The Sense of the Sacred:

Meaning and Experience in Traditional Liturgical Music

Among Contemporary Young Filipino Catholics

A Thesis Proposal

Presented to

The Faculty Committee of the Graduate School

The Philippine Women’s University
Taft Avenue, Manila

In Partial Fulfilment
Of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy major in Ethnomusicology

By

Rolan B. Ambrocio
2019
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Liturgical music is the music used in Catholic liturgy—music for the worship of

God. This definition is enshrined in many documents on the role of music in Catholic

worship (Lang 2015, Ratzinger 2000). Music in liturgical celebrations used to be strictly

regulated by ecclesiastic law until the reform of the Second Vatican Council, which

welcomed other forms of music into Catholic liturgy (Milner 1964, Panayiotou 2011).

This development enabled parish communities to choose and appropriate music that

best expressed their respective individual identity and culture. Catholic parishes, once

musically unified by Latin hymns and plainchant, are now separated by multiple

musical practices (Bohlman 2013, Hughes 2003, O'Malley 2008).

Many Catholic parishes, including monasteries, seminaries, and religious houses,

abandoned the use of traditional Latin hymns and Gregorian chant. Agents of this

movement largely based their novelties on the premise that the Church needs to

recognize the “signs of the times”, and adapt to them, in order to inspire more young

people to practice their Catholic faith (McDannell 2011, Milner 1964). However, many

eminent liturgical scholars argue that the dominance of popular culture in the Catholic

liturgy is due to a great misconception on the reading of Vatican II documents

pertaining to both music and language (Poterack 1999). Latin and the Gregorian chant

were in fact re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council and its removal from the

Catholic liturgy is a betrayal of the real intent of the Council, according to an eminent

liturgical scholar J.F. Baldovin (Baldovin 2008).

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 The objective of attracting more young people to the Catholic Church through a

conscious adaptation to their musical taste did not see accomplishment. Instead, as

researchers from the University of Notre Dame have discovered in their study of young

adult American Catholics, “more than any other time in the past, American Catholics

now have a confused sense of belonging and not belonging. The kinds of religious

expression that can be subsumed under the name ‘Catholic’ are less clear today than in

the decades prior to the Second Vatican Council” (Hoge et al. 2001, 6). Furthermore,

Gregorian chant and traditional Catholic liturgical music are witnessing increased

resurgence among contemporary young people in different parts of the world, including

the Philippines (Ambrocio 2016, Daice 2007). This situation necessitates a re-evaluation

of how we understand the relationship between young Catholics and liturgical music, a

necessity that demands a new mode of discourse and dialogue.

To contribute to this on-going debate, I propose a phenomenological ethnographic

study among young Filipino Catholics who prefer to sing traditional Catholic liturgical

music1 over a popular musical genre that started to dominate Catholic liturgical praxis

after the Second Vatican Council. To articulate this preference, I will explore the culture

and the context of these young Filipino Catholics within the framework of the “sense of

the sacred” experience associated with the traditional liturgical music genre. This

concern with how the “sense of the sacred” experience in and among young Filipino

Catholics is understood is the principal driving force that urged me to adopt a

phenomenological ethnographic stance as this allows me to put the musician’s

experience with traditional Catholic liturgical music at the foreground and at the core of

the study. This approach provides insight based on lived-experiences into why and how

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young Filipino Catholics enact musical preference and practices amidst a plethora of

competing praxes.

My study focuses on the contemporary usage of traditional Catholic liturgical

music in three different parishes in the ‘Olongapo’—a chartered city between the region

of Zambales and Bataan. Despite its size, Olongapo is a vibrant location for the

intersection of culture, modernity, and the public practice of religion. Throughout its

territory, it encompasses 9 parishes and 68 small chapels, each being within walking

distance from one another. The three parishes selected for this study serve as a

representative of the dynamic and active liturgical musical culture that is in dialogue

with the dynamic socio-civic culture of the city.

This phenomenological ethnographic study explores (1) the expressive character in

the usage of the contemporary traditional Catholic liturgical music; (2) the

characteristics of the subcultural groups that identify themselves as agents in this form

of musical expression; and (3) the emphasis on the sensuous aspect of religiosity. This

allows me to focus on the liturgical music-making as a unit distinct from ritual praxes,

dogmata, and doctrines, geared towards an examination of the affective, lived-

experience, and social dimensionality of liturgical “musicking” (Small 1998), to wit:

“… If we widen the circle of our attention to take the entire set of

relationships that constitute a performance, we shall see that music's
primary meanings are not individual but social. The fundamental
meaning of music lies not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in
action, in what people do. It is only by understanding what people do as
they take part in a musical act that we can hope to understand its nature
and the function it fulfills in human life.” (Small 1998, 8).

Accordingly, this study is poised to offer valuable insight into the lives of young

Filipino Catholics who are using traditional Catholic liturgical music to experience their

religion through the aesthetic experience of sound, considering that the focus on

3
elements of experience “is often ignored by other forms of scholarship” (Berger 2008, p.

71) especially in many ethnomusicological literature that deals with music-making

within the context of Catholic liturgy. These musical experiences, however, are not

simply a sonic event but an event “embedded with affect, style, value—meaning in the

broadest sense of the word (ibid), an event tied to the rest of one’s cultural sphere”

(Nettl 2005). As such, this study presents a fresh perspective into those who wish to

understand the important experiential aspects of the element of tradition within religion

in the context of contemporary society. Furthermore, this study occupies a position

conducive to contributing to the current discourse in the ethnomusicology of

Catholicism by highlighting the importance of non-musical aspects of musical

performance in the process of meaning-making.

AIM, METHODOLOGY & FRAMEWORK

This phenomenological ethnographic study aims to describe the meaning and

experience in traditional liturgical music from the perspective of my study participants

and to provide a rich description of the lived-experiences of Catholic liturgical musicians

who moved away from the mainstream liturgical music practice. Thus, I adopted

different approaches from the field of anthropology and ethnomusicology to explore

how the conception of music operates on people, place, and cultural objects. Throughout

the study, I assume a stance that puts the religious experience of the choir executing

traditional Catholic liturgical music at the front and the center of the study. The intrinsic

value of religion within the framework of human experience and its importance in the

4
structuring of both the culture and the society requires my study investigate an element

that functions within one of the important dimensions of human life.

