Marcelo Adonay, his Pequeña Misa Solemne and the Continuing Saga of the Nation:
A Reflection on the Personal and the Political

June 14, 2020

“Hoy es hoy…Ayer fue ayer. Es hoy.”
(Today is today…Yesterday was yesterday. It is today.)
Marcelo Adonay[1]

It was in the middle of January, 2020, that I received news that the money for our recording of Marcelo Adonay’s “Pequeña Misa Solemne” had finally become available. My university had approved the project six months earlier and we had gone ahead and recorded six of the smaller works for solo piano and violin and piano in a small local studio in September of 2019 fueled by my personal bank account. But the major work, featuring a 15-piece orchestra and a 16-piece choir had remained on the boards, awaiting the infusion of state-sponsored funds for creative works. We were setting up the project - printing out scores, recruiting the choir and orchestra, setting up rehearsal dates and booking recording venues – when the lockdown was announced and all university activities ground to a halt. With a philosophical sigh, I stored the scores and parts in a black folder once again, reflecting that for the nth time, this notoriously quiet and elusive genius whose career I had worked to reconstruct two decades ago would have to return once again to the shadows.

The recording was long overdue. I remember sitting in the pews of San Agustin Church and looking up at the choir loft on the evening of that fateful concert in March of 1999 as the first strains of the “Gloria” were intoned by the bass soloist. I recall the rush that followed, with the “mighty wind” of the orchestral build-up to the explosive entrance of the choir. Transfixed in my seat, my spirit leaping with each mighty roar from the choir, my joy soaring with each melodious tenor solo, I mentally asked the Maestro – where have you been all this time, why are you not part of my memory as a Filipino Christian, what compelled you to conjure up this glorious sound, what does it all mean? That night, I decided to commence my search for him in earnest.

After two years of personally tracking him down to his hometown, the lakeshore town of Pakil, Laguna, in 2001, I assembled a team of musicologists to work more intensively on the project. For 8 years, we struggled to find out what we could about this extremely reticent figure. The first fruits of our work, a critical edition of his music [2] had been launched in 2009. We had searched old musician’s aparadors and bauls, rescued music collections that had survived floods and fires and which had been scheduled for the garbage heap to build up a repertoire fit for publication. We had discovered family skeletons and dodged community intrigues to collect data and scour disorganized archives covered with dust to piece together a picture of the context in which the music was written. Sitting at our computers, we struggled with the intricacies of scorewriters, the swiftly developing music notation software of the decade. Hobbled in 2004 by the illness of my husband, Rollie, I had nevertheless persevered, working at my computer at his hospital bedside through his increasing confinements. At times, I wondered if we would have enough material to write anything, so elusive had Maestro Adonay been. The final research haul had proven somewhat meagre but there was enough to produce a handful of essays, 11 small works and thankfully, two versions of the aforementioned “Pequeña Misa”, a major work.

Rollie passed away in April of 2009, living long enough to see the first published volumes arrive at our house. A month later, I was appointed Dean of my home college, one of the “big three” on campus. The administrative duties of running such a large unit would occupy my energies for the next six years. I had to set aside my plans for the recording and a second volume of material that had fallen into our laps as the first volume went into publication.  Today 2020, now retired and recovered from an illness that had required my own extended period of hospitalization and convalescence, I am ready. But it now seems, the times are not. 

The “Pequeña Misa Solemne sobre Motivos de la Missa Regia del Canto Gregoriano,” is truly the master work of a mature composer. Written in the five-part form of the Mass Ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei), it is tied together by motives derived from a plainsong mass by Henry Du Mont (b. Villers-L’Eveque, nr. Litege, 1610; d. Paris, May 8, 1684), a composer for the French Royal Chapel in the baroque period.[3] Adonay takes a melodic fragment from one of the Cinq messes en plain-chant (1669) and makes it an incipit to four of the five movements of his mass. Adonay’s mass however, does not exhibit:

the plainsong-like quality in…(its)… melodies,…none of the gently marked rhythmic regularity…. Instead there is Romantic flamboyance: lush strings, harmonic and rhythmic inventiveness, emotional pathos, deep religious fervor, that are generally characteristic of his other church works.  A Romantic he was indeed in his mastery of the style idiom, but one truly cognizant of the persistence and merit of tradition.[4] 

Pondering these words written by a younger colleague, it came to me that my persistent and dogged attempts to bring the maestro’s work to public attention were indeed, the result of my personal exposure to the power of his work, the “deep religious fervor” embodied in the music, and its impact on my soul as a Filipino Christian. As I write this, I am also supremely aware that the blockages towards the completion of this project may be traced precisely to the character of the project of, as Pat puts it, “becoming Filipino.”[5]

For the times Adonay lived through and especially the period of national formation immediately preceding his composition of the Misa, were particularly dark and conflict ridden. In 1904, the Pequeña Misa emerged from the wreckage of the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the Philippine-American War for independence that occupied two tumultuous decades where the nation was both conceived and fought for, betrayed and thwarted. Living in Malate, then a suburb of Manila; and working in the San Agustin Church in Intramuros, the city center, Marcelo Adonay was both participant and witness to the unfolding of this complex historical struggle. In 1887, we begin to detect a subtle counterpoint of the composer’s personal maturity and development  amidst increasing social unrest and disorder. There is a sense of the his growing power as a musician, as maestro de capilla of the then formidable music making arm of the Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus of the Philippines (Santisimo Nombre de Jesus de Filipinas) based in Intramuros, Manila. We find him conducting the premiere performance of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” in 1887 at the San Agustin Church, an event in Philippine music history remembered for decades after by both musicians who had performed and members of the audience that had witnessed the  festivities celebrating the 1500th anniversary of conversion of the founder of the Augustinian order. Three weeks earlier, Jose Rizal had published his first incendiary novel Noli me Tangere, creating a firestorm for his attacks on the friar orders, including the Agustinians. The order immediately mounted a counter-attack, headed by Fr. Salvador Font, to counter the effects of the sensational novel and its sequel El Filibusterismo, possession of which became a subversive act.

The steady crescendo of drumbeats accenting the development of this counterpoint is detected in the parallel events of the early 1890’s – the growing frequency of Adonay’s performances of major sacred works for orchestra and chorus attesting to the vibrancy of cultural life in the metropolis against the organizing and recruiting activities of the La Liga Filipina and Katipunan unfolding just beneath the façade of civic order in Manila and the nearby provinces. By August of 1896, the Katipunan, led by Andres Bonifacio, had begun its offensive in Manila and the nearby provinces, In December of the same year, Rizal was executed in Luneta for the crime of rebellion.  Adonay and his peers could not have been spared the chaos of the times. His musical mentor, the Augustinian Manuel Arostegui had just returned to the Philippines and been assigned to a parish in San Juan, Batangas, where he had to go into hiding to escape the wrath of the rebels. One of Adonay’s dearest patrons, the banker and aficionado Francisco Roxas, was executed by the Spanish authorities in January of 1897, less than a month after Rizal’s death, on charges of abetting the revolution. Maestro Adonay visited his friend in prison on the eve of his execution, an act that must have taken a considerable amount of personal courage.

Between 1897 and 1903, Adonay disappeared from the roster of employees of San Agustin and we have only shadowy reports of his performances and activities. He is said to have conducted a “Te Deum” at an unknown location in July of 1897.[6] More chaos and confusion resulted from the entry of the Americans on the scene, first as ally, then as antagonist for to the fledgling and ill-fated republic in 1898. No record of Adonay’s activities exists from that year until 1901. The revolutionary government declared war on the Americans in 1899. A cryptic letter written by Guillermo Lisboa y Bagayan, a musician from Longos, Laguna, on January 15, 1899 requested the then injured General Emilio Jacinto, who was leading the militia in Laguna, to contact the Maestro who had written a march to be used by the troops during a projected attack by the Katipunan on Manila. The attack was aborted. Jacinto died in April. Later, the Revolutionary Army, under the rival Magdalo leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, retreated to Calasiao, in Pangasinan. Aguinaldo was captured by the Americans in 1901. In 1900, Adonay is reported to have performed a Mass in honor of San Antonio at the Quiapo Church with the San Juan del Monte orchestra, an orchestra funded by the patron, Francisco Domingo. In 1901, the Augustinian Order shut down its provincial house in Manila and most of the friars ejected from their parishes during the war were repatriated to Spain. In the middle of it all, there was the cholera epidemic of 1900-1902, probably brought into the country by the foreign ships bringing in fresh supplies for the American troops and exacerbated by the war. In 1902,  Miguel Malvar, Aguinaldo’s successor, surrendered in the wake of the forced quarantine of the population to the city centers in the Southern Tagalog provinces, the ban on lakeshore travel in Laguna de Bay and the government control over the distribution of rice in the affected areas to isolate the rebels. This resulted in a fresh wave of cholera engulfing the population of the Southern Tagalog towns. Malvar’s statement upon surrendering was:

