Sonic Experiments of Postcolonial Democracy Listening to José Maceda's Udlot-udlot and Ugnayan

I write this article not as an expert on José Montserrat Maceda. It is an analysis of how contemporary exploration of sound and sound performance practices in Southeast Asia offer proposals for new ways to understand epistemology and aesthetics—in which Maceda has paved the way through his avant-garde music projects. In this paper, I examine José Maceda's Udlot-udlot and Ugnayan, and their context in Manila and Southeast Asia. I 'listen' to Maceda's aesthetic sonic experimentations within the postcolonial Philippine nation and the much broader global and transnational context of experimental artistic practices of the second half of the twentieth century. I situate his artistic and musical experimentations within the sponsorship of the Marcos regime and the cultural diplomacies of the 1970s and 1980s Cold War cultural politics. Maceda's work can be seen within the three intersecting threads of: (1) an emerging transnational avant-garde market, (2) the international ambition of the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the cultural diplomacy-savvy First Lady Imelda, and ultimately (3) the Philippines' political dependency on its former US colonizer. How did Maceda's music compositions experiment with postcolonial modernity within such conditions? How did his musical and artistic trajectory intersect with the burgeoning postcolonial aspirations of the late twentieth century in Southeast Asia? What new paradigms arose from the intersection of the ethnomusicological discipline and twentieth-century sonic aesthetics?