The Philippines is an archipelago in Southeastern Asia, between the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea, east of Vietnam and south of Taiwan.
Filipino Music
Ambahan music – highly developed traditional music and chanted poetry developed by the Hanunuo Mangyan of Oriental Mindoro, Philippines. Each poem consists of mostly seven-syllable lines that usually end with the syllable “an”. The Hanunuo now occupy mountainous and interior coastal areas within the districts of Mansalay and Bulalacao, municipalities of Oriental Mindoro and a portion of San Jose, Occidental Mindoro.
Unlike other indigenous arts that had already vanished, the Ambahan was preserved not only through the Hanunuo’s active practice of their oral tradition but also because this poetry had been engraved through centuries on surfaces of diminutive bamboo containers, with the use of an indigenous syllabic writing system known as the surat-Mangyan. Inscribing these ancient poems with small knives on bamboo proved to be a most effective tool in transmitting this ancient form of poetry into the eve of the twenty first century.
Filipino Musicians