I did my preliminary fieldwork in three different Catholic parishes in Olongapo

City in 2016, returning to it for a more intense study from December 2017 to February

2019. My fieldwork commenced in the parish of St. Ursula and eventually extended to

the parish of St. Joachim and St. Hannah. The music-making in St. Ursula became the

cornerstone for my study on traditional Catholic liturgical music as a tool in religious

experience. However, on account of the changes that reality confers on life, these

parishes experienced quite substantial changes from the time when I last visited them

until almost a year later when I returned, and are, in fact, changing still. The members

of the choir I worked with are between 14 and 32 years of age, the youngest still in high

school. When my research began, these choir groups, despite belonging to different

parishes, collaborated with each other during annual Catholic celebrations in Olongapo,

such as Christ the King, ordinations, Chrism Mass, and other gatherings that allow

certain musical practices and genres to be highlighted from among many.

I analyzed these musical practices both from the standpoint of an ordinary

churchgoer and from the viewpoint of a member, and even that of an organist, of the

choir. With the choir, I attended different liturgical and non-liturgical events that

involved music, such as Sunday Masses, choir rehearsals, as well as non-music related

activities, such as parish pastoral meetings. I conducted several semi-structured and

formal interviews with members of the choir, each interview lasting for about an hour,

and initiated free conversations with parish workers and other members of the parish

community. While the main focus of this study is understanding the musical experience

of the choir, talking to other members of the parochial microcosm provided an

5
opportunity for an alternative interpretation of the music and music-making within the

community from the perspective of non-performing participants (Guilbault 1993).

Furthermore, everyone involved in this study was promised strict confidentiality. All

names such as the name of the church, the choir group, have been in changed as per

requested by my study participants.

From a traditional ethnographic standpoint, my choice of research location

certainly challenges ethnographic convention and standards. While access to the field

site may be of relative ease, research in an urban setting is not easy. Unlike fieldwork in

a close-knitted social formation typical among indigenous communities, the hyper-

mobility of my interlocutors, let alone the heterogeneous cultural background of each

social formations, makes access and navigation truly challenging (Stock and Chiener

2008, Araujo 2009). In this case, the conventional ethnographic approach is limited for

my purpose because my ethnographic position assumes a stance beyond positivist

descriptive ethnography: the field is no longer geographically and socially bounded. This

way of looking at the field is specifically important because my study does not intend to

be a single in-depth exploration or a positivist description of a single case study, instead

it is to understand the varied experiences contemporary young Filipino Catholics have

on traditional Catholic liturgical music.

Thus, I utilized a more contemporary approach known as yo-yo fieldwork (Wulff

2002) and multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus 1986, 1995) to adjust to the

situations of the field. As a result, my field is more expanded and more varied. I am not

tied to a single church choir, instead, I am able to explore the various modalities and

elements that give rise to the “sense of the sacred” experience of Traditional Catholic

6
liturgical music in a much broader context following the methodological possibilities

given by Marcus and Wulff.

I attended rehearsals, trans-parochial music engagements, both music- and non-

music-related gatherings as an observer and, sometimes, as a performer myself (Hellier-

Tinoco 2003). Thus, while my base was St. Ursula, I was constantly commuting to and

from other parishes to observe liturgical celebrations, choir practices, and parish

meetings. Furthermore, I traveled to Cavite, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tuguegarao, and

Vigan to perform in many of the extra-parochial singing engagements in which the choir

participated. As they traveled—within proximity, between cities, or between regions—

the movement itself became the site of my research and a methodological flexibility that

allowed me to gain a deeper and more intimate understanding of their choice of music.

My approach to ethnomusicological fieldwork stemmed from my aim to explore

the experience in singing traditional Catholic liturgical music, which is more often

entangled with power, conflict, and marginalization. For this reason, I employed Harris

Berger’s (1999) “critical phenomenology” in this research, conscious that my

ethnographic interlocutors are not passive actors. They are people who “engage with

sound, make it take shape in their experience, and juggle it relative to other elements of

performance” (Berger 1999a). This approach allows me to understand their struggles,

hopes, and aspirations.

As such, musical practice is not the sole locus of meaning-making. Many aspects of

one’s life are constantly affected by other domains of practice which are not essentially

musically-related—work and private life, past experiences, belonging and identity, and

even the process of dying (Berger 1999a, 2008). To do phenomenological ethnography is

to understand the shaping tensions and meaning-making implications of musical

7
meaning and experience, how meanings of music are “shaped by and have the potential

to influence practices and experience from other domains” (Berger 2008, p. 72).

On the personal note, my interest in this study came from my experiences, which in

one way or another influenced how I conduct and perceive what is happening in the

field. I am not simply an observer observing from a purely subjective point of view.

Instead, my personhood, my identity, my experiences, and my own ontological view of

the world stands at the background, while I cast my gaze upon my ethnographic

endeavor and my participants’ experience and point of view.2 Turino notes, “in the very

act of doing ethnomusicological research […] we inevitably call up myriad comparisons

with our own musical experience and social understanding; we approach new

experiences or ideas against the backdrop of what we already know” (Turino 1993, p. 6).

This approach allows my experiences to magnify the ambit of my ethnographic gaze, “by

giving [me] alternative ideologies, discourses, and experiences to think with” (ibid). I

may seem to view that the emic perspective is no longer important,3 but it is far from

that. The emic-etic dichotomy, nevertheless, commands further rethinking (Rice 1997,

47).

I myself grew up as a member of a Catholic choir, and partly, by virtue of the social

and religious background I share with the members of the choirs of the three Catholic

parishes I worked with, I had—and I utilized—every opportunity to observe and

participate the musical practice of each parish. My research owes its momentum to my

strong familiarity with the places where I had once served as chorister and, eventually,

as organist.4 And because I am very familiar with the parish’s acoustical territory, I can

decode many “subtleties in the sound that the novice cannot decode” (Truax 2013, 76).

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 I ventured into the study with more than a decade of experience as a lay Catholic

liturgical musician, a chorister, a conductor and an organist behind me. I started my

Catholic musical life as a church organist at quite an early age in one of the parishes in

Olongapo City. Traditional Catholic liturgical music is a genre I seldom encountered

then. Vernacular, popular and folk music was the norm. Jesuit compositions, those

penned by Manoling Francisco and Eduardo Hontiveros, dominated liturgical singing.

As a young organist initiated into the mysteries of the Yamaha Electone, these musical

benchmarks readily complimented my style, which can be summarized by an added pre-

set drum rhythm for the purpose of rendering the music more “affective”.

Eventually, new liturgical music compositions gained currency, developing

alongside the mainstream, as new music books were published and circulated in

Olongapo City. Music by Ryan Cayabyab entered the liturgical scene with his book Mass

for Peace (2001). Congregations, such as the Societas Verbum Dei (SVD), likewise

started publishing liturgical music. Furthermore, young seminarians also participated in

the blossoming of Philippine liturgical music through their musical compositions and

direct involvement in the parish music ministry.5

The spread of popular and vernacular music did not happen solely through the

mediation of printed materials. It happened with the help of the print media, the radio,

and the television. The Jesuit music ministry launched music videos featuring popular

artists, which included Joey Ayala. They recorded many compact discs album through

Hangad and Bukas Palad, choir groups they specifically founded for the purpose of

spreading their liturgical music style.

I served in the Diocesan Commission in Liturgy for almost eight years prior to my

transfer from Olongapo City to Pangasinan. Yearly, I attended the National Diocesan

9
Directors of Liturgy Conference as part of my work in the commission. Thus, apart from

having been a chorister, an organist and a conductor for several Catholic parishes, my

time in the Commission provided me opportunities to deepen my understanding of the

surrounding politics of liturgical music, at least in the Philippines, and to peer into the

issues concerning the various conflicting opinions on what constitutes as liturgical

music, of which there was, and there is still, no common agreement. My thorough

familiarity with the dominant musical genre used in the Catholic liturgy is not enough to

understand the multi-layered meaning of performing and listening to traditional

Catholic liturgical music (Garcia 2011). My own experiences of power and

marginalization as a musician with a strong preference for traditional liturgical music

allow me to understand the marginalization experiences of my participants and enable

me to communicate in critical dialogical exchange with their experiences—experiences,

which in so many ways, are also mine. In this way, my fieldwork becomes an encounter

of “people making music”, whose lives are intertwined with culturally-contingent

musical praxis (Titon 2015).

I first encountered traditional Catholic liturgical music in the latter part of my

involvement in the Commission, when I met a German missionary priest who, at that

time, was assigned to one of the parishes in the Diocese of Iba. He belonged to the Order

of the Holy Cross and studied Gregorian chant under Dom Eugène Cardine, a renowned

proponent of the semiological interpretation of Gregorian chant. Raw curiosity towards

a form of notation I had never-before-seen was all that sparked my desire to learn how

to read and sing chant and jumpstarted a two-year study under his direction, which

ended when he left for Brazil for another parish assignment.

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 My years of studying Gregorian chant did not immediately bring about a paradigm

shift. I continued performing, playing, and singing popular and folk liturgical music.

Although I spent considerable time learning Gregorian chant, my prior musical training

and aesthetic conditioning remained the determining factors in my musical choices. My

opinion about Gregorian chant in the liturgy did not change abruptly. Instead, I

experienced a form of Cartesian dualism, where my mind appreciated Gregorian chant

based on its historical and musicological merits, while my practice as a liturgical

musician, my embodied response, rejected its modal aesthetics. It took many years

before I started to experience Gregorian chant as “sacred music”, a process that was not

musical, but socio-cultural.

I left Olongapo in 2005, after years of serving in the Commission on Liturgy, to

settle in a Carmelite monastery in a rural town in Pangasinan. I served, and continue to

serve, in the liturgical office of the monastery in whatever musical ways I could be of

service. I play the organ, rehearse the choir, edit music books, and even compose simple

hymns and psalmody. Life in the monastery revolves around the liturgy with its

sevenfold daily chanting of the Divine Office. The musical repertoire for the daily

celebration of the Mass includes simple chants, vernacular music both in a traditional

and popular genre, in which Latin is not treated as an outcast. During important

celebrations, such as Christmas Eve, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and Easter

Sunday, the repertoire is given a prominent place to Latin. While this is typical in a

monastery, traditional Catholic liturgical music is not common in the parishes where I

had served for many years.

In 2008, I started to serve as choirmaster in one of the parishes in Pangasinan. In

this environment, I built a music repertoire that is in keeping with my own aesthetic

11
sensibilities and understanding of Vatican II liturgical directives. Popular music was still

my liturgical comfort zone. As a young choir conductor, I nursed a penchant for high-

note singing and mixed-voiced choral music, going as far as to even advocate musical

compositions solely for their dramatic and theatrical effects. The choir in which I served

slowly evolved and developed a strong ensemble culture enabling the members to

execute the music that I selected. In my naïve mind back then, weekly liturgical

celebrations were certainly with the “solemn” spectrum, thanks to the music that we

were singing. Sunday after Sunday, we practiced and built upon our experience to

expand our repertoires, joining competitions, even staging concerts to showcase our

talent.

In 2011, our parish was set to host the Diocesan Celebration of Christ the King, an

event rotated each year within the Diocese of Alaminos. The preparation for the big

event was done through a series of activities that culminated in the main liturgical feast.

We began practicing our repertoire earlier to ensure that the celebration would attain a

befitting solemnity. Four months before the main event, however, the parish priest

asked us to change our repertoire. Instead of vernacular songs, we were asked to sing

Latin and Gregorian chant. I tried to dissuade the priest because I was not comfortable

with Latin, much so with the Gregorian chant, and because I thought the choir,

comprised of young people, incapable of appreciating Latin and chant. The priest

nonetheless insisted on his request, wanting the event to feel like it was being celebrated

in the Vatican. In his own words: “This will be the only chance the Diocese will

experience a celebration like no other.”

He gave us a copy of Mass VIII, otherwise known as the Missa de Angelis, which,

among the Masses in Vatican Kyriale, is by far the most familiar. Written in mode IV,

12
which sounds like a major scale, this chant does not alienate modern ears. After a long

negotiation, I acceded to his suggestion, not realizing that it dragged along in its wake a

much bigger challenge, something that is beyond the realm of learning to sing from

square notes, of ensemble unity, and of the musical parameter. I was not prepared to

encounter the connection of the music to the people. I was not prepared to witness how

cultural aspects interplayed with music making and listening. Much so, I was not

prepared to handle the conflicts and issues that came, and continue to arise, from

singing Gregorian chant.

From this point, I observe how music reveals its connection to the maker of the

music and to those that consume music. The power relation inherent between these two

sides emerged in the remaining four months of preparation for the diocese-wide Christ

the King. While the choir sang music that was, and remains to be, intrinsically sacred,

the conflicting, and often violent, reactions from the congregation embodied an

opposing perception. While I was not prepared for this, it nevertheless encouraged me

to embark into a scholarly journey to formally understand that very experience. This

experience, and all the other before it, is constantly in dialogue with how I perceive the

field and my ethnographic interlocutors (Williams Spring-Fall 2005).

Exploring the liturgical music culture in a Catholic parish is, in its own right, a

challenging endeavor, since music making occurs within a liturgical ritual that all

Catholic parishes practice (McGann 2010). So, I draw on the concept of “acoustic

community”6 to theoretically differentiate liturgical music making in each parish (Truax

2013). With this concept, each parish occupies its own “acoustic territory” that makes

“musicking” (Small 1998) unique on its own, despite the perceivable similarity. Each

parish possesses its own acoustic signature and an aesthetic sense formed through the

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values, ideas, and behavior within the context of society and culture (Nketia 1984, 22).

Such calls for an examination of various “sensational forms” (Meyer 2010) that generate

intense feeling of sacredness and social elements that formed and continue to mold each

parish’s acoustic signature, how the musical senses are shaped by social and cultural

values, and in turn, how ways of musical senses inform socio-cultural practices (Howes

and Classen 2014). To this, I also include in my approach the concept of “social

aesthetic” used by MacDougall (MacDougall 2006).

While the common notion that underscores the notion of aesthetics is the beauty of

art, the concept of the social aesthetic by the visual anthropologist David MacDougall

(1999) refers to “valuation of sensory experience” (p. 5). He developed the concept of

social aesthetic during his fieldwork at an elite boys’ boarding school in northern India—

Doon School. MacDougall (2006, 105) argues that social and physical traits within a

community affect people’s actions and decisions. Thus, it is important to analyze the

“aesthetic of community life” that directly orients people’s lives. He posits that social

aesthetic constitute the design of buildings and grounds, the use of clothing and colors,

the rules of the dormitory, the organization of students, time, styles of speech and

gestures, and many rituals of everyday life that accompany such activities as eating,

school gathering, and sport, itself already a highly ritualized activity (ibid).

Through the lenses of social aesthetics, I seek to get a broader understanding of the

process of meaning construction and experience in traditional liturgical Catholic music.

Every community possesses a physical object, engineer communal gestures, and develop

behavior patterns that are determinedly known by those within a specific community

(MacDougall 2006, 94-95). These features can be both social and physical, but what

they share is the fact that they are highly recognizable to its inhabitants. In the course of

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the analysis, the necessity to identify and discuss the meaning and objects such as the

choir robe and the music binder, and social concepts such as the cantor and the organist

indeed arises, for which a cursory description how the choir dominates parishes’ social

space deserves attention, a framework that offers me a possibility to understand how the

meaning of liturgical music making, experience, and preference takes shape through the

process of social contextualization and through material influences. Furthermore,

MacDougall contends that, since the way we direct our seeing is predetermined and

highly organized, the different features of the society, therefore, such as the tempo of

life, the behavior of the choir, the style of clothing, and the relational dynamics

prevailing within the parish community, form a body of evidence that gives access to a

broader understanding of how my interlocutors construct their meaning and experience

in traditional Catholic liturgical music.

The theoretical conceptualization of social aesthetic is connected to Pierre

Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus. MacDougall, however, distinguishes his concept

of social aesthetic from Bourdieu’s habitus by establishing that social aesthetic is a

“disposition of time, space, material objects and social activities” (Macdougall 1999, 6),

while habitus is “a system of structured, structuring dispositions” (Bourdieu 1990, 2).

The concept of social aesthetics in relation to habitus has also been discussed by

the social anthropologist Sarah Buckler (2011) in her work Fire in the Dark: Gypsiness

in North East England. She opines that social aesthetic is an intentional and deliberate

process of acquiring behavior that can still be consciously modified, whereas habitus

largely posits an unconscious behavior that cannot be deliberately altered or controlled

(Buckler 2011, 62). Furthermore, she rejects the concept of habitus by forcefully

proposing that “we do not become socialized into some determining prison of which we

15
are unconscious”, that we become who we are in accordance to signs and meanings “by

the use of which we can develop enormously subtle and complex relationships and

which we can use, mold and manipulate to achieve our own personal projects” (64).

Social aesthetic concepts offer a wider range of perspectives from which the

musical and social world of the contemporary young Filipino Catholics can be viewed. It

enables the ethnographer to become sensitive to his own sensory experiences of the field

and their significance to the ethnographic knowledge process, in which, the sensory

experience of not just listening and playing music through participant observation, but

also of co-inhabiting in the social world, can be part of the ethnographic data which will

allow a more transparent and vivid impression of the life-world under study. As

MacDougall argues, the social aesthetic dimension of human experience offers “an

important social fact, to be taken seriously alongside such other facts as economic

survival, political power, and religious belief” (MacDougall 1999, 5).

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Introduction

This study explores meaning and experiences in the performance of traditional

Catholic liturgical music among young Filipino Catholics. To do this, it is helpful to

consider recent scholarly contributions to the understanding of the nature and

processes of musical meaning. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have contributed to

the emerging interest in the value of meaning and experience in music making.

Following Ruth Stone’s pioneering work that opened the path for a phenomenological

oriented ethnomusicological scholarship, several ethnomusicological studies have

16
focused on the role of time, embodiment and reflexivity in the meaning-making process

(see for example, Feld 1994, Titon 1988, 1997; Rice 1994, 1997, Friedson 1996; Berger

1997, 1999; Porcello 1998; Berger and Del Negro 2004; Wolf 2006). This study builds

from the foregoing ethnomusicological literature and contributes to it by showing how a

set of socially-defined ideals, material culture, and aesthetic process orients musical

meaning and experience and how such process affects the religious self-understanding

of contemporary young Filipino Catholics.

