Join us at the Music Café in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music to celebrate and learn about the Philippine bamboo music of the Talaandig Indigenous community of Bukidnon!

If you’re interested in Indigenous Philippine music, ethnomusicology or innovative bamboo instruments, come along to a fascinating morning of insight, Filipino food and great music.

Celebrate Philippine bamboo music and learn about conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork in Indigenous communities, with a short talk and documentary by ethnomusicologist Starr Abelardo on her research and the music of the Talaandig community. This event will feature light Filipino refreshments and music.

This event is free with registration and open to everyone! Please feel welcome to bring along your friends, family and peers.

Please note that this event will be filmed and photographed. If you have any concerns, please speak with staff at the event.

About the exhibition:

Resilient Resonance: Placing Bamboo at the Intersection of Culture and Nature and the Case of Philippine Bamboo Music is on display at the Conservatorium Library until mid-October. This exhibition explores how Philippine bamboo music redefines resilience by blurring the dichotomies of tradition/innovation, foreign/local, and culture/commodity. Bamboo honours the varying degrees of interconnection and interdependence between these elements, cultivating a deeper understanding of the nuances in music-cultures. The resilient resonances of bamboo music intertwine with the Talaandig community’s reverence towards nature, economic pursuits, and tenacity to reaffirm their identity according to their own terms.

About the researcher:

Starr Abelardo is a SCM PhD candidate, casual academic, and research assistant. She recently conducted fieldwork in Lantapan, Bukidnon in Mindanao Philippines where she worked with the Talaandig community – a lumad group (the collective term for non-Muslim Indigenous peoples of Mindanao). She has also worked in the Bamboo Musical Instruments Innovation Research and Development Program, and the UNESCO Culture 2030 Thematic Indicators Project in the Philippines.

This event is brought to you by the University of Sydney Library in collaboration with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.