Before Their Music Stopped: Manila’s Spanish Military Regimental Bands at the End of the 19th Century

Author(s): Summers, William John | Abstract: Utilizing the contemporary daily, Spanish-language newspapers surviving from the final three decades of 19th–century Manila, this study investigates the extensive activities of the eight regimental bands stationed in Manila, the Philippines. Even though these dailies served as powerful tools for the imposition of colonial subjugation and disenfranchisement on the indigenous Filipino population, they also reveal that the regimental bands were the most active musical ensembles during that era. This review of the papers began by chronicling the frequency of the many free, weekly, outdoor concerts that total more than 2,700 performances.nnA related goal was to identify as many of the musical pieces presented in band arrangements during these performances. The newspapers also published additional valuable articles that discuss a variety of unique or unusual events involving the regimental band’s contributions to major military maneuvers, special occasions of state in honor of the Royal Family, and a set of seven concerts performed on consecutive days by one band during a major, religious feast.The dailies also permit us to follow the work of the bands during a period of crisis and some danger. From August 1896 to December 1897, the Spanish Military was engaged in a war with Filipino insurrectionists fighting for independence. The Military command responded to this threat in two ways that affected the bands. The first was the creation of a new regiment of indigenous-heritage soldiers to protect the capital from invasion by their countrymen. That new regiment, The Loyal Volunteers, also had a new band attached to it. Like all the bands, this new one was made up entirely of Filipino men.nnA second response affecting all of the bands was the order for the Band Masters to include in their public concerts a steady stream of newly composed works promoting the Spanish propaganda opposing the war. Though the revolt was ended with a peace treaty in late December 1897, just four months later, on 1 May, the fate of the Spanish colony was sealed when the U.S. armed forces invaded the Philippines. As the Spanish Military regiments exited the country, the work of the bands ended. A new period of brutal colonial subjugation of the Filipino people had commenced.

The dailies also permit us to follow the work of the bands during a period of crisis and some danger. From August 1896 to December 1897, the Spanish Military was engaged in a war with Filipino insurrectionists fighting for independence. The Military command responded to this threat in two ways that affected the bands. The first was the creation of a new regiment of indigenous-heritage soldiers to protect the capital from invasion by their countrymen. That new regiment, The Loyal Volunteers, also had a new band attached to it. Like all the bands, this new one was made up entirely of Filipino men. A second response affecting all of the bands was the order for the Band Masters to include in their public concerts a steady stream of newly composed works promoting the Spanish propaganda opposing the war. Though the revolt was ended with a peace treaty in late December 1897, just four months later, on 1 May, the fate of the Spanish colony was sealed when the U.S. armed forces invaded the Philippines. As the Spanish Military regiments exited the country, the work of the bands ended. A new period of brutal colonial subjugation of the Filipino people had commