MUSIC-PHILIPPINES: Joey Ayala’s Music for the New Mind

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

MANILA, Nov 8 1994 (IPS) - For Joey Ayala, the most famous and successful of a new breed of Filipino ethno-musicians, the ‘hegalong’ is not just a musical instrument: it is an icon for a “new state of being”.

The hegalong is a two-string lizard-shaped guitar of the indigenous Tiboli people who live in the mystic mountains of Mindanao in the southern Philippines.

Its pulsating whine has the acoustic qualities of the mating call of cicadas in the rainforests of Mt Apo, the dormant volcano which is the highest mountain in the Philippines and the last repository of the country’s once-rich biodiversity.

The sound itself is half way between a sitar and a fiddle, and the hegalong almost seems to go back to the guitar’s Moorish heritage. (The ancestry comes a full circle — the Spanish colonials in the Philippines called the Muslims of Mindanao ‘Moors’.)

Ayala, 38, has heard a lot of about ‘sustainable development’, the catch-all term that has become a buzzword in development circles, and he says he has tried to give the concept a musical form.

“Sustainable development for me means sustainable consumption. You cannot sustain development without restraining consumption. And this is something I learned through music, and through the hegalong in particular,” Ayala explains.

“It is a very simple instrument, just two strings. The lesson from this instrument is: you can do a lot with little.”

Take the words of his song, ‘Hari Ibon’ (King Bird) about the majestic Mindanao Eagle that has a wingspan of three metres but has nowhere to nest because the forests are disappearing:

‘I wish to fly like the Eagle/And build a nest in the heart of the forest/But the trees are leaving for other countries/Without trees there are no nests/The nestless Eagle has no reason to ride the wind,

Oh Eagle, my true king, I wish to help so thy kingdom may live again/If you want to see the Eagle, don’t look up at the sky/He has shed his feathers and folded up his wings/Oh Eagle, my true king, I wish to help so thy kingdom may live again.’

For Ayala, the theme of nature and culture conservation underpins the survival of tribal peoples worldwide. Indigenous cultures are proof that you do not need all that much cement and diesel and plastics and styrofoam to make a decent living, to be cultured and to be civilised. (MORE)

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