My review begins by mapping the on-going trend in the area of phenomenological

ethnomusicology to foreground the importance of not only understanding music in its

cultural and social context but also to its experiential dimension as the locus of meaning.

The next part of the review will explore both the epistemological and ontological

problem with the concept of sacred experience in music through understanding the

basis of sacred and religious experience. Lastly, I include in this review of scholarly

works those that intersect religious experiences in music and youth culture. By focusing

on these themes, my study is positioned within the broader scholarly literature that

explored different aspects and areas of music and experience.

Ethnomusicology and the meaning of music

Ethnomusicology in the 1960s and 1970s draws heavily on theoretical traditions of

the social sciences in exploring music making. The dominant paradigm—structural

functionalism and structuralism—relegated the question of meaning and ontological

status of music (Berger 2008). Instead, music making and music listening were treated

as a background of cultural and cognitive system (See Stone’s remarks in Stone and

Berger 2014, 4). Contemporary ethnomusicologists who see musical meaning as the core

17
of ethnomusicological scholarship turned to phenomenology—a movement within

continental European philosophy—to study a wide range of issues that foreground

meaning and experience as the object of study.

Ruth Stone (1982) is the first ethnomusicologist to draw on the concepts provided

by phenomenology. She utilized several different concepts from the works of Husserl

([1929]1964), the symbolic interactions such as that of Blumer (1969; 2), and the

concept of social phenomenology from the works of Alfred Schutz (1962, 1964; Schutz

and Luckmann ([1973] 1975). Other ethnomusicologists followed her lead in the quest of

understanding the musical meaning that is not drawn from the anthropological-laden

concepts of Alan Merriam (1964) and the biological basis of music making espoused by

John Blacking (2000). Jeff Todd Titon (1988, 2008, 2009) and Tim Rice (1994, 2001,

2003, 2008) explored in their many ethnomusicological works issues of meaning and

experience in music-oriented by the philosophical writings of the phenomenological

hermeneutic tradition, most prominently Gadamer and Ricoeur. The work of Steven

Friedson (1996), on the other hand, combined Heideggerian concepts and perspective

from hermeneutic tradition on his research on ritual and trance.

Scholarly literature that falls under the umbrella of phenomenological

ethnomusicology foregrounds the experiential and aesthetic dimension of music

making. While not altogether rejecting the role of context, they believe that issues of

experience and meaning in music should be the core focus of any ethnomusicological

research (Berger 2015). Thus, works by phenomenological ethnomusicologist explore

meaning making in music by looking into the issue of reflexivity (Berger 1999a,

Csikszentmihalyi 1990, Savage 2009), experience as enactment of religious ideologies

(Freidson 2009, Ho 2009, Humphreys 1991, Simmonet 2009), or political meanings

18
(Berger 2004, McGuiness 2013, Shannon 2003, Turino 2014, Berger 1999a). However,

current trends in phenomenological literature focus on more-or-less tightly-structured

and bonded social group with a coherent and fixed way of looking at the world and being

in the world.

Scholarly literature on meaning and experience in music offer various

methodological possibilities from which phenomenological issues of music can be

explored. Other ethnomusicological works within phenomenological ethnomusicology

recourse to the works of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986)7 to include into their analysis the

diversity of experience in performance, including conflict and dissent that arises within

social groups on the account of music making.

Participatory forms of music as the basis of embodied experience is also one such

possibility (Turino 1999, 2008). Not limited to musical sound alone as the basis of

analysis, participation may include dancing, clapping, playing instruments and singing.

The quality of the performance does not rest on its objective quality. Instead, how the

participants feel during musical activity is the main judge of whether the music is good

or not. In connection to this study, the emphasis on participant feeling and motion as

put forward by Turino may provide an insight to understand an aspect of the liturgical

wars that has been woven into the fabric of music making in the Catholic Church.

Music in Religious Experience

This study is not the first to consider the connection between the experiential

dimension of music in the practice of religion.8 Various scholars explored different

aspects of music making within the context of religious practice, not only to understand

music per se but explore diverse aspects of the tight connection of music to religious

19
experience (Blackwell 1999). Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon (1988) explores

aspects of meaning-making processes that occur through speech and songs in a rural

Baptist church in Virginia. He argues that the context of occurrence surrounding the use

of religious language is essential in understanding both religious and folklife. As a

phenomenologically oriented study, he explores how worshippers experienced their

faith through the song text and how this experience has evolved. On a similar study

among the Appalachian Primitive Baptist church, Beverly Patterson (1995) argues

however that the musical style and singing, apart from the words and melodies, projects

a discourse of social, aesthetic, and a distinct religious experience and identity. In

addition, she posits that hymn singing among these group of ordinary Americans is an

inseparable living tradition that permeates every aspect of their lives.

The importance of music experience transcends ordinary modes of existence and

ritual events (Becker 2004). Rather, music is a crucial element in the experience of

divine manifestation and transcendence of the Holy Spirit (Butler 2000). In his work

among the Ewe-speaking of Ghana, Friedson (2008) provides a detailed ethnographic

portrait to the inner experience of devotees of “brakete” and their aesthetically charged

feeling tone to argue that musical experience is not just one of the many events of ritual

life, but it is where all terms of existence flows thus allowing people to experience their

gods. Furthermore, he highlighted the “important issue of aesthetic force that largely

has been ignored” in the study of religion (p.8).

While music helps understand the religious experience and everyday life, its

meaning does not reside in the music itself but a result of the intersection of belief,

experience, aesthetic, and socially negotiated human experience (Hinson 1989). This is

best exemplified in the musical practice of African-American Spirit-filled Christians

20
where the meaning of music is located in their negotiation of existential reality. Musical

practice becomes their way of figuring out the solution and the way to navigate their

challenges (Boone 2013). The lack of stable meaning and fluidity of function possessed

by music often result in conflicting discourse over what constitutes music as well as

what can be considered as the right kind of music within a religious context. What is

acceptable is largely determined by the limiting capacity of religious cultural

expectation. It is what shapes ones understanding of what can be considered as an

acceptable form of religious faith experience. Music is not the only means of performing

a faith experience. Among the members of a Corinthian Black Baptist church, “frenzy”

and loud shouting can be an acceptable form of faithful performance of their religion

(Sheehan 2008).

