José Maceda’s Ugnayan, Music for 20 Radio Stations
José Maceda’s Ugnayan, Music for 20 Radio Stations (1974/2026)
music compostion, radio transmission with 20 radios and 20 transmitters, archival photo and broadsheet, text
Whitney Biennial
Mar 8–Aug 23, 2026
Co-organized by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez.
Photo above by Darian DiCanno.
Artist and curator Aki Onda presents Ugnayan (1974), music for twenty radios composed by José Maceda. Maceda wrote a fifty-one-page score, created separate reel-to-reel recordings of singers and musicians playing gongs and Filipino bamboo instruments, and worked with radio stations across Manila to play the tracks simultaneously. Blanketing the city in sound waves, Maceda’s composition returned music from the concert hall to everyday life.
Past Exhibitions
2024. Western Front, Vancouver, Canada
2019, Fridman Gallery, New York, USA
Audiences at one of Ugnayan Centers.
Photo published by Times Journal on January 4,1974.
Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology.
A Musical l Atmosphere That Covered the Megalopolis
Text by Aki Onda
The Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer José Maceda had a gigantic, balloon-like imagination, and the scale of his art was marvelous and unprecedented. His compositions include music composed for one hundred cassettes, twenty radio stations, and hundreds or thousands of performers as an open-air ritual. He emerged from the context of twentieth-century avant-garde music, and brushed shoulders with the greats: he visited Edgard Varèse at his SoHo apartment, learned musique concrète with Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and befriended the French-Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. At the same time, Maceda became passionately drawn to the Filipino indigenous music, so-called village music, that has been performed in people’s lives as a ceremony or ritual for thousands of years. As an ethnomusicologist, Maceda rigorously documented Southeast and East Asian musical practices and folkways. After conducting fieldwork for a decade, he composed his first piece Ugma-ugma in 1963, when he was forty-six years old. For the remainder of his life, Maceda worked steadily and produced twenty-three compositions before passing away in 2004.
Ugnayan (1974) is likely the most ambitious, provocative, and controversial work in Maceda’s repertoire. It’s a fifty-one-minute composition for twenty radio stations, consisting of twenty recorded tracks. When the work premiered at 6 p.m. on New Year’s Day 1974, Maceda broadcast the recordings through all thirty-seven radio stations in the metropolitan area of Manila, the Philippines for his sound diffusion, with some tracks playing simultaneously from multiple stations. It was a participatory event that encouraged anyone with a transistor radio to gather at one of the 142 “Ugnayan Centers” established across the city. At the time, Manila’s population was 4.7 million, and in one of the biggest Centers alone, 35,000 people congregated with radios to catch one of the frequencies. Maceda’s idea allowed for the original twenty tracks to be multiplied by thousands, resulting in a dense mass of sound to create a musical atmosphere that covered the entire city.
Considering Martial Law was declared two years prior in the Philippines, you may wonder, how was this extravaganza of unprecedented scale, with regards to large numbers of people congregating in public space, even possible? Well, it was supported by the notorious authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos as an extraordinary sociopolitical music event. In addition to holding this one-hour segment on all radio stations in the city, Ugnayan was heavily promoted by the national media. The nine-month production drew strong patronage by First Lady Imelda Marcos, who was also the chairperson of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). The regime wanted to employ Maceda’s expertise in Filipino indigenous music and the use of native instruments, as well as his practice of collective music making, as a symbol of national unity. Regarding the music production, Maceda began preparing a fifty-one-page score with his team before recording took place at Radio Veritas, Quezon City. He used various Filipino indigenous instruments; Chinese cymbals and gongs; and vocals. For each of the twenty tracks, Madeca conducted five musicians through the meticulously notated score. Nonetheless, these seemingly traditional elements were highly augmented and abstracted with Maceda’s unconventional approach in adopting both Filipino musicality and European avant-garde techniques. Artistically, methodologically, and conceptually cutting-edge, and keen on the fusion of ancient and modern, Ugnayan is a culmination of Maceda’s wide array of experimentation such as spatialization, mass structure, attention to timbre, and use of modern technology for sound diffusion.
However, the public's response to Ugnayan was almost apathetic. The composition was overly idealistic and alien for a listenership that did not have prior knowledge of the musical avant-garde. Additionally, due to centuries of Spanish colonization, general knowledge of Filipino indigenous music was diminished. The Filipino journalist and music critic Rosalinda Orosa described the event as: “Mrs. Marcos was launching, full-scale, a project that was too eclectic, too esoteric in approach and, therefore, not likely to capture common tao’s [peoples’] imagination. But without taking the risk, she would have allowed Ugnayan to remain nothing more than 20 sheets of paper stashed away in a drawer, doubtless to mold in obscurity.” Rosalinda Orosa, “A World Happening in Music – Ugnayan.” Philippines Quarterly, March, 1974. The risk wasn’t limited to the work itself as the broadcast could have been harmful for the Marcos regime—a reminder of The People Power Revolution in 1986, in which the protesters ousted President Marcos ending with the ruler, his family, and their supporters fleeing to exile to Hawaii.