If I had not known what was passing with the people who petitioned my surrender that their deaths were very certain in the coming year, 1903, unless they could plant rice in the month of May, I should not have surrendered.[7]

Macario Sakay, the last of the rebel generals,  remained at large to direct guerilla raids outside the capital until his execution in 1907, but for all intents and purposes, the exhausted and depleted population had been silenced and the nation returned to colonial submission under a new master.

So it was in 1904, two years after the Augustinian provincial house had closed down and a year after Fr. Arostegui died prematurely in Intramuros, at the age of 49, having opted to remain after the bulk of the friars had repatriated to Spain, that Marcelo Adonay mounted the podium in the choir loft of the San Agustin Church to conduct the premiere performance of the Pequeña Misa. He directed the Rizal Orchestra, a new ensemble privately founded in 1898 by Martin Ocampo, one of the publishers of El Renacimiento, a newspaper critical of the newly established colonial government.[8] The work was performed again the same year in Pasig, to celebrate the visit of Nuestra Señora de Buenviaje, patroness of Antipolo; and twice the next year in San Agustin. 

Ernesto Epistola’s comment that Adonay: 

...was not just another disinterested Filipino who stood by while many of his countrymen suffered. In his own quiet way, he gave them comfort…”[9]      

is worth reflecting upon at this point. The public performance of a mass by a Filipino composer, performed by an ensemble named after the national hero executed for rebellion only eight years earlier, and sponsored by a nationalist journalist who was convicted in 1914 for printing libelous statements against a high government official in the new dispensation, could not have been an innocent act. The performance of the Pequeña Misa, at the end of a period when many prominent individuals had invested heavily in and some had given their lives to the nascent concept of the Filipino nation, displayed the range of the calibrated responses to the cause. Maestro Adonay’s response was first, to be silent. Torn between his lifelong loyalty to the musical institution of San Agustin; and his network of relationships with dear friends and patrons in the secular music circles of Manila whose aspirations towards independence led them to suffer imprisonment and death in the pursuit of these liberal ideals, Adonay withdrew from public life, absent from both the rosters of San Agustin and the revolutionary government. Adonay’s unquestioning loyalty was to music, and the intensity of his devotion to it is imbedded in the glorious music of the Pequeña Misa. After the hiatus of 1897-1903, he returned to serve the diminished capilla for ten years after the departure of the Spanish Agustinians and the death of Arostegui. His loyalty to the San Agustin convent and the Catholic Church as an institution might have wavered during the revolutionary period, and he may have even sympathized with the revolutionary government to a certain extent, leading him to agree to the performances bankrolled by a known critic of the American regime but his sentiments regarding the idea of nation that tore the Spanish colonial regime apart at the turn of the century remain unarticulated to this day. In the light of the many betrayals, large and small that led to the failure of the national enterprise, his silence was probably a most pragmatic choice. What remains today is the Misa - its brooding Kyrie, Sanctus and Benedictus, its lyrical Agnus Dei, its stately and majestic Credo and above all, its Gloria, exploding with pent up joy and thanksgiving. 