The “ethics of style” determines the creation, reception, and rejection of whatever

is called “music.” Musical choices mirror ethical judgment (Rommen 2007) and musical

meaning may move in different spaces as a means of local and trans-local negotiation of

concerns and conviction (Ingalls 2008).9 In addition to aspects of human challenges,

the material culture of music also exerts an influence in the discourse of musical

meaning of religious music. Video recordings, songbooks, costume, and choice of

musical instruments are likewise vehicles to communicate and accomplish a specific

religious worldview (Busman 2015). What gives meaning to music, therefore, is not

dependent on its object characteristic but on how it is socially defined by groups who

use them.

21
Sense of the Sacred experience in Music: An Ontological Issue

Music is the most faithful ally of divine manifestation and sacred experience that

creates a space in between the sacred and the profane (Navarro 2013). Also, music

possesses mystical and evocative power to link to the divine and believes that music

possesses a power that affects people physiologically, psychologically, socially and

culturally that is far beyond human intentionality (Sylvan 2002). Equally, “music is not

a mere accompaniment in religious worship; it is religious worship itself” (p, 42). While

this may be the case when the notion of sacredness is attached to religion and ritual,

sacredness may be experienced even within a secular location and means. Music does

not necessarily need to be performed within a religious ritual or in a religious place

deemed as sacred for it to have the potential for a divine encounter (Anderson 2015).

The notion and experience of the sacred are in no way locked up within the secured

scaffolding of ritual and temples (Durkheim 2001 [1912]) as religious expression and

experience become available through postmodern means and secular spheres

(Engelhardt 2011).

While the notion of the sacred continues to define religion, it can no longer be

restricted or even attributed for that matter, exclusively to the traditional religious

sphere. It does remain as a key concept in studying religion but the sacred now includes

a wide range of social situations and mundane activities that happens on a daily basis

(Strausberg 2017). The post-secular society can be a location of spiritual and religious

encounter because it continues to harbor elements of the sacred despite its seeming

abandonment of traditional religious expression, albeit in a totally unique form (Onishi

2018). However, to view the secular as sacred requires a new re-envisioning and careful

navigation on the epistemological divide between the dialectics of the sacred and the

22
profane (Eliade 1959). Secularization is seen as the opposite of the sacred, and vice

versa. It is considered as a condition where “all vital experiences—whether sex or eating,

work or play—have been desacralized. This means that all these physiological acts are

deprived of spiritual significance, hence deprived of their truly human dimension

(p.68). But secularization is an extension and new expression of superstition,

irrationality, and heteronomous forms of authority that characterized traditional

religious belief. The decline of religious belief simply did not happen. Instead, it only

changed its notional form and expression that is no longer specific to religion. Anything

and any place can be made sacred through “the focus of attention upon, and the

organization of activity around, items and behaviors apprehended as sacred, that is [as]

sufficiently special to excite behavior that perpetuates the initial apprehension” (Rennie

2017, 683). This proposition challenges the profound relationship of religion and sacred

sound as music participates in the blurring of the ontological status of sacredness that is

often attached to the meaning of the profane.

On the other hand, a proposition of the meaning of the sacred not tied to

traditional religious sphere may have some advantages. First, the notion of what

sacredness as an analytical category may be defined contextually and may be accessed in

other means other than religious rituals, or away from the dialectic of the sacred versus

the profane. Such departure places the sacred in ‘a more nuanced set of relations to a

broader variety of other concepts (Engler and Gardiner 2017, 629) and allows it to be

more accessible through various means such as language, art, and music (p. 620).

Fuller proposes that sacred experience is motivated by bodily functions and

conditioning (Fuller 2008). On the other hand, Gavin Flood sees the concept of the

sacred as transformational and a way to elevate one’s state of life to a ‘higher forms of

23
living’ (Flood 2017). He further argues that sacred is a ‘participatory mode of human

existence’ so fundamental in human sociality (p.699). As such, the definition of the

sacred becomes implicit when it is seen as something unspecific to religion since the

sacred can be found in many aspects of human behavior (Rennie 2017, 684). However,

the sacred, cut from religion’s umbilical cord, is not just there but ‘requires cultural

work’ through the process of sacralization that will give any object an ‘aura’ accessible to

individual experience (Morgan 2017, 657).

The lack of solid grounding on the definition of the sacred, while having some

analytical advantage, has the delimiting capacity for further abstraction since anything

can be considered as sacred. If anything can be considered sacred, therefore, the sacred

and religious experience can be experienced on almost anything, wherever, and

whenever, without distinction as to what is set apart as sacred and what belongs to the

mundane (Manoussakis 2019). On the contrary, the experience of the sacred and

religious experience does not lend itself to simply just anything but requires the

experiencer’s concept and belief which is essentially cultural in nature (Proudfoot 1985).

Furthermore, beliefs about sacred experiences are always inferred from prior concepts

and belief systems and the “belief about the cause of one’s experience are themselves

constitutive of the experience. This is especially true in the case of religious experience”

(114). Therefore, sacredness and religious experience is not sui generis but an ascription

given by an individual, a group, or a culture, to anything they “deemed as sacred and

religious” (Taves 2009). Postmodern religious modalities opened many avenues and

options to which contemporary man can continue to reinvent himself and choose for

himself what he considers as sacred and religious. But even with an unlimited number

of options to choose from, postmodern times are the time when “we are witnessing the

24
birth of a new religious lifestyle in which religious experience is precisely analogous to

the aesthetic experience of music” (Shepherd 1972).

Youth Culture and Religious Experience in Music

Spirituality and the quest to experience the sacred remains vital and alive amidst

secularity and materialism (Wuthnow 2003). While it was assumed in many scholarly

discourses about the certain decline of religion, the sociologist Peter Berger asserts that

“a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled

‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken” (Berger 1999b, 2). However, the

resurgence of religious life in contemporary times is no way similar to its traditional

forms and expressions. The new religious lifestyles are now located outside of the brick

and mortar of traditional religious institution and now located within a variety of spaces

and experiences including elements of popular culture (Stewart 2017).