The Marcoses were big supporters of the arts. Imelda, who was especially fond of lavish cultural projects, built a network of national art centers, and even had a good understanding of experimental arts. The regime fueled a political climate that made it difficult to express one’s political opinions openly, yet they simultaneously backed such progressive artists and composers. So, the question is: how does one navigate the contradictions of an authoritarian regime being responsible for a substantial part of Filipino cultural production?
It’s undeniable that part of Maceda’s ideas, such as adopting indigenous culture and the collective making of his music, were aligned with the regime’s agendas. Even so, Maceda wasn’t interested in any ethnic nationalism as he explored music traditions that transcended political borders. He advocated for “Asian musics” throughout his career, which contradicted the propaganda of the regime. It’s ironic that the political collusion with the regime stained Maceda’s masterpiece Ugnayan and added extra layers of confusion, but the work could only be achieved with their support. Even today, these are tricky subjects among Maceda’s scholars, and there won’t be an easy answer. It has been a half-century since the grandiose Ugnayan project was launched, but the extra-musical rationale and sociopolitical agendas of these artistic experimentations haven't been fully evaluated since Maceda’s work had been forgotten for some decades. The music itself was probably still too far ahead of its time, and the future might tell us how it would sound.
Broadsheet promoting Ugnayan, 1973. Published for the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) by the Ugnayan Secretariat. Courtesy of Asian Cultural Council and the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Aki Onda interview by Bill Dietz
For the Whitney Biennial 2026 catalogue by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer
![]()
José Maceda recording with Uher tape recorder in Palawan (1972). Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology.
BILL DIETZ (BD): It’s not often that I talk with another artist who’s as involved with someone else’s work as I am with Maryanne Amacher’s; in your case, José Maceda. I’m curious about the connections and maybe even conflicts between your work on Maceda and your own work.
AKI ONDA (AO): I don’t think there’s much conflict since Maceda and I share a lot of interests: using electronic devices for sound diffusion, strong attachment to tape recorders, blending cultural beliefs and spirituality, mixing ancient and modern, and so on. My biggest draw to Maceda’s work was probably his cosmopolitan perspective. He studied Western classical music in Manila and Paris, then while studying in the US, he discovered the Indigenous music of the Philippines, which later extended to the whole of Southeast and East Asia. He dove into ethnomusicology for a decade, carrying tape recorders into the field to document musical practices and folkways. Then he started his career as a composer at forty-six, merging his knowledge of Asian musicality with Western avant-garde techniques. As for me, I was born in Japan, but my father’s side immigrated from South Korea. I grew up in Asia, but I’ve built my career mainly in the West, including spending two decades in New York. I definitely relate to something Maceda said towards the end of his life: “I’m a Filipino composer, but I don’t confine myself to national borders. I consider my composition to be more universal. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as specifically Filipino. Whatever I need, I can borrow from anywhere.” One thing I do want to make clear here, though, is that I’m presenting Maceda’s work as a curator and researcher, apart from my work as an artist.
BD: I’ve been thinking about this notion of the cosmopolitan. Maceda’s first composition is Ugma-ugma from 1963, which comes on the heels of the decade he spent working in ethnomusicology—and 1963 is, of course, a major moment in various international decolonial struggles. I’m curious to what degree his thinking and his access to international spaces is also influenced by Spanish, American, and Japanese colonial histories in the Philippines, along with liberation discourses that were then current and widespread.
AO: For Ugma-ugma, he used different instruments from Japan, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines, combining the musical traditions of those Asian countries. It was a bold decolonial statement against Western cultural dominance. But at the same time, he incorporated Western avant-garde techniques like Musique concrète-ish abstraction and mass structures to organize sound, resulting in highly unconventional notations. So, Maceda was a unique type of decolonialist, blending both traditions in his work.
BD: There’s a line in one of his articles that you quote: “Different combinations of drone and melody represent an expression of a group of people, perhaps a reflection of a social organization, a representation of values, and a view of time.” This almost sounds inflected by someone like Adorno!
AO: Interesting. I’m not sure if Maceda was familiar with Adorno, but it wouldn’t be surprising, considering his music often touched on social philosophy—specifically, how music functions in Asian societies. Maceda became deeply fascinated with Filipino Indigenous music—so-called village music—that had been performed as part of ceremonies and rituals for thousands of years. For him, music wasn’t just music, it was everything happening around the event: the chatter of people, birds singing, the sounds of tropical rain and wind—these were all part of the musical landscape.
His concept of “drone and melody,” which he created from his fieldwork as an ethnomusicologist, offers a really interesting way to understand the structure of traditional Asian music. Western musical concepts like pitch, rhythm, and harmony don’t quite apply to his approach. In Southeast Asian traditions, there’s often a “drone”—a sustained note—or an “ostinato,” which is a repeating tone or set of tones. These create a kind of steady base. What’s called melody in this context isn’t the same as in Western music—it’s also not about pitch in the usual sense. Instead, it refers to the layering of tones that add color and variation to the drone. For Maceda, this concept wasn’t just about music, it was philosophical, too. Different combinations of drone and melody reflected different communities and maybe even their social structures.
![]()
“Ugnayan—here’s how to listen, appreciate its beauty in full.” Published by Times Journal on December 29 (1973). Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology
“Ugnayan—here’s how to listen, appreciate its beauty in full.” Published by Times Journal on December 29 (1973). Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology