Growing up in a house of music
I am asked all the time: what is it like to come from your family? So here’s a real answer: Every weekend, either a Saturday or a Sunday, it doesn’t matter really, we all come together for a family lunch.
These meals are planned way ahead of time. My mother plans it mostly for Elenita Corpus-Bolipata the pleasure of planning seeing all her children. It is also planned ahead of time because we have different gustatory requirements and all our “happinesses” (if such a word exists and if it does not, it should) are important to her.
Let me introduce us the way our parents would: there is Jed, the pianist; Chino, the cellist; Plet, the painter; Coke, the violinist; Non the lawyer; and then me, the writer. I never knew how unusual this manner of introduction was until only recently when my husband pointed out that in his family, people were introduced only by names plus order of birth, and not by the choices they had made of what it is they do in life.
(This is old news now but I hope you will indulge me. There’s a bit of a need to explain who the Bolipata Brothers are, primarily because only one brother actively performs these days, and we are more known now as the family who put up Casa San Miguel, an arts center in Zambales founded by my brother Coke in 1994. But before all this, and really 1994 was about giving back, my brothers were premier Filipino musicians who studied abroad and reaped a harvest of awards for the country. Together, they toured all over America and Europe before disbanding and pursuing their own personal pursuits. Many people wonder why two of my brothers gave up performing and Jed explained it this way to me: “If you’ve been performing since you were 10, at some point it becomes tiring and you ache for other things, other pursuits or other creative endeavors.” For Jed, it is filmmaking and writing that is at the core of his artistic expression. For Chino, it is playing cello for himself and his family.)
Jed is not at this table as he lives in New York. Chino and Coke come to the table from their respective apartments. Plet comes all the way from Zambales with her husband, the painter Elmer Borlongan. Non and I live in our parents’ compound and we come with our husbands and children. Yes, my fatherRicardo Bolipata would say if he were still alive, there are no daughters-in-law at this table. Until the day he died, my father was match-making nurses at the hospital for his bachelor sons. How he must have wanted his name to continue and how ironic that it has in a way he never imagined. But for now, it is my mother who reigns over these lunches. She sits at the head of a table full of artists as she has done all these years.
I’m sure most of you want to know: what was in the water that my mother drank that made us so?
For one, blame it on genetics. My mother’s father was Ramon Corpus, first Filipino concert violinist and first Filipino to study music abroad at the London Guildhall. He graduated in America at the New England Conservatory of Music, the premier conservatory of its time. I suspect though that the first gene that can be blamed was that of a great-great grandfather, Vicente Ferriols, from Valencia, Spain, a conservatory-trained flutist on the Spanish armada that came to our shores. Transfixed by a Filipina’s beauty named Lucia del Fierro, he set his roots here. Vicente was the archivist on this ship too and that perhaps explains the storytelling talent everyone in our family has.
My mother believes that this one moment brought together many elements — the centrality of Zambales to our creative spirit and the centrality of love and all its attendant complications. But there is still another gene that makes this story even more complicated. My grandfather married a Magsaysay and from that gene pool perhaps came discipline. But here’s an even greater suspicion: how completely possible it is that it is my father’s history that makes us who we are. Although he was a businessman, he was at heart a poet and certainly his temperament was artistic, tempestuous and difficult to predict. More proof perhaps was his ability to make things happen from nothing.
When my parents married, their business was a publishing house. One of their publications was called Philippines International, a literary magazine, and even then, a life in the arts could not sustain them. To augment their income, they also printed yearbooks and schoolbooks. As more and more children came (and this I can imagine because I am a parent now who attempts to live on my art), he must have realized that it would just not be enough.
I came as last child when my siblings were already artists so I can no longer imagine what our earlier life was like. But my mother remembers: “You cannot imagine how wonderful it was for them to come home from lessons and be told that they were beyond their years.”
Jed, the oldest, lived in our hardiest years and he practiced the piano on a book placed on my mother’s lap. It would take a long time before my parents could even afford Coke and Chino their own instruments.
You cannot talk about the Bolipata brothers without ultimately talking about the Bolipata sisters. Ours was a symbiotic relationship. Every night when we would pray the rosary, my mother punctuated the end with this line: “Dear God, thank you for the talents of the boys and the goodness of the girls.”
It was both lesson and prophecy. For the first two decades of our family life, the instructions were simple. The brothers pursued their music and the girls aided them with their goodness. Concretely that meant that Plet went abroad primarily to play guardian to prodigy brothers. That meant waking up the brothers and balancing their checkbooks and feeding them dinner and getting them to their rehearsals and shouting “bravo!” at concerts.
That meant that when they were home from studies in Juilliard, our lives (Non’s and mine) in Manila shut down to accommodate the string of rehearsals and concerts and performances. We skipped school to be their assistants and because we always slept so late due to rehearsals and concerts. Between us and among us as siblings, there were no hard feelings. If anything, it was a heady time and we grew up always knowing that we always had each other, no matter what.
In terms of our own artistic pursuits, however, these would come for the girls much, much later. For Plet, it would mean becoming a painter in her 30s in spite having known of that desire since she was a child. For me, it made me a closet writer for years. But that’s another novel.
When I was born, we moved into a house in Marikina where we had very few neighbors. You’ll laugh now but we had a stable of horses, my parents bred champion dogs and our garden was as large as a small park so our days were filled with horseback riding and playing with dogs aptly named Melody, Sonata and Brahms.
My father attached speakers from one end of the house to another so that when Schubert was played, it was heard everywhere. Our basement was a library and a music center and our nights were spent performing. The brothers would play (and really to me it was play) their instruments and we girls would sing. On some nights we presented plays originally written by my brothers and we would make tickets and posters, never mind that only Ma and Pa were our audience. On rainy days, my father would take out a long table and we would paint the rain away. We would tack our artworks on the long wall in the hallway.
These were happy, happy times. If you were to ask me therefore, apart from genetics, what made us expressive, it would be this kind of upbringing: an upbringing that valued and upheld the practice of fine arts.
This is much clearer to me now with the new generation of Bolipatas. They are visual artists and musicians and dancers and it is amazing to me how organic their talent is. Perhaps backed by history, they are less fearful and more certain because they know that they can run to a family member for guidance and even for apprenticeship. Maybe it is nature. But then without support, without the necessary scaffolding for art to flourish (you should see my kids’ calendar of activities: it’s filled with artistic events!), it may eventually be un-chosen. So maybe it’s nurture, too.
I was once asked if being a Bolipata has an impact on my writing. I think that when you grow up, you only know family as family. It was only when I met other people that I realized how different we are — but that’s a truth about all families.
The impact on my art is definitely an exposure to it from birth, much like my mother, whose musical language is extensive. Its impact is on my aesthetic sensibility and my measure of beauty or what makes something beautiful. Its impact is on an understanding of audience and of having a responsibility to that audience. It is also in my own estimation of myself as I sit at family lunch, judging my own development. I grew up with music of the highest order all my life. Surely that has an impact on how I have developed?
More than anything, as I sit with them, every Saturday or Sunday lunch, it doesn’t matter really, as we celebrate each achievement at this table, I realize that as in all families, my family has given me a soft place on which to fall.
