Philippine folk music
| Filipino folk | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Traditional music |
| Cultural origins | Individual ethnic groups of the Philippines |
| Typical instruments | See Folk instrument |
| Derivative forms | Manila Sound - Pinoy reggae |
| Subgenres | |
| Asik - Agung - Bodabil - Cariñosa - Gangsa - Kundiman - Kulintang ensemble - Maglalatik - Pangalay - Singkil - Tinikling - Tagonggo | |
| Other topics | |
| OPM | |
The traditional music of the Philippines, like the folk music of other countries, reflects the life of common, mostly rural Filipino. Like its counterparts in Asia, a lot of traditional songs from the Philippines have a strong connection with nature. However, much of it employs the diatonic scale rather than the "more Asian" pentatonic scale.
Traditional Filipino music is reflective of the country's history as a melting pot of different cultures. Among the dominant cultural strains noticeable today are Hispano-Mexican, American and to some extent Chinese, Indian and Islamic. It is thus difficult to strictly classify the whole corpus of Philippine music as either Western or Eastern.
A frequently used system is to classify it according to ethno-linguistic or cultural divisions: for example, traditional Tagalog music, which is somewhat more Hispanic in flavour, differs from Ifugao music and Maranao kulintang music.
A commonality is that vocal music is of significant import to every ethnic group in the country. Although there is some music intended for dance, the best-preserved form of traditional music is that intended for the voice, with chanting epic poetry as having been the earliest form and later augmented by instrumental accompaniment. Regarded to have a wide range, as most of them stretch more than an octave, they are still considered within the capacity of even an average singer.
Borromeo also noted that one interesting feature of Western-influenced traditional music is that a tune is not bound to a particular language or dialect. The country is an archipelago, and thus Filipinos did not have a unifying language during the Spanish Era (Filipino was only adopted as a national language in 1936).
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Wikipedia