Customer Reviews

José Maceda: Gongs and Bamboos

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José Maceda (Manila, 1917) is one of the fundamental personalities of the second half of the 20th century. His research work has established a very serious basis for his innovative music in Philippines, and a model of ethics and aesthetics for all Asian art music composers - and, why not, for all Third World composers. Maceda knows very well the Western game, and can create different rules for his proposals, with different syntactic logics and even a different behaviour in the roles of performers and listeners. His music is really fascinating. A second and a third CD should be available soon.

I believe I might possibly enjoy this CD more if I could actually distinguish the music better. This CD and another by Dr. José Maceda I bought at the same time both suffer from poor recording quality. I realize the recordings were purporsely made during performances at a particular venue, but perhaps a better micing technique could have been used. There's far too much ambience in the recordings, which doesn't work very well with bamboo instruments. It sounds as though the mics were at considerable distance from the performers, as if for a bootleg recording; in fact, I've heard bootlegs that presented a far better representation of the music than these recordings do.