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.