I Walked With Heroes

I Walked With Heroes

Author: Carlos P. Rómulo

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2016-07-26

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 1786259400

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I Walked with Heroes is an autobiographical book written by Carlos P. Romulo, a former Philippine general, journalist, poet, story writer, diplomat, former resident commissioner to Washington, D.C., former Philippine ambassador to the United States, and former President of the United Nations General Assembly. In I Walked with Heroes, Romulo personally reviewed his boyhood, early life, school days, and career in which he presented the facts and events with "frankness, intimacy, sense of person-to-person communication". It included Romulo's memories of his parents and the first time he met the Americans in the person of soldiers stationed in Camiling, his native town in Tarlac. The time was during the Philippine War of Independence. The nameless soldier taught Romulo and other Filipino boys how to read and write in English using Edward Baldwin's Primer. Romulo also narrated his life in Manila when he was both a morning-time student and an evening-time news reporter. A part of the book mentioned how Romulo was praised by then President of the Philippine Senate Manuel L. Quezon after writing a news item against Quezon's political opponents. In the pages of the autobiography, the reader would find that Romulo was comfortable in employing humor such as "telling jokes on himself", particularly in reference to his height to make the reader enjoy his writing. The book revealed Romulo's "unfailing faith in mankind".


Naming the Artist, Composing the Philippines

Naming the Artist, Composing the Philippines

Author: Neal D. Matherne

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9781321088076

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This work is a critical analysis of art, memory and prestige in the early twentieth- and late twenty-first-century Philippines. I am concerned with the creation of the Philippine nation by various acts of commemoration and recognition (awards, exhibits, and concerts) through which artists are valorized, immortalized and celebrated. I answer three broad questions: (1) how do patron-client and kinship systems determine the national recognition of artists in the post-colonial world? (2) how is music used in the nation-building project? and (3) how is national mythology created and contested through the commemoration of individual artists in the Philippines? I approach Philippine area studies through discussions of the past in ethnomusicology, borrowing theory from memory studies and methodology from historical anthropology while expanding both fields with a consideration of expressive culture. To describe this interaction between state and artist, I focus on the National Artist Award (NAA), the highest honor bestowed upon an artist by the Philippine government. I begin by recounting an aberration of the nominating process: the 2009 National Artist Award controversy. Then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo deleted a name from the prestigious NAA nominee list and added artists with suspiciously close ties to her administration. Then, I analyze the 2010 re-performance of National Artist for Music Jose Maceda's Ugnayan , a multi-spatial composition for 20 radio stations. This work was originally performed in 1974 with the explicit support of then-First Lady Imelda Marcos. Finally, I describe a 2012 exhibit featuring the materials of National Artist for Music Felipe De Leon Padilla Sr. I sort through clashing characterizations of De Leon of as a "crisis composer" who served the Philippines at times of foreign and domestic peril. Reading against the grain of these public acts of commemoration and recognition, I provide an account from the "ground up" and consider how the public construction of national artists renders the Philippines into a unified conceptual whole.