Two big issues having to do with culture blew up while I was away these past two weeks, and I feel constrained to say what I think about them, because—well, I’m a Filipino.
This week I’ll take up the first one—the brouhaha that followed singer Martin Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem, Lupang Hinirang, at the Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas last May 2. The National Historical Institute and some commentators took Nievera to task for his interpretation, which deviated from what turned out to be news for many Filipinos—a legally prescribed way of singing the song, under Republic Act 8491 or the Flag and Heraldic Code.
I didn’t get to see the fight live, so I had to go to YouTube to listen to Nievera—and when I did, I had to wonder what the fuss was all about. The performance was a tad dramatic, to be sure, but wasn’t the moment titanically theatrical as well? I didn’t think that anything was wrong with Martin; rather, I think something’s wrong with the law in its intent and implementation.
Let’s begin with intentions. Can you imagine what it would be like if some emperor declared that, say, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) or even Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” should be read aloud in one and only one way?
Of course, the National Anthem isn’t just a poem or a pop song, as many have archly observed; it’s a verbalized symbol of national unity, and therefore—the argument might go—singing it one way would concretize the spirit of that unity. In this sense, I can understand the NHI’s exasperation. If we can’t even get the tempo of Lupang Hinirang right, what can we?
But I think that misses the point, which is that the anthem is also a work of art, and as such is inevitably subject to interpretation. Its meaning can be affected by its context. When I sing it together with a quadrangleful of other Filipinos, all at one pace, I find and put myself within the collective, the me-in-the-nation. When I sing it by myself, more expressively, I seek and find the-nation-in-me; I reread it and sing it as a poem to which I bring my own experience and emotions. When an accomplished artist reinterprets the anthem, it’s not a form of disrespect, but high praise and a way of revivifying what to many of us have turned to stale, memorized, emotionless words sung at flag ceremony.
I don’t think our revolutionary heroes will turn in their graves if they heard this blood-hallowed hymn played differently from they way they heard it in 1898—to begin with, it didn’t even have any official Filipino lyrics, as we know them today, until 1956! The freedom they fought for was handmaiden to a democracy—at least a theoretical one—that should allow for diversity, divergence, and dissent. As unpleasant as it may be, that includes the right to quarrel—nonviolently—with and about the nation and its symbolic representations.
This nation’s more than a hundred years old. We should feel confident enough about ourselves to accommodate a range of expressions about who and what we are. If we’ve failed to cohere as a nation, it isn’t the fault of the anthem or of its singers, or because we’ve failed to sing the anthem to the one lawful beat, or flown flags with the prescribed shade of blue. It’s more likely because we haven’t been open and inclusive enough as a society in more significant and more material ways.
And what of implementation? Since when has the Flag Law—crafted in 1998 in a fit of Centennial fervor, when we were too busy contemplating the embroidery on our barongs—been applied with the religiousness it demands by law enforcers bearing color swatches of Pantone 286, the official shade of blue? (Since when, for that matter, have we observed the Constitutional separation of Church and State, with Catholic Masses and prayers held at nearly every government function from the Palace down? And before that comment cranks up the hate-mail machine, let me say outright that I do pray—privately, without requiring or expecting it of my State-university colleagues and staff.)
Cultural policing like this promotes a narrow, mechanical sense of nation, one grounded on ultimately impractical rules rather than an appreciation of the nation as an organic entity.
I don’t see the United States diminished in any way when Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, and Clay Aiken choose to sing The Star-Spangled Banner this way and that (if you want proof, go to YouTube and check out their versions). We may argue with the quality of their singing or the excessive flourishes of their interpretation, but hardly with their privilege to sing the song the way only they can. That’s why professional singers—and not Marine or Army sergeants (unless you were Barry Sadler)—get invited to sing at big events; for a few minutes, they bring new life to an old tune (or, to use the fancy critical term, they defamiliarize the familiar, which is basic to any art).
I seem to remember—and please correct me, fellow boomers, if I’m wrong—that RJ (yes, that RJ) and his band the Riots got banned from the airwaves for a while back in the ‘60s for doing a rock rendition of Lupang Hinirang. Was Jimi Hendrix any less American for doing the same thing at Woodstock in 1969?
As a workable compromise, let the anthem be played and sung the prescribed way in official government functions, and perhaps in schools at flag ceremony; that’s all the practice of uniformity we need; but leave artists to interpret it as only artists will, emotively, with all its possibilities for both artistic success and failure.
I’m not saying that artists are above the law, or that laws are unnecessary. If a writer or musician steals, rapes, or passes a bouncing check, he should be jailed or punished like everyone else. As for singing the National Anthem—well, I can’t sing a tenth of Martin Nievera’s notes, but I’d be willing to try and sing it the way he did in a public venue, to be prosecuted as a test case for the Supreme Court to sort out: ang makulong, so to speak, nang dahil sa iyo.
Next week, I’ll take up the other and perhaps more materially important issue—the so-called “Book Blockade of 2009.”
Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/opinion/content/161908/a-narrowed-nation/story/
This week I’ll take up the first one—the brouhaha that followed singer Martin Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem, Lupang Hinirang, at the Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas last May 2. The National Historical Institute and some commentators took Nievera to task for his interpretation, which deviated from what turned out to be news for many Filipinos—a legally prescribed way of singing the song, under Republic Act 8491 or the Flag and Heraldic Code.
I didn’t get to see the fight live, so I had to go to YouTube to listen to Nievera—and when I did, I had to wonder what the fuss was all about. The performance was a tad dramatic, to be sure, but wasn’t the moment titanically theatrical as well? I didn’t think that anything was wrong with Martin; rather, I think something’s wrong with the law in its intent and implementation.
Let’s begin with intentions. Can you imagine what it would be like if some emperor declared that, say, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) or even Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” should be read aloud in one and only one way?
Of course, the National Anthem isn’t just a poem or a pop song, as many have archly observed; it’s a verbalized symbol of national unity, and therefore—the argument might go—singing it one way would concretize the spirit of that unity. In this sense, I can understand the NHI’s exasperation. If we can’t even get the tempo of Lupang Hinirang right, what can we?
But I think that misses the point, which is that the anthem is also a work of art, and as such is inevitably subject to interpretation. Its meaning can be affected by its context. When I sing it together with a quadrangleful of other Filipinos, all at one pace, I find and put myself within the collective, the me-in-the-nation. When I sing it by myself, more expressively, I seek and find the-nation-in-me; I reread it and sing it as a poem to which I bring my own experience and emotions. When an accomplished artist reinterprets the anthem, it’s not a form of disrespect, but high praise and a way of revivifying what to many of us have turned to stale, memorized, emotionless words sung at flag ceremony.
I don’t think our revolutionary heroes will turn in their graves if they heard this blood-hallowed hymn played differently from they way they heard it in 1898—to begin with, it didn’t even have any official Filipino lyrics, as we know them today, until 1956! The freedom they fought for was handmaiden to a democracy—at least a theoretical one—that should allow for diversity, divergence, and dissent. As unpleasant as it may be, that includes the right to quarrel—nonviolently—with and about the nation and its symbolic representations.
This nation’s more than a hundred years old. We should feel confident enough about ourselves to accommodate a range of expressions about who and what we are. If we’ve failed to cohere as a nation, it isn’t the fault of the anthem or of its singers, or because we’ve failed to sing the anthem to the one lawful beat, or flown flags with the prescribed shade of blue. It’s more likely because we haven’t been open and inclusive enough as a society in more significant and more material ways.
And what of implementation? Since when has the Flag Law—crafted in 1998 in a fit of Centennial fervor, when we were too busy contemplating the embroidery on our barongs—been applied with the religiousness it demands by law enforcers bearing color swatches of Pantone 286, the official shade of blue? (Since when, for that matter, have we observed the Constitutional separation of Church and State, with Catholic Masses and prayers held at nearly every government function from the Palace down? And before that comment cranks up the hate-mail machine, let me say outright that I do pray—privately, without requiring or expecting it of my State-university colleagues and staff.)
Cultural policing like this promotes a narrow, mechanical sense of nation, one grounded on ultimately impractical rules rather than an appreciation of the nation as an organic entity.
I don’t see the United States diminished in any way when Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, and Clay Aiken choose to sing The Star-Spangled Banner this way and that (if you want proof, go to YouTube and check out their versions). We may argue with the quality of their singing or the excessive flourishes of their interpretation, but hardly with their privilege to sing the song the way only they can. That’s why professional singers—and not Marine or Army sergeants (unless you were Barry Sadler)—get invited to sing at big events; for a few minutes, they bring new life to an old tune (or, to use the fancy critical term, they defamiliarize the familiar, which is basic to any art).
I seem to remember—and please correct me, fellow boomers, if I’m wrong—that RJ (yes, that RJ) and his band the Riots got banned from the airwaves for a while back in the ‘60s for doing a rock rendition of Lupang Hinirang. Was Jimi Hendrix any less American for doing the same thing at Woodstock in 1969?
As a workable compromise, let the anthem be played and sung the prescribed way in official government functions, and perhaps in schools at flag ceremony; that’s all the practice of uniformity we need; but leave artists to interpret it as only artists will, emotively, with all its possibilities for both artistic success and failure.
I’m not saying that artists are above the law, or that laws are unnecessary. If a writer or musician steals, rapes, or passes a bouncing check, he should be jailed or punished like everyone else. As for singing the National Anthem—well, I can’t sing a tenth of Martin Nievera’s notes, but I’d be willing to try and sing it the way he did in a public venue, to be prosecuted as a test case for the Supreme Court to sort out: ang makulong, so to speak, nang dahil sa iyo.
Next week, I’ll take up the other and perhaps more materially important issue—the so-called “Book Blockade of 2009.”
Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/opinion/content/161908/a-narrowed-nation/story/
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