’s ear, it sounded like global modernity.

Committed to that intent, the book makes several key contributions. The first one, already mentioned above, is the proposition that more than being on the receiving end of modernity, Manila—and by extension Southeast Asia—was among its epicentres. Here, yamomo’s initial thrust is to interact with classical studies of globalisation and modernity using Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (2005 [1996]) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2003 [1983]), among others, and to treat modernity not as ‘the aesthetic construction of artistic modernity rather, [as] the production and consumption of […] music within the social practice of modernity’.² From this key distinction, yamomo then elaborates on what is perhaps the main contribution of the book: a framework based on what he defines as an “Anthropology of Sound”—a term he coins by adapting Hans Belting’s theory of the “Anthropology of Image”.³ Countering—or rather supplementing—visuality and the image as the central epistemes of modernity, yamomo’s argument focuses on the possibilities of an acoustic epistemology, or “acoustemology”:

Drawing from Belting’s ocular epistemology, I propose a reapplication of the concept to my investigation of acoustemic processes. […] In reframing Belting’s theory into sound studies, a question that would naturally come up is, whether there is an equivalent of the image in sound studies. If so what is it? What do we call this? My proposal is to call this the ‘sonus’ (from the Latin word for sound). […] The sonus (plural soni), in the similar sense as Belting’s notion of ‘image’ does not have a tangible or perceivable (physically hearable) form. As a concept, the sonus is inextricable from its mediatized sounding (i.e. music). In this configuration, the human body is also a crucial component where the soni reside and are activated through performance and listening.⁴

This conceptual and methodological shift allows yamomo to ascertain the overall theme of his argument: a history of the nineteenth century Manila through its soni. The result is a fascinating melody of modernity’s mediascapes as these were played by generations of Filipino musicians who performed in Manila and the neighbouring countries, but also in Europe and the US. The acknowledgment of Manila’s musicians as one of the first, if not the initial, talent imports of The Philippines into the broader world is therefore crucial. The book narrates passages from three critical points in the becoming-modern of The Philippines. Across the chapters, what becomes clear is that these musicians were as central to the processes through which Manila and The Philippines became what they are today, as they were to the articulation of a global modernity and its soni. From archaic globalisation’s soni of Catholic masses and bell tolling, to turn-of-the-century nationalisms’ soni of operas and sarswelas, to William Howard Taft’s election as the 27th president of the US in the sounds of the Philippine Constabulary Band playing at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, yamomo’s research demonstrates how central Manila is in the histories of globalization, but also how vital are music and sound in those histories.

In this sense, the book is a necessary contribution to several fields that include theatre and performance history, musicology, globalization studies, Southeast Asian studies, and media studies, among others. The author is agile in reminding the reader of the key points and contributions. These are brought back every so often throughout the several chapters, thereby making a cover-to-cover read as enriching as reading a single chapter. At the same time, the task that the book sets out to fulfil is not an easy one, and one can perceive that the author struggles to make the broader connections of his argument across the book. This is especially the case whenever the argument reaches points about embodiment. The end-points of the argument’s larger implications are truly exciting, but they lack a bolder anchor in, for example, some of the publications on the embodiment that have appeared in the last few of years—the work by Ben Spatz in What a Body Can do? Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015) on embodied research comes to mind as a first instance, but there are more. Having said that, as a Mexican living in Singapore, I resonated with several passages of the book. I hummed to the tune of its politics and sang its leitmotifs. Thus perhaps, even though the connections between embodiment and the soni of modernity are not as crystalized as the rest of the book, in these tiny resonances the intent of yamomo’s argument hits home for those who, like me (and maybe yamomo as well), are invested in the endeavour of de-centring and re-writing the colonial histories of how people, including scholars, from the “periphery” should sound, look, and be.