In my mind, I retrace the journeys taken by my ancestors during those times. Both my maternal grandfathers belonged to the ilustrado class. Geronimo Morales, Jr., of Paco and Guillermo Zarco, Jr.  of Tondo were enthusiastic disciples of the journalist and labor leader, Isabelo de los Reyes, who had been incarcerated in Barcelona’s Montjoie Prison in 1897 for his revolutionary activities. Geronimo, the Maestro de Paco in the Spanish almanaques and vecindarios of Manila, had served as a Captain in the Ordinance Division of Aguinaldo’s army. He and his family, including my grandmother, Marciana, then in her early teens, had been part of the chaotic retreat of the army to Calasiao, Pangasinan. Terrified of the reports that the American soldiers were as huge as monsters and ate little children, the family had been overtaken by the American forces on the way. “Mama” recounted to me that one of the soldiers on horseback had leaned into their “kariton” and handed her baby sister, Felicidad (my Lola “Chiching”) a small chocolate bar. This had been a revelation and turning point for her. Returning to Manila, she was recruited as a teacher’s aide in the new public school system. She would recall to me how she would walk for three days to reach her station in Pampanga, then go from house to house to convince parents to send their children to the newly organized public school. Later, she would become a student at the Philippine Normal School where, given her feisty nature, she had been suspended after she called one of her white teachers a “white buffalo” in retaliation over his remark that Filipinos were “brown monkeys.” She had subsequently complained about the teacher, was eventually reinstated, finished the course and assigned as a teacher to the Paco Elementary School, where she met my grandfather, then the principal of the school. Always vocal in her political views, she would curse Aguinaldo and get riled over American sovereignty over the islands, even as she embraced the Presbyterian church into which she had been baptized after her marriage and often expressed a great fondness for the American missionaries she had known.

Guillermo Zarco, Jr., my other maternal great-grandfather, had left his hometown in Silang, Cavite, after the murder of Andres Bonifacio by the Magdalo forces of the province. A member of the Magdiwang faction that supported the Katipunan founder, he had escaped to Manila and settled in Tondo. Disillusioned with both the Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila where he had studied, and the revolutionary government that had sowed the seeds of their own discord in Cavite, he appears to have  sat out the Revolutions of both 1896 and 1898, become addicted to opium, and later rehabilitated by the Protestant missionary James Rodgers, who became his mentor. Lolo Momoy became an evangelist and later an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church, singing hymns and preaching the gospel to crowds in Batangas during the perilous post-revolutionary, post-cholera period and establishing the Tondo Evangelical Church. Fueled by missionary zeal, his family embraced the new liberal-democratic order and their version of the Christian faith. His son, Pablo, my grandfather, would join his father, singing in a fine baritone voice and playing the harmonium at the evangelistic rallies. “Papa” studied at Silliman University and became Principal of the Paco Elementary School before he took a management position in the government bureaucracy as head of the machine division of the Manila Railroad Company.

The years 1903-1941 were referred to by my mother’s generation, the generation born 15 years after the Philippine Revolution for Independence of 1896-1903, and the generation that also survived World War II, as the “Peacetime.”  

My daily reflections on the Bible have also led me to the equally conflict-driven arena of biblical history, where archaeologists and paleographers fight over the meanings to be found in  archaeological excavations, sparse evidence from material culture, linguistic analysis of fragments of ancient texts and carbon dating techniques to prove the veracity or, alternatively, the creative and imagined renderings of history and/or founding myths of Israel as a nation. 

What we know of Israel today was that it was a small country, in the middle of mighty empires – Babylon and Assyria (now in Iraq), Persia (now Iran), and Egypt. Its mythic ancestor was a nomadic shepherd, Abraham, who had come from either Ur in the area of Babylon, now Iraq; or Ura in Harran, which was part of Assyria, now Turkey; and settled in Canaan. The descendants of the patriarch had, during times of famine, settled in Egypt where their number had increased so much that they had invited persecution by the native Egyptians. At some point in their narrative, a large  group of these “migrants” had left Egypt and returned to their native Canaan, capturing the settlements in the area and settling in to build the hill and plain communities of Judah and Israel, respectively. At some point, the two loosely constituted states might have been united into a single kingdom by David of Judah and his Son Solomon with a capital in Jerusalem (also referred to as Zion).  But the unity was a fragile one and the kingdom was divided shortly after Solomon’s death. Both kingdoms were constantly besieged by the more powerful states that surrounded them – Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Egypt. Their leaders formed alliances with one power over another and made tactical concessions to survive but the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Jerusalem were both destroyed by waves of conquest and a significant portion of their population (particularly the ruling class) was carried off into exile and slavery at different times. 

