In September 2011 While Researching at the National Archive of Vietnam in Hanoi, I Had the Good Fortune of Catching Bizet's Ca

CODA In September 2011 while researching at the National Archive of Vietnam in Hanoi, I had the good fortune of catching Bizet’s Carmen at the Hanoi Opera House [Nhà hát lớn Hà Nội] on the occasion of the theatre’s cen- tennial. The production featured Vietnamese soprano Vanh Khuyen as Carmen, tenors Thanh Binh and Nguyen Vu alternating as Don Jose, and Manh Dung as Escamillo. The production was accompanied by the Orchestra of Vietnam National Opera and Ballet conducted by British conductor Graham Sutcliffe. It was directed by Swedish director Helena Rohr, who had worked previously with the company through a cultural exchange between the Swedish and Vietnamese governments. Rohr’s staging of the opera was adapted to contemporary Hanoi setting: The tobacco factory was replaced with a Hanoi garment sweatshop. The opera house, built during the French occupation and finished in 1911, initially housed European opera and theatre companies performing for the European population until the end of the French rule. After the indepen- dence of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the opera house served as an important political and government meeting house, occasionally hosting performing arts events. In 1995, the theatre was renovated and since then has been home to Vietnamese and Western classical concert music, opera, drama, and ballet. In 2012, while attending the Australasian Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies Conference in Melbourne, I attended Prof. Barbara © The Author(s) 2018 225 m. yamomo, Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869–1946, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69176-3 226 CODA Hatley’s presentation of Il La Galigo, an opera conceived by Robert Wilson based on Rhoda Grauer’s adaptation of the Buginese scroll epic, Sureq Galigo of South Sulawesi. The production toured Europe, Australia, and the US between 2004 and 2008. For its final performance in 2011, the opera was ‘brought home’ to Sulawesi. The performance caught the interest of the local government and led to the proposal to create an annual festival to stage the opera to honour the Buginese epic as a UNESCO-declared cultural heritage, which would have had given the production an extended lease of life after touring the Western opera cir- cuit. However, nothing has been heard about this venture since. A few years earlier, while living and working in Bangkok, I assisted a small opera production company in staging adaptations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Donizetti Gaetano, and Christoph Willibald Gluck operas. I also saw productions of the much acclaimed Bangkok Opera under the artistic direction of Somtow Sucharitkul. In 2003, Sucharitkul inaugurated the Bangkok Opera-Richard Wagner Opera Circle, which aims to stage the full Wagner’s Ring from an entirely Asian perspective. Through this project he claims Southeast Asia will be the next Wagnerian frontier.1 Earlier in the 1960s and 1970s Philippines, Imelda Marcos wanted to build an image of Manila as the Southeast Asian cultural capital by estab- lishing the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The original intention was to make this centre the home of a Philippine opera company. The opera company did not materialise, but the CCP became one of the most important cultural institutions of the country.2 Though seemingly disparate, it is a point of interest how opera kept reoccurring uncannily in the Southeast Asian cities. The various cases of opera’s (attempts for) institutionalisation are also attempts to claim or perform modernity—both symbolically through the physical buildings and their performances, and acoustically in its particular musico-theatrical medium. The particular use of the opera form/genre as the sonic articula- tion of modernity now does not just pluralise the spatial contexts of modernities, but it also shows how it could temporally recur in different historical contexts. In these rearticulations of the same repertoire being performed in newly industrialising Southeast Asian nation-states, new soni of acoustic modernity are being reconstituted through the old medium. If we are to account for the events that I described above as isolated cases that are specific only to the cities where they were happening, or if we do not contextualise them within a longer track of global cultural history, they may appear as aberrations. The investigations I undertook in CODA 227 this book explore the different trajectories of modernities and their acoustic formulations. The scope of my research covers an earlier period of globalisation prior to the establishment of modern and postcolonial nation-states in Asia Pacific. The subsequent period, where my research ends, would reframe the entire region towards the logic of nation-building and a global internationalism. By this time, many previous translocal processes were subsumed into international diplomacy, controlled by inter- state labour immigration, or completely severed due to national interests. Some were held off until the twentieth century when these dormant archaic cultural practices would have been reactivated and would be con- sidered novel global cultural practices. In Chap. 3, I discussed how the colonial cities in Southeast and East Asia were already entrenched within the translocal modern cultural eco- nomics of the late-nineteenth century. However, the degree to which the colonial expatriates and the locals in the different cities were involved in the cultural production and consumption processes varied widely. I sur- veyed concomitant events in the different colonial cities in Southeast Asia, however, my research focused primarily on the case of Manila as an early modern global city that became an important nexus of cultural exchange in the modern globalisation of the nineteenth century. I historicise Manila’s entanglement with the early global processes and how it was intertwined with the different urban capitals in the Asia Pacific region. Inwardly, the arrival of travelling musicians, theatre, and music-drama companies linked Manila to the burgeoning global entertainment net- work. Outwardly, Manila became an important source of musicians who were to be engaged in the modernisation projects of other Asia Pacific cities. My research historicises the translocal processes of how music (as media) and its migration constituted modern subjectivities of the citizens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian cities. To explain how modernity was imagined, heard, and embodied, I explored the intersec- tions of sound studies, theatre history, musicology, and performance studies. I synaesthetically compared Hans Belting’s iconology theory3 into what I propose as an Anthropology of Sound. Within this framework, I further argue that the sound of modernity is inextricably enmeshed with music (as its mediated form) and its human embodiment. Taking the performing bodies of the Manila musicians as the locus of sound, I argue that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversi- 228 CODA fied through their multiple subjectivities within the entanglements of the modernist projects of empire and nation as these intertwined with the individual agencies of the European colonisers and local citizens. Although I have strived to trace the different threads of the translocal cultural processes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, my project is program- matically hinged on Manila due to my limitations on time, language, resources, and personal biases. If this endeavour is to engage further the entanglements of the interconnected cultural history of the region, this research agenda will benefit from the interdisciplinary and cooperative efforts of different specialists who are able to work collaboratively within a global historical perspective. NOTES 1. “Richard Wagner Circle Bangkok,” http://www.wagnerthai.com/RWCB/ RWCB.html 2. See: Christi-Anne Salazar Castro and Timothy Rice, “Music, Politic, and the Nation at the Cultural Center of the Philippines,” in Ethnomusicology (Los Angeles: University of California, 2001). 3. See: Hans Belting, “The Locus of Images: The Living Body,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 37–61; Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 302–319. REFEREncES PUBLISHED SOURcES Affairs, Division of Insular. 1901. Monthly Summary of Commerce of the Philippine Islands. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Agnew, Vanessa. 2008. Orpheus Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Agoncillo, Teodoro A. 1990, c.1977. History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing Co. Aguilar, Filomeno V., Jr. 2003. Global Migrations, Old Forms of Labor, and New Transborder Class Relations. Southeast Asia Studies 41 (2): 137–161. ———. 2010. Routes to Modernity: Philippine Labor Migration in the Age of Empire. In Filipines, Un País Entre Dos Imperis, 54–89. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Alvarez, Santiago V. 1992. The Katipunan and the Revolution: Memoirs of a General. Trans. P.C.S. Malay. Reprint. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Amattayakul, Poonpit. 2011. มหาอุปรากร ในสมัยรัชกาลที่ 6. In พระบาทสมเด็จพระมงกุฎเกล้าเจ้าอยู่หัวกับการดนตรี: เฉลิมพระเกียรติในวโรกาสครบรอบร้อยปีบรมราชาภิเษกสมโภช, 134–138. Bangkok: Mahidol University. Anderson, Benedict. 2008. Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Language in Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, 3–4. Quezon City: Ateneo

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