Studies on the religiosity of contemporary youth culture attest to the powerful

force varieties of contemporary music genres exert on religious experience and

identification. The force of popular and contemporary Christian music resonates with

the need of the younger generation for a more relational expression of religion that is

not laden with discourses of theology, doctrines, and dogmas (Chase 2013, Makewa

2008). Sacred music as a medium of expression found in traditional forms of religion

simply can no longer hold the interest of contemporary generations who rely on

relationally and emotionally religious practice to get in touch with the divine (Nekola

2009, 6). Spirituality in contemporary times is best defined as a religion that

emphasizes personal experience as its main epistemological principle (Aufer and

Houtman 2006, Heelas 1996, 2007).

25
 Secular music and lyric are significant to reach the increasing number of younger

generations who remained unaffiliated to the church. While secular music and lyrics

seemingly have no connection to any Christian themes, values and theology, the music

style and lyrical content speak well to the experiential and aesthetic preference of the

younger generation (Stace 2017). And because of its strong emphasis on thanks and

praise, contemporary music is the key to solve declining youth participation in religion

(Howard and Streck 1999, Hall 2006, Lau 2012, Roeland 2009). Furthermore, popular

music genre including gospel music rest on the same Christian principles and is even

more traditional in its forms despite the surface worldly aesthetic represented by flashy

clothing and the use of informal language (Pollard 2008). But in order for the popular

music genre to become sacred requires an ontological configuration. This sacred

ontology is produced and imposed on the individual believer by using specific aesthetics,

forms of authority, social interaction and bodily practices (Roeland 2009).

Conclusion

Scholarly studies on the religiosity of post-secular youth, particular on that of

Christianity, have been particularly focused on contemporary expressions and

modalities of religious expression. However, little study has been conducted on the

traditional expressions of religiosity among postmodern youth, specifically in the

Philippines. Studies on young Filipino Catholic as a scholarly interest is still a

burgeoning field in the Philippines. The studies conducted by Jayeel Cornelio are still

among the very few scholarly works on this topic. His studies argue that Filipino

Catholic are ‘reflexive” in the practice of their religion (Cornelio 2011). Studies on youth

Filipino Catholic involved in traditional form of religious expression (e.g Latin Mass,

26
Gregorian chant, and veils among others), however, remain marginal. This study aims

to contribute to the on-going discourse on contemporary youth Filipino religiosity by

examining the role of Gregorian chant and traditional liturgical expression in the

religiosity of the youth Filipino Catholics.

This study focuses on the traditional Catholic liturgical music among young

Filipino Catholics and explores “chant religiosity” in the Philippines. This study

examines the dynamics of traditional Catholicism in late modernity, traditional

liturgical music practices, and its impact on the postmodern experience of religiosity

among contemporary Filipino Catholic youth. Most recent work within the area of

religious music and contemporary youth culture focuses on issues and youth formations

that have adopted popular musical styles. While many scholars in the field focus on

religious experiences and worship rituals, faith formation through music has also

received significant attention. In contrast, my study addresses another side of the

discourse on contemporary youth experience of religion by focusing on contemporary

young Filipino Catholics who largely define themselves through their explicit rejection

of popular music styles in liturgical worship. Also, my analytical attention is largely

focused on musical meaning and experiences in traditional Catholic liturgical music

through an approach that not only considers musical experience but the shaping force of

material culture (Meyer 2010) and social aesthetics (MacDougall 2006) that informs

both meaning and experience of traditional Catholic liturgical music among young

contemporary Filipino Catholics.

27
 RESEARCH SETTING

The development of the city of ‘Olongapo’ has occurred side-by-side with the

development of Catholicism in the city. From its early establishment, religion has played

a critical role in the life of its inhabitants. The city was once occupied by the Spaniards

in 1884 before it became an American naval territory in 1901. After many years, the

territory was returned to the Philippine government and became a municipality on

December 7, 1959, by the virtue of the Executive order No. 366 issued by President

Carlos P. Garcia. It was in 1966 when Olongapo became a chartered city adjacent to a US

Naval Base. The metropolitan city of Olongapo is a chartered city located between the

province of Zambales and Bataan.

Figure 1: Map of Olongapo City10

The first church in Olongapo, named San Roque Chapel, was built during 1920.

But during the Spanish occupation, there existed a chapel near the Spanish gate by the

Spanish missionaries to serve the spiritual needs of the Spanish soldiers and immigrant

Caviteños.11 Catholicism was very much alive through celebrations like Holy week

28
processions and the annual celebration of the feast of San Roque until the Japanese

bombings reduced the city into rubble (Anderson 1991).

The United States took over Olongapo just after the liberation from the Japanese

occupation and converted the site into a naval base in 1951. The old San Roque church

was converted into an ecumenical chapel. Catholic practices started to exist side by side

with other denominations such as Pentecostal, Baptist, and Protestants. In the same

year, the Catholics of Olongapo revived the celebration of the Feast of San Roque. Since

other religious denominations occupied the chapel, they sent a request to the

Archdiocese of Manila for a parish priest and a new church so they could practice their

traditions fully, and the request was granted (Anderson 1991, Laurel 2003).

Photo 1: The Spanish Gate of Subic Bay

(taken March 12, 2019, by R. Ambrocio)

In 1951, the Missionary Society of St. Columban (also known as Columban Fathers)

came to Olongapo and established a number of parishes (see Appendix A). Apart from

churches and small chapels, the Columban Fathers also established several schools.

Because of the Columban Fathers, Olongapo became part of the prelature of Iba,

29
Zambales, despite being a city that is neither a part of Bataan nor Zambales. But in the

early part of the year 2000, the Columban Fathers, being already in their older years,

turned over the governance of the parishes in Olongapo to Filipino priests. But although

Olongapo has a long history of Catholicism and is a predominantly Catholic city, other

religions also exist in the city. A religion such as Iglesia ni Cristo has the biggest

membership, next to the Roman Catholic (Noone 1998, Neil 2017).

Side-by-side with the growth of religious practices in the city is the growing changes

in the moral landscape that gave the city the name “sin city”. Prostitution became the

number one commodity and revenue earning means of the city (Moselina 1979 ). It is a

common sight in Olongapo to see “good-time girls” in company with US servicemen.

