UYAGI: First Songs

By Chin-Chin Gutierrez
“In UYAYI, we find snapshots of private parent-child moments from various parts of the country, presenting styles that are as varied as the lyrical contents," says ethnomusicologist Verne de La Pena of the UP College of Music, who provided academic direction to the project. “This collection deals with an act that perhaps all human societies have done for ages-putting their babies to sleep by singing lullabies."
Among the featured artists and arrangers in the album are Bo Razon, Joey Ayala, Tots Tolentino, Malou Matute and Rachel Conanan.
The double CD is credited as an “intimate advocacy” and performed by Chin-Chin Gutierrez, multi-talented recording artist and film persona. Gutierrez intimates that “music in this case, is not just a craft, a cultural heritage, or an item to be bought or sold. It is a map to our precious, collective homes-to a dwelling place outside the boundaries of my Manila, your fishing boat or their huts. ... This is my dream-that we may know our land and our people so intimately, it would be difficult not to care for and sustain their lives."
The three-year project is the first known compilation of documented “cradle music” interpreted by a pop artist from personal research, interviews and recordings with various tribal and linguistic groups in the Philippines.
Songs Gutierrez learned and those passed on to her were free-flowing improvisations, mostly spontaneous and unstructured. She collected almost a hundred folk tunes, learning to sing them in their original languages and understanding their lyrics through the basic translations provided by the sources themselves.
The songs that made it to the album were carefully selected to represent the different bioregions of the country, classified into burol (hills), kapatagan (plains), baybayin (coasts) and kabundukan (mountains). (Publisher’s release)