A bittersweet carol
A bittersweet carol
Updated 11:33pm (Mla time) Dec 06, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
FEW noticed the songwriter's obituary, stashed below the fold of a newspaper's inside page a few days back. But this note on an obscure lyricist's passing, just when lilting lines of "Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit" ring out again, evoked images of Christmas past. One was the Nativity Day Mass, then ending at the graceful Thai-style church on Bangkok's Ruamrudde Lane. Suddenly, the choir leader leapt to his feet. "Before you leave," he told the surprised congregation, "may we sing for you a Filipino carol?" With overseas Filipino workers as lead musicians, the choir then belted out one of our probably best known carols: "Ang Pasko ay sumapit/ Tayo na at mangagsiawit…." It's an exuberant carol. Listeners are drawn in with the singers.
Swedes, Thais, Australians, Germans, Nigerians, Samoans and others clapped along as the choir sang: "Nang si Kristo'y isilang / May tatlong hari nagsidalaw..."
Holy Redeemer parish serves an international flock. Built in the early 1950s by Redemptorist Fathers on what were Bangkok rice paddies, the church is now surrounded by skyscrapers. But that Christmas Day, few in the congregration knew -- or particularly cared-that they were singing the "hijacked" adaptation of a 1933 Cebuano “dayegon,” or carol: "Kasadya Ning Taknaa" ]How Joyful Is this Season].
Composer Vicente Rubi jotted down the music for a new dayegon to be presented at a Christmas festival. Then Panorama Magazine writer Alex Dacanay recalls that Rubi sought out Mariano Vestil to do the lyrics. Their "Kasadya" dayegon won hands down.
Today, wherever Cebuano is spoken- I- n Bohol, Negros Oriental, Southern Leyte, Northern Mindanao, Cebu and elsewhere -- carolers still sing the same infectious beat that Rubi and Vestil blended 71 years ago. "Bualahan ang tagbalay/nga gi awitan [Blessed are the homes where carols are sang]."
But singing this Cebuano dayegon in the overwhelming Buddhist city was bittersweet, at least for some Visayans in the pews. Italians call this joy-laced pain "chiaroscuro." Among others, injustice evokes that feeling.
"The books of antiquity of every people and culture are filled with that restless human search," the theologian Catalino Arevalo notes. "One thinks of the words from Aeschylus which Robert Kennedy loved: 'And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart.'"
Did that Christmas group include Filipino United Nations officers like the econometrician Edmundo Prantilla of Davao and Bohol's Ernesto Pernia, later Asian Development Bank economist? I don't recall now. But Dr. Jose Abueva, by then, had moved on to the United Nations University in Tokyo. He was later to become University of the Philippines president.
That Christmas, his international vessel docked at Klong Toey. So, Capt. Ariston Roxas was there together with his wife, Justin, principal of Bangkok's Mary Poppins kindergarten. So were engineer Noel Bersabe and his physician-wife, Jing.
"It's the supremest of ironies in a country that boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas," editor Jullie Yap Daza wrote in 1978. "But not a trace of effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol 'Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit' to its author Vicente D. Rubi."
When Daza wrote that, Rubi was an old impoverished widower. Until he was confined in a hospital ward, "Nong Inting" would shuffle to his door to teach startled carolers, sometimes kids banging tin-cup tambourines, how to sing his dayegon.
Rubi and Vestil's carol was hijacked for P150 by a record company. Nong Inting, who died in 1980, was "denied what was due him in royalties," Daza added. As Shakespeare's King Lear puts it, "I am a man/More sinned against than sinning."
Record companies conned the carol's authors over the years with legal dodges. That's par for the course in a country where court verdicts on dictators and their plunder are sapped by a never-ending spiral of motions. "I can delay this case for at least five years" boasted an abogado de campanilla after Edsa II.
Twenty-four years after Rubi's death, as his obituary notes, the lyricist Vestil went to his grave, also bereft of benefits and recognition-although their dayegon continues to resound, albeit in forms that Rubi and Vestil never sought. Does it ultimately matter? "I have written your name in the palm of my hand," an Advent reading from Isaiah says.
But those who crassly exploited the talented dayegon musician and lyricist have kindred spirits here: in the cartel that flogged an onerous levy on coconut farmers; in loggers who triggered those flash floods or generals who fiddled with soldiers' skimpy retirement benefits. These are the "Napoleons of crime," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle muses.
In Charles Dickens 1843 classic "A Christmas Carol," the miser Scrooge dismisses what Vestil and Rubi celebrated as "Humbug!" But Christmas is not tinsel, reindeers, shattered diets, etc. a Bangkok Post feature noted. It is "about a Child...who healed the sick, fed the hungry, showed compassion, taught that one should lay down life for friends-and did so. He also gave answers to basic questions, such as death that confront ordinary mortal like us." That's why it is a "feast of luminous images that hint at all manner of communication."
Christmas' unique grace is that both carol writer and carol thief can say with shepherds and kings: "Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us.
Updated 11:33pm (Mla time) Dec 06, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
FEW noticed the songwriter's obituary, stashed below the fold of a newspaper's inside page a few days back. But this note on an obscure lyricist's passing, just when lilting lines of "Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit" ring out again, evoked images of Christmas past. One was the Nativity Day Mass, then ending at the graceful Thai-style church on Bangkok's Ruamrudde Lane. Suddenly, the choir leader leapt to his feet. "Before you leave," he told the surprised congregation, "may we sing for you a Filipino carol?" With overseas Filipino workers as lead musicians, the choir then belted out one of our probably best known carols: "Ang Pasko ay sumapit/ Tayo na at mangagsiawit…." It's an exuberant carol. Listeners are drawn in with the singers.
Swedes, Thais, Australians, Germans, Nigerians, Samoans and others clapped along as the choir sang: "Nang si Kristo'y isilang / May tatlong hari nagsidalaw..."
Holy Redeemer parish serves an international flock. Built in the early 1950s by Redemptorist Fathers on what were Bangkok rice paddies, the church is now surrounded by skyscrapers. But that Christmas Day, few in the congregration knew -- or particularly cared-that they were singing the "hijacked" adaptation of a 1933 Cebuano “dayegon,” or carol: "Kasadya Ning Taknaa" ]How Joyful Is this Season].
Composer Vicente Rubi jotted down the music for a new dayegon to be presented at a Christmas festival. Then Panorama Magazine writer Alex Dacanay recalls that Rubi sought out Mariano Vestil to do the lyrics. Their "Kasadya" dayegon won hands down.
Today, wherever Cebuano is spoken- I- n Bohol, Negros Oriental, Southern Leyte, Northern Mindanao, Cebu and elsewhere -- carolers still sing the same infectious beat that Rubi and Vestil blended 71 years ago. "Bualahan ang tagbalay/nga gi awitan [Blessed are the homes where carols are sang]."
But singing this Cebuano dayegon in the overwhelming Buddhist city was bittersweet, at least for some Visayans in the pews. Italians call this joy-laced pain "chiaroscuro." Among others, injustice evokes that feeling.
"The books of antiquity of every people and culture are filled with that restless human search," the theologian Catalino Arevalo notes. "One thinks of the words from Aeschylus which Robert Kennedy loved: 'And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart.'"
Did that Christmas group include Filipino United Nations officers like the econometrician Edmundo Prantilla of Davao and Bohol's Ernesto Pernia, later Asian Development Bank economist? I don't recall now. But Dr. Jose Abueva, by then, had moved on to the United Nations University in Tokyo. He was later to become University of the Philippines president.
That Christmas, his international vessel docked at Klong Toey. So, Capt. Ariston Roxas was there together with his wife, Justin, principal of Bangkok's Mary Poppins kindergarten. So were engineer Noel Bersabe and his physician-wife, Jing.
"It's the supremest of ironies in a country that boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas," editor Jullie Yap Daza wrote in 1978. "But not a trace of effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol 'Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit' to its author Vicente D. Rubi."
When Daza wrote that, Rubi was an old impoverished widower. Until he was confined in a hospital ward, "Nong Inting" would shuffle to his door to teach startled carolers, sometimes kids banging tin-cup tambourines, how to sing his dayegon.
Rubi and Vestil's carol was hijacked for P150 by a record company. Nong Inting, who died in 1980, was "denied what was due him in royalties," Daza added. As Shakespeare's King Lear puts it, "I am a man/More sinned against than sinning."
Record companies conned the carol's authors over the years with legal dodges. That's par for the course in a country where court verdicts on dictators and their plunder are sapped by a never-ending spiral of motions. "I can delay this case for at least five years" boasted an abogado de campanilla after Edsa II.
Twenty-four years after Rubi's death, as his obituary notes, the lyricist Vestil went to his grave, also bereft of benefits and recognition-although their dayegon continues to resound, albeit in forms that Rubi and Vestil never sought. Does it ultimately matter? "I have written your name in the palm of my hand," an Advent reading from Isaiah says.
But those who crassly exploited the talented dayegon musician and lyricist have kindred spirits here: in the cartel that flogged an onerous levy on coconut farmers; in loggers who triggered those flash floods or generals who fiddled with soldiers' skimpy retirement benefits. These are the "Napoleons of crime," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle muses.
In Charles Dickens 1843 classic "A Christmas Carol," the miser Scrooge dismisses what Vestil and Rubi celebrated as "Humbug!" But Christmas is not tinsel, reindeers, shattered diets, etc. a Bangkok Post feature noted. It is "about a Child...who healed the sick, fed the hungry, showed compassion, taught that one should lay down life for friends-and did so. He also gave answers to basic questions, such as death that confront ordinary mortal like us." That's why it is a "feast of luminous images that hint at all manner of communication."
Christmas' unique grace is that both carol writer and carol thief can say with shepherds and kings: "Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us.
posted by Dante at 11:44 PM
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