Amazing Grace

It was an evening in December 1993 at Bistro sa Amoranto, a sliver of time in total darkness, during an all-Luzon blackout. Grace Nono was onstage. It was a magical night; perhaps the moon shone, but it shone less brightly than her voice. As one fan recalled, in a posting to an internet bulletin board, "Her voice was enough to power the Luzon grid!"

There are many things remarkable about Grace Nono. One is definitely her voice–so different when speaking, soft and at times tinged with a bit of huskiness, and when singing, a voice so clear and flowing, strong and powerful, coming from deep within. Her songs are many times a swirling eddy of sound and words, soaring anthems, rhythmic and hypnotic; sometimes soft, fragile lullabies that lift to a rise unseen. She’s no soprano, not in the academic sense, but her voice shimmers, like a swath of light in a dark sky, moving and changing shape. And when she sings, many times in tongues we do not comprehend, she chants, she wails, she laments, she celebrates, she worships.

The living room of Grace’s Quezon City home is warm in the afternoon, bathed in browns of mostly wooden furniture, accented by native weaves thrown here and there. There’s music waiting to be made as musical instruments are very much part of the room. There’s a Maguindanao kulintang, a Vietnamese wooden xylophone and a knot of chimes, still waiting to be hung, resting on a chair. There’s another set of gongs on the table given to her by T’boli culture specialist Myrna Pula and a gabbang, a southern musical instrument but created by someone from the North.

But today it is quiet in the home Grace makes with her husband, creative partner and collaborator, Bob Aves, and Tao, her daughter from her first marriage, a scholar and folk dance major at the Philippine High School for the Arts in Makiling, Laguna. "There’s so much music in our heads," she says. "To relax, we like to listen to silence."

Grace Nono is known in the local music scene as the diva of ethnic-inspired music, of alternative music, of world music. A much awarded artist who has five solo albums–Tao Music (1992) that carried the hit Salidumay, Opo (1995), Sang Buhay, One Life (1997), Hulagpos: Women Breaking Free From Violence (1998) with 11 Filipina artists, and her recently launched Diwa (2002) which won a Catholic Mass Media Award for Album of the Year last October.

Together with her husband, she also runs Tao Music, an independent recording label that produces the music of other artists including traditional Filipino musicians and instrument-alists from all over the country. Tao Music has produced CDs of the percussion group Pinikpikan, Sindao Banisil, a respected performer of Maranaw traditional music, Aga Mayo Butocan, a Maguindanaon instrumentalist and player of the kulintang, music and chanted poetry of the Hanunuo Mangyan of Oriental Mindoro and, most recently, two other CDs which she launched together with her award-winning Diwa, Mendung Sabal’s Tudbulul Lunay Mogul: T’boli Epic Hero of Lunay, the place of Gongs and Music and Kahimunan featuring the cultural music of the Agusan-Manobo, Higaonon, Banwaon Artists of Agusan del Sur.

Grace also heads the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts which aims, among others, to research, document, help transmit and further develop the various indigenous cultural and artistic traditions of the Philippines and to encourage Filipinos to preserve cultural traditions while assisting them with tools for survival through education and various community initiatives.

She also runs a shop in Greenbelt called Living Culture. It’s a tiny store showcasing her explorations into Philippine traditional crafts. The store, says Grace, is an experiment, established to make traditional Philippine crafts available to the general public. Here you will find trinkets that are her collaborations with the Mangyan women beadmakers of Mindoro, ornaments from South Cotabato, traditional weaves from Ilocos, the Cordilleras, books on Philippine culture, Tao Music publications and CDs. Living Culture also serves as an umbrella for other Filipino artisans whose works are being exhibited there.

The label "diva" is deceiving, she says, pointing to the dictionary meaning of the word as "one who is a prima donna". Perhaps it is an image created by her onstage persona, she ruminates. "Maybe they see that kind of aura when I’m on stage but they don’t know what I do when I’m offstage and I do a lot of dirty work. People don’t see that…they only see the tip of the iceberg when you’re in performance. But they don’t know what mountains I have to climb before I can step on that stage and sing."

The mountains she has to climb are both literal and figurative. She’s not just a singer, but a composer as well. But creating the kind of music she makes isn’t as simple as tickling keys on the piano. Every song, every tune Grace composes entails a journey, one that often is off the beaten path and filled with encounters with people she calls her teachers–the culture bearers. Culture bearers, according to Grace, are those who live their cultures–shamans, chanters, instrumentalists, musicians. Like Mendung Sabal who is an epic chanter, a settler of disputes, a weaver who Grace first heard of from a foreigner friend.

"The sources of my music are not readily available, not in books, not in libraries, not the conservatory, not in mass media. I have to find my own sources, my own teachers, and my teachers don’t even necessarily see themselves as teachers but just the fact that I learn from them makes me their student. That’s as far as sources are concerned. In terms of method, it’s really much more complex than just a student-teacher relationship, it isn’t like going to a school where the teacher has prepared a syllabus in advance. Here, the student creates his own syllabus and there’s no ready curriculum."

