Ugnayan
- José Maceda
As part of the multi-part project, José Maceda: Echoes Beyond the Archipelago, Western Front is pleased to present an installation of Ugnayan, a work for twenty radio frequencies.
Ugnayan (1974) is a 51-minute composition that consists of twenty separate tracks, each played on a different radio frequency simultaneously. Originally broadcast on New Year’s Day in 1974, the work famously produced a musical atmosphere at the scale of Manila, with all 37 radio stations in the metropolitan area broadcasting through their channels for Maceda’s sound diffusion. Millions of listeners tuned in, with more than one hundred of “Ugnayan Centers” established in Manila’s parks, plazas, and street corners to create public spaces for people to congregate with their personal radios. In 2020, curator Aki Onda recreated Ugnayan at Fridman Gallery, New York City, with the exhibition at Western Front marking the work’s Canadian debut.
About the Artist
José Maceda was a Filipino composer, pianist, and musicologist recognized for bridging his fieldwork on traditional Filipino music with techniques of European avant-garde music. His work uniquely fuses cutting-edge compositional techniques such as spatialization, attention to timbre, and musique concrète with traditional Asian instruments, rhythms, and structures.
About the Curator
Aki Onda is an artist, composer, performer, curator, and is currently Curator-at-Large at Western Front, Vancouver. Their works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, and historical. Crossing genres and disciplines, they have been active internationally in art, film, music and performance.
Accessibility
The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgement
With thanks to the UP Center for Ethnomusicology.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.