By the 1960s, kulintang music would pique the interest of a new breed of Filipino academics apart from the dance folklorists: the ethnomusicologists. Jose Maceda, who would embark on the pioneering systematic survey of Philippine music in the 1950s at the University of the Philippines, had a particular interest in kulintang music (Dioquino 1982: 131). In 1963, he wrote his PhD Dissertation at the UCLA titled Music of the Maguindanaon in the Philippines wherein he devoted an entire section on the kulintang. Maceda chaired what was then known as the Department of Asian Music at the UP College of Music (subsequently named the Department of Music Research and presently the Department of Musicology). Under Maceda’s helm, the department would build what is until today the largest archival collection of Philippine music which made possible the in-depth study by various scholars. With the intention of disseminating research data to a wide range of readers which included school teachers, professionals and students, the department published a journal in Filipino. Later, these publications would be complemented by a number of recordings of traditional music, including Ang Kulintang sa Mindanao at Sulu (The Music of Kulintang in Mindanao and Sulu), a double LP released in 1977.

Apart from research, the mandate of UP’s Department of Asian Music was instruction. The department handled graduate seminars and undergraduate courses in musicology and ethnomusicology as well as performance classes on Asian instruments for music majors specializing in Western music. For this task, Maceda recruited instructors in Chinese Nan Kuan music, Indian sitar, Javanese gamelan, Kalinga music and Maguindanao kulintang. Whenever possible, he made sure that the instructors were natives of these music cultures. In 1968, he recruited Aga Mayo Butocan, a native of Maguindanao who was then finishing her undergraduate studies in Education in Manila (Liao 2013: 20). Butocan would remain teaching kulintang at UP until the present and would be solely responsible for developing a method of teaching kulintang performance to non-Mindanaon students and institutionalizing the pedagogy of kulintang in the university. I will return to discuss Butocan later in this essay.

Apart from Jose Maceda, other ethnomusicologists will pave the way for the migration of kulintang outside Mindanao. After concluding film documentation of music and dances in various parts of the Philippines in 1966, Robert Garfias returned to the University of Washington and proposed the establishment of a kulintang program at the Department of Ethnomusicology. For this, he invited Usopay Hamdag Cadar, an expert dabakan player who comes from a lineage of Maranaw musicians whom he met while doing fieldwork in Mindanao. Cadar began teaching at UW in 1968, marking the introduction of Maranaw kulintang on American soil. He would later earn his MA in the same university with the thesis titled The Maranao Kolintang Music: An Analysis of the Instruments, Musical Organization, Ethnologies, and Historical Documents (1971).

Cadar would be followed in 1976 by Maguindanaon kulintang expert Danongan Kalanduyan as an artist in residence at the University of Washington through a Rockefeller grant. Kalanduyan would spend eight years of residency before completing his MA in Ethnomusicology in 1984. During their stay at the university, Cadar and Kalanduyan taught kulintang music mostly to non-Filipino graduate students in ethnomusicology, establishing as well an ensemble that specialized in Maranaw and Maguindanao tradition. They emphasized teaching the music “in the traditional way, without the use of notation or scores, emphasizing the rudiments of memory and the rigors of repetition, because kulintang is strictly an oral tradition” (Cadar 1996: 133).

Later in the 1980s and upon the completion of their graduate studies, Cadar and Kalanduyan began to shift their focus from teaching non-Filipinos in the academic setting to various community-based Filipino-American performing organizations in different parts of the US. Among these groups were the Kalilang Kulintang Ensemble Inc based in San Francisco, the Tavahika Workshop Inc, later known as the Amauan Workshop Inc. In New York City, the Kulintang Arts, Inc, also in San Francisco, and the World Kulintang Institute and Research Studies in Los Angeles (Cadar 1996: 136-138). Cadar speaks of his decision to pursue the idea of community outreach among Filipino Americans:

My hope was that Filipinos living in America would be receptive, aspiring, and teachable. Part of the challenge was to find such people in the different communities to share this musical heritage with. The ultimate goal seemed to be the integral enrichment of whatever tradition was being passed from one generation to the next. (Cadar 1996: 133)

The article from 1996 quoted above reveals the challenges that Cadar and Kalanduyan faced in their engagement with Filipino American community organizations. Without the structure and rigor that the academic environment afforded them, they often experienced difficulty in bridging differences in artistic orientation and at times even felt exploited. In 1995, Danongan Kalanduyan received the prestigious National Heritage Fellow from the National Endowment for the Arts. After his passing in 2016, his students such as Bernard Ellorin continue to actively perform with various Filipino-American community troupes and university students as well. Usopay Cadar on the other hand maintains an active academic career in teaching and research, having recently completed a film documentary about the Philippine kulintang produced by the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan (Terada 2013). For this project, Cadar partnered with another ethnomusicologist, Yoshitaka Terada, who was a former member of Cadar’s kulintang ensemble at the University of Washington.

Another ethnomusicologist who contributed towards the popularity of kulintang is Filipino-American Ricardo Trimillos who wrote his PhD dissertation entitled Tradition and Repertoire in the Cultivated Music of the Tausug of Sulu, Philippines in 1972. Trimillos established a Philippine music program at the University of Hawaii which included kulintang music. He would maintain a close working relationship with several performing groups within Honolulu’s Filipino population. His greatest contribution perhaps is in the dissemination of knowledge about kulintang and Philippine music in general in the academe as a scholar, and, as a teacher, in the raising of a younger generation of ethnomusicologists who would pursue Philippine music studies. Among them is Bernard Ellorin, a former member of Kalanduyan’s ensemble in California who wrote his MA Thesis entitled Variants of kulintangan performance as a major influence of musical identity among the Sama in Tawitawi, Philippines in 2008.

As mentioned earlier, Bernard Ellorin studied kulintang under Kalanduyan as a member of the Samahan Filipino American Performing Arts and Education Center based in San Diego California (formerly the Samahan Dance Company). With funding from the National Endowment of the Arts, Samahan arranged for Kalanduyan, who was based in San Francisco, to visit twice a month to teach kulintang. Kalanduyan employed a method that he and Cadar developed while teaching at the University of Washington where pieces are cut up into melodic fragments and taught by rote, one fragment at a time until these are committed to memory by the students. At the Samahan, Ellorin was among five students in the training sessions that lasted an hour to 90 minutes. Kalanduyan would play the melodic fragments in the kulintang and these would be repeated by the students using the saronay, a smaller instrument normally used by children in place of the larger kulintang. Kalanduyan would emphasize mastery and rhythmic precision before the students play on the regular kulintang and move on to the other instruments of the ensemble). This is the same method that Kalanduyan used in teaching classes with as many as 25 students when he taught at the San Francisco State University.

The first piece that Kalanduyan would teach beginners was Kaditagaunan, a piece about two sisters setting out to plant sweet potatoes. This was followed by Sinulog a Kamamatuan (Sinulog in the Old Style), a piece that Kalanduyan learned from his mother. These lessons were interspersed with lots of storytelling about his childhood and life in Datu Piang. On several occasions, Kalanduyan organized visits to Mindanao with his students, which in turn encouraged local youth in Datu Piang to value their kulintang tradition even more.