To illustrate her meaning, Nono cites the first song in her Diwa CD, Dosayan, defined in the album sleeve as a song form of the Kalinga people of the Cordilleras. This particular piece is sung to Kabuniyan, the Creator and Skygod. Dosayan was taught to her by Arnel Banasan, and was arranged by her husband who also did additional percussions.

"Dosayan is a Kalinga prayer. The person who taught me the piece is an old friend. I knew him from Baguio Arts Guilds days. He’s a Kalinga…and I asked him if he could compose a song using a traditional Kalinga mode but expressing a contemporary theme. So that’s what he did. We had to meet in Baguio so I could learn the piece from him and you don’t learn it once. Every so often when we had the chance to see each other, I would verify the information. So in one way, you can say it’s parallel to scientific investigation because you gather data and then you verify it. In this case, you don’t have to problematize it. It’s a piece that you don’t just ponder about, it’s a piece that you have to embody. There are parallelisms in the scholar’s and the artist’s method but they are definitely not the same. For me, in my own experience anyway, the artist’s intent is not just to learn something intellectually…you have to sing it like it’s your own."

Another song from Diwa is Pangulawit which was taught to her by the composer’s son, Datu Migketay Victorino Saway. She had asked him to teach her a prayer because prayer, in a sense, is the theme of Diwa. Pangulawit is described as an adaptation of a sala or vocal music form traditional to the Talaandig of Bukidnon, with texts composed by Datu Kinulintang. The piece is an expression of a longing, a wish for life to return to a state of oneness.

Says Grace of her work with Datu Saway: "We had sessions several times and I let him hear the recordings. When I sent him the final recording, he met with some elders in his group and they listened to it. His brother, Waway Saway, a musician, texted me and said positive daw ang response ng mga elders. I felt so good…even if my rendition is never perfect… because coming from a different culture you can never duplicate and it should not be your intent as well. My intent is to find my own voice through the mirror of the other…and that’s very clear for me, it’s not to imitate every nuance but to capture the essence while expressing it in my own language, in my own way, using my own voice."

There was a time when she didn’t make music that was her own. From the 80s to the early 90s, she was performing in folk houses, hotel lounges and rock clubs. "I was just like everybody else, copying, imitating the latest trends. But in the 90s after a decade of copying, I just couldn’t see meaning in it anymore. I said, is there another way of doing this? Of being a musican where I could express myself at the same time parang carry my culture with me because I already knew that you can never be as good as the culture you’re copying."

The turning point, Grace recalls, came during the 1990 Baguio Arts Festival. (She is a founding member of the Baguio Arts Guild). She was singing cover versions of rock music. "I said, this can’t be! I’m an artist. I’m supposed to be creating music and if possible create music in relation to my culture. I better rethink everything and so the process started…not really formal research at that point but just finding people, what they call ‘culture bearers’ who could inform me not only about music."

As a theater arts major at the Philippine High School for the Arts, then later an Art Studies major at UP and now a graduate student of Philippine Studies also at UP, Grace says she is not just interested in the formal elements of music but also the culture from which the music sprung.

"My background is multi-disciplinary so I relate music with culture in general, with education, with social work. My husband, on the other hand, comes from a background in pure music. He’s a composition major from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He’s a genius!"

But it took a while, says Grace, before she found what she was looking for, before she found the songs she wanted to sing. Today, she is a stalwart of what’s called World Music. "I don’t know what world music really is," she laughs. "Who should we ask? From my little understanding, world music is really a fusion of traditional elements with contemporary popular music. If that is how you define world music, then I could fall in that category."

Nirmal Ghosh, an Indian-German journalist who lived in the Philippines in the early 90s, writes: "Diwa is a treasure chest; each time you delve into it you find something new and interesting, and the experience of listening to it fills you in the same way that the rising sun warms your bones on a cold morning in the northern mountains."

"I worked on this CD for four years," says Grace, "figuring out what to do. With a new album, I should have something new to say because I discovered some new things in my life. Otherwise I’d be repeating myself. That’s completely boring. The theme of the album Diwa came in the end. I was really searching. I had all these songs that I felt an affinity with. But how would I tie them all together? So I needed to have a concept to make my presentation coherent or buo."

Making Diwa was a tedious and exhilarating journey. "In seeking my voice, I listened to the spirit speaking in day-to-day situations, in dreams and other people’s stories, permeating the air in mountain clearings, river valleys, backstreets…..as such the voice that you hear in this album has become a merging of many voices."

There is advocacy in her work because, she says, "I’m advocating for education to be not only reflective of western values and tastes but of our heritage. Our educational system is completely lacking in the indigenous perspective." The response from her audience has been positive. A modest appraisal, considering all the awards she has won–Catholic Mass Media Award for excellence in music (1994, 1996) and Album of the Year (2002), Katha Best World Music Album (1996, 1998, 1999), toym Award for the Performing Arts (1994), towns Award for the Performing Arts (2001).

"They’re all important to me, but my best prize is my daughter Tao. Well, its completely beyond my control how people react to my work but let’s just say I’m planting seeds about matters that have been forgotten."