Master musician and ethnomusicologist Danongan Kalanduyan is the only expert on southern Filipino music living in the United States. In ” Global Village,” Spark catches a glimpse of the master at work as he teaches a class on Maguindanao, Maranao and Tausug tribal music and dance at San Francisco State University.
Kalanduyan is a master of the kulintang, a set of eight small embossed gongs in graduated sizes, arranged horizontally on a rack called an antangan. The kulintang is the central instrument in Kulintang music, which features a number of different percussion instruments: the babendil, a small handheld gong; the dabakan, a single-headed kettle-shaped wooden drum; the agung, a large wide-rimmed vertical gong; and the gandingan, a set of four large graduated vertical gongs.
Kalanduyan’s foremost goal is to use his music to help connect contemporary Filipino American culture with ancient tribal traditions. Kulintang music finds its roots almost entirely in a small Muslim region of the southern Philippines, but existed before both the Muslim and the Hispanic influences. In recent years, it has been embraced by young, secular Filipino Americans for whom it has come to serve as a symbol of pan-Filipino unity.
Kalanduyan earned his graduate degree in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he remained as an artist-in-residence for many years. In 1990, he served as a master artist in the California state apprenticeship program. In 1995, Kalanduyan was awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently a lecturer at San Francisco State University, Kalanduyan is also the leader of the Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble. He has been a featured artist in performances at such major venues as the Hollywood Bowl (with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kennedy Center, and countless concerts and festivals throughout the United States.
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