Juxtaposed with the locals, prostitution became a normal and acceptable scene and has

since become a part of not only of the city’s identity, but also of music making.

Photo 2: The "Ulo ng Apo" monument in the rotonda of the city

(taken Dec. 15, 2018, by R. Ambrocio)

30
 Olongapo is somewhat a unique blending of secular and religious life. For one

reason, the city has the biggest number of Catholic parishes in the entire Zambales

province. In addition, small chapels continue to grow in number in different locations

both inside and outside the city proper.12 But in terms of numbers, Catholic parishes

and chapels are outmatched by the number of bars and nightclubs that expand the

whole area of Olongapo (Leininger 2014). Below needs a cite or two in there somewhere

It is very easy to assume that Olongapo is nothing but prostitution. On the contrary,

there are many positive cultural changes that occurred as a result of the American

interaction among the people of Olongapo. Nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, and many

events that intend to bring entertainment to US servicemen on rest and recreation

became a stable venue for thriving musicians who provide musical entertainment. Band

scene was very much alive in Olongapo (Moselina 1979 ). During my teenage years, my

friends and I were among those who formed bands and played in one of the many

establishments in Olongapo. For many self-supporting students, playing in the band

provided a good financial source big enough to support oneself to college. Many of these

band musicians, including myself, also play music in the Catholic church. The church

becomes another musical venue where musical aesthetics are found in places such as

casinos, clubs, and hotels, and the recreational establishment is never out of place.

Aside from the Catholic mass, there are charismatic prayer meetings that are also a

receptive venue for music making among band musicians who play in entertainment

establishments (Azores 2012). Where does the profane culture of the “sin city” begins

and where does it end then? And where does the sacred culture enshrine in the growing

number of chapels ends? And where does it begin? Being Catholic churches located

31
side-by-side with night bars and casinos, the boundary that separates the sacred and the

profane is no longer perceivable. Therefore, in the backdrop of such socio-religious

circumstances, I will locate the liturgical music practices in three Catholic parishes in

Olongapo, in this phenomenological ethnographic study, to explore the process by

which a sound becomes sacred.

32
 CHAPTER II
THE SEARCH FOR THE LITURGY OF THE FILIPINO PEOPLE

This chapter will present liturgical history and politics in the Philippine in which music
plays a major role. I will discuss the use of traditional Catholic liturgical music and the
growth of the popular, vernacular, and folk-music after Vatican II, respectively. I will
then discuss the growth of charismatic and Pentecostal movement within the Catholic
Church to exemplify how traditional Catholic music became a foreign musical genre in
its own backyard.

CHAPTER III
TRADITIONAL CATHOLIC LITURGICAL MUSIC IS THE NEW POP: THE
LITURGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY YOUNG FILIPINO CATHOLICS

This chapter highlights the use of traditional Catholic liturgical music in both traditional
and contemporary parishes to examine the role of traditional Catholic liturgical music in
the shaping of contemporary religiosity of young Filipino Catholics.

CHAPTER IV
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SACREDNESS IN THE TRADITIONAL
CATHOLIC LITURGICAL MUSIC

This chapter will discuss the function of traditional Catholic liturgical music within the
context of Philippine Catholicism using ethnographic data drawn from fieldwork to
explore factors that shape the meaning and experience in traditional Catholic liturgical
music among the young Filipino Catholics.

CHAPTER V
SUMMARY

The final chapter will present the summary, the implication of the research to the wider
context in the field of ethnomusicology and the burgeoning scholarship of Filipino youth
Catholicism. This chapter will conclude on the direction for future research.

33
 Endnotes

1 Throughout this study, I used the term “traditional Catholic liturgical music” encompassing chant both
in Latin and in the vernacular, Latin and vernacular hymns in traditional harmonic setting, sacred music
ranging from the Renaissance to the Romantic period.
2 There are many circumstances when my experiences as a Catholic musician are similar to them despite
differences in time, circumstances and location. As such, the location of the field becomes less and less
tied to a geographical reference. Field is only a metaphorical creation created by the researcher (See Rice
1997). As I investigate their experiences, many of which are similar to mine, myself becomes also part of
the field and “my Self” also becomes my fieldwork.
3 See (Nercessian 2002). In his work Postmodernism and Globalization in Ethnomusicology: An

Epistemological Problem, Nercessian critiques the privileging of emic perspective in ethnomusicological

research. Timothy Rice concurs with the Nercessian by arguing that emic-etic dichotomy requires further
re-thinking.
4 My fieldwork in Olongapo in many ways concurs to the definition of Jeff Todd Titon (2004) that

fieldwork is a form of visiting home. Although I stayed most of the time in Olongapo at about my college
years, it has been more than a decade since I am able to go back to visit.
5 The parish priest of St. Ursula is among the liturgical music composers produced by the Immaculate
Conception Major Seminary in Guiguinto, Bulacan. He was a former member of a band comprised of
priest and seminarians who often travel abroad for concert performances. He soon became the director of
Liturgical Music in the diocese. He and I collaborated during the early part of the 1990s in the
Commission in Liturgy. Together, we introduced the musicians of the diocese to even more diverse
popular musical style such as jazz and rock music.
6 Truax argues a sound function is not only through its objective characteristics; rather, by subtle process
by which listeners and community perceive sound signals that are filtered not only through the senses by
history.
7 See also (Bauman and Briggs 1990, Matejka 1973, Titunik 1973)
8 See Barz 2003, Summit 2000, Sullivan 1997
9 See also Ingalls, M. 2011.
10 Google Maps. 2019. Accessed April 2, 2019.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Olongapo,+Zambales/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x3396711b9c32216b:0xa
080c3d36f2963a7?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiu8u6m8s_iAhWEfd4KHZRtClgQ8gEwFnoECAwQBA.
11 Filipinos from Cavity city brought with them their devotion to the Nuestra Senora Soledad de Porta

Vaga when they moved to the then sitio Olongapo. The devotion to the Blessed Mary under this title is still
very much popular in Barrio Barretto, one of the barangays of the city. In 1905, an image of San Roque
from Segovia, Spain was given to the Caviteños. San Roque became the patron saint of the sitio.
12 Many business establishments in the SBMA area have built a chapel attached to their establishment as

part of their business strategy.

34
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