FIELDWORK CONTEXT
10-16 October 2018 | DINALUPIHAN
In early October 2016, the Jose Depiro Kabataan Orkestra welcomed me to their orchestra program on the outskirts of Dinalupihan, Philippines. My visit was scheduled to coincide with the final preparations for a highly anticipated concert by the orchestra in Manila, the capital city, as part of the “Concert at the Park” series. The children had been playing as an orchestra for just over two years, and this would be their first performance in Manila.
During the week I spent in Dinalupihan, I led orchestra rehearsals, worked with the string sections and individual students, and interviewed the program founder and staff. I observed that students felt comfortable in the program and enjoyed close relationships with each other and with the program staff; as I rode along in the van that was picking up the children after school, for instance, I heard them singing and laughing loudly in the back.
A clarinet teacher—joined occasionally by a brass teacher—visits from Manila on Sundays to work with the orchestra. However, none of the regular program staff have extensive musical training. Through conversations with students and staff and my observations of rehearsals and practice sessions, it became clear to me how challenging it is to run a music education program without music teachers or trained musicians to provide hands-on guidance. The string students in particular needed help developing their instrumental skills.
SUBJECT BACKGROUND
JOSE DEPIRO KABATAAN ORKESTRA
Kabataan Orkestra means “youth orchestra” in Tagalog and “Jose Depiro” refers to the founder of the Maltese religious order that runs and supports the music program. Previously, program founder Father Joseph Cremona had worked as a missionary priest in Dinalupihan. According to a May 3, 2015 profile in the Times of Malta, Fr. Cremona has a musical background himself and was inspired to start the program in order to give local children a safe place to go after school, help them find direction in life, and develop their talents. Music lessons were virtually unavailable in the Dinalupihan region prior to the founding of this program. With the financial and logistical support of the Missionary Society of St. Paul in Malta, the program collected enough instruments, primarily through donation, to begin offering musical studies to the children. The orchestra program started in January 2014 with approximately 30 children, and currently serves approximately 140 students every year. The orchestra has full string, wind, brass, and percussion sections. Rehearsals are held in the Jose Depiro Formation Center, a complex of about 5000 square feet, which includes a gymnasium, vegetable gardens, an air-conditioned rehearsal room, and storage for all of the instruments.
Dinalupihan is a municipality in Bataan Province with about 106,000 inhabitants. From Manila, it takes between 2.5 and 5 hours to travel there by car, depending on traffic and weather conditions. Most people in Dinalupihan are dependent on agriculture, particularly rice cultivation, for income and employment. However, rice harvesting is seasonal work and many laborers are unemployed during the wet season. Many students in the Jose Depiro Kabataan Orkestra have parents who are seasonal agricultural workers and some of the older students work on the land during the rice harvests.
Students in the Jose Depiro Kabataan Orkestra program range in age from 8 years old to their late 20s. The younger students are in school full-time, while some older students take classes at the local college. One student works as a teacher at a local high school. School classes in rural Bataan Province can have more than 50 students, and children go to school from approximately 7:30 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday. According to the Kabataan Orkestra staff, local schools are understaffed and lack basic materials, including an adequate number of textbooks. Many students do not have access to educational resources, such as computers with Internet, outside of school. According to Fr. Cremona, recreational activities for children and families are largely unavailable in Dinalupihan and previous to the founding of the orchestra program, children would regularly show up to the church mission center after school and on weekends, often spending whole days at the center. The center provided them with lunch and a safe place where they could play basketball, use a computer to do homework, and spend time with their friends. The mission staff recognized that an orchestra could offer these children a productive and fun way to spend their free time.
The delivery of the music program is currently the responsibility of Mr. Felicito Sacdalan, a clarinetist and conductor based in Manila who travels to Dinalupihan every Sunday to conduct the orchestra and work with the wind players. He also has a background in wind instrument dealership and repairs, and can help the children with small repairs on their instruments. Most Sundays, Mr. Sacdalan is accompanied by Mr. Roberto Salazar, a brass teacher from Manila who supports the brass and percussion sections during rehearsals and offers private tuition for brass students. By tapping into his extensive network of musicians and cultural leaders in Manila and other parts of the country, Mr. Sacdalan has organized performance and learning opportunities outside of Bataan Province for the Kabataan Orkestra. For example, on November 13, 2016, the orchestra made its debut at the Luneta Park Auditorium, an open-air performance space in Manila that runs a prestigious concert series.
In addition to Mr. Sacdalan and Mr. Salazar, the staff of the Kabataan Orkestra consists of Fr. Cremona and one of the older students, Rome Jake Fajardo, a violinist and concertmaster of the orchestra. Mr. Fajardo is instrumental in taking care of logistics: he can be found many afternoons driving around the town in the orchestra’s van, picking up children and bringing them to the orchestra site. He also drives students home at night after rehearsals, as many of them do not have access to reliable and safe transportation. Mr. Fajardo leads the orchestra during the week and, in October 2016, he started offering private violin lessons to some of the younger students. Volunteers also drive students home, supervise children during trips, and prepare food. Some of these volunteers even travel all the way from Manila to support the program.
Fr. Cremona has had extensive contact with Sistema-inspired programs in the Philippines and abroad. In 2014, some of the students of the Kabataan Orkestra were invited to attend classes at Sistemang Pilipino, a large Sistema program in Cebu City, Philippines. Additionally, four students traveled to Malta in the summer of 2016, for a month of private lessons and rehearsals with local musicians. According to Fr. Cremona, the music program Ang Misyon, in Manila, had proposed in 2014 or 2015 that some of the Kabataan Orkestra’s advanced players join their program. However, the Kabataan Orkestra staff ultimately decided that this collaboration would not be in the best interests of their program. They feared that children would leave their program upon reaching a certain level of playing, thus disadvantaging younger students who would have benefitted from listening to, and learning from, more advanced players.
Fr. Cremona would like the Kabataan Orkestra to remain independent as a music program rather than develop a formal attachment to the Department of Education. However, the staff of the Kabataan Orkestra has been working hard to build positive relationships with the municipality and the school system, and the Dinalupihan mayor’s office now lends some logistical and financial support to the orchestra for special projects. For example, the mayor’s office pays for Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) music theory exams for the children in Manila each year. The mayor’s office also takes responsibility for safe transportation of the children to concert locations. In 2016, the Kabataan Orkestra began collaborating with the local San Simon Elementary School. Mr. Fajardo, together with some of the more advanced members of the orchestra, now teaches elementary music theory to a number of classes and has started a teacher training course as well, for classroom teachers who have an interest in learning more about music. Unfortunately, I was not able to observe this program in action during my visit.
Since 2015, the Kabataan Orkestra has offered music lessons in Batiawan, a remote mountain village about 70 kilometers, or two hours, north of Dinaluphan. After a Batiawan community leader contacted Fr. Cremona regarding fifteen students in the village who had expressed interest in learning music, the orchestra staff began offering music theory lessons, with the intention of enabling the children to travel occasionally to the Jose Depiro Formation Center to participate in the orchestra.
In 2016, a student from the Kabataan Orkestra was admitted to St. Scholastica College in Manila to continue his viola studies. The program staff would like to see current students become teachers at the Kabataan Orkestra in order to lessen the program’s dependence on outside musicians.