Psalm 137, possibly written after the return of exiles from Babylon[10] and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem wall during the period of Nehemiah, a Jewish functionary in the court of Artaxerxes I, ruler of Persia, records the sentiments of the exiles thusly:

By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down yea, we wept
When we remembered Zion.
We hung our harps
Upon the willows in the midst of it.
For there those who carried us away captive asked of us a song,
And those who plundered us requested mirth,
Saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget its skill!
If I do not remember you,
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth –
If I do not exalt Jerusalem
Above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, against the sons of Edom
The day of Jerusalem,
Who said, “Raze it, raze it,
To its very foundation!”
O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed,
Happy the one who repays you as you have served us!
Happy the one who takes and dashes
Your little ones against the rock! (Psalm 137)

In the time of troubles, it is difficult to sing the Lord’s song. In front of one’s persecutors, it is hard to think of how one can make music. One suppresses one’s anger and renders the self mute. But the psalm reminds us, in periods of national suffering and oppression, in the midst of our grief and even our anger, that we must not forget our Jerusalems. Our fingers must retain the skill to play upon our harps; and our tongues must always be ready to sing “Te Deum” and exalt its memory until the times of persecution are no more.

For world orders, the fates of nation states and the histories of empires are complex and difficult to control. The great and mighty armies of Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Egypt won great triumphs and suffered massive defeats at each other’s hands as their kingdoms rose and fell through the centuries. The smaller satellite states around them like Judah and Israel either thrived or suffered as their petty princes negotiated their way around and through the power plays of their overlords. Even today, the region remains locked in mortal combat with other “kings” of the world. Likewise, in Asia, great forces with renewed imperial ambitions are asserting their power and flexing their military might. Small vassal states, ex-colonies, formerly conquered populations such as the Philippines tread carefully in their wake, making alliances with forces they hope will protect them and advance whatever causes their leaders think will be to their advantage. Histories are being improvised, revisioned, rewritten and recast to buttress  ambitions and forward agendas. We who have lived through the times must continue to reflect on the complexity of our narrative as a people. We must remember, without flinching, our personal and our family histories, the right and wrong choices our ancestors made and the roles they played in shaping the nation. We must soberly assess our current situation and how we ourselves have continued to meander through the wilderness in search for our imagined community. And most important, we must sing our songs and be instrumental in passing them down to our descendants so that as they emerge from the wreckage of successive national disasters, they may clearly discern the paths that must be taken to fulfill the Lord’s will for us as a nation as we continue to dream of a promised land.

[1] As quoted by Antonio Molina, “Music: Between God and Man,” p. 4. 

[2] Adonay’s compositions span the period 1870-1928.

[3] Corazon Dioquino, “Marcelo Adonay’s Pequeña Misa,” The Life and Works of Marcelo Adonay, Volume I, p.  (2009).

[4] Ma. Patricia Brillantes-Silvestre, “Music and History in the Manila of Marcelo Adonay,” 
The Life and Works of Marcelo Adonay, Volume I, p. (2009)

[5] Ma. Patricia Silvestre, “Becoming to Being Filipino: A Social History of Music in Manila 1860-1940 Through Journalistic Print,” unpublished PhD dissertation draft, University of the Philippines 2020. 

[6] The “Te Deum” is a mass associated with thanksgiving. If the July date is correct, it is unlikely that this was performed to celebrate the Pact of Biak-na-Bato signed in December of 1897 that marked a truce with Spain. The date, however, comes closer to the defeat by the Spaniards and local volunteers of  an attack on Nagcarlang, Laguna in early July, 1897 by rebel forces under Atanacia Penola, known as the ‘terror of Nagcarlang.’ (Gil Gotiangco, “Laguna, 1571-1902: The Making of a Revolutionary Milieu,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of the Philippines, 1980., p. 189.)     

[7] Reynaldo Ileto, “Cholera and the origins of the American sanitary order in the Philippines,” Imperial medicine and Indigenous Societies, (2017). P. 129.

[8] In 1908, El Renacimiento published the editorial, “Aves de Rapina,” that accused the new colonial government of corruption. Ocampo and his partner, Teodoro Kalaw, were sentenced to prison and pardoned only in 1914. 

[9] Ernesto Epistola, “Adonay,” The Diliman Review, Vol. I, No. 3, July, 1953, p. 321.

[10] Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon carried away much of the royal court of Judah in 605 BCE after the Battle of Carchemish.

References:

Elena Rivera Mirano (editor-in-chief). The Life and Works of Marcelo Adonay, Vol. I, University of the Philippines Press (2009).

Reynaldo Ileto, “Cholera and the origins of the American sanitary order in the Philippines,” Imperial medicine and Indigenous Societies, (2017).

Youtube. “Marcelo Adonay’s Gloria,” September 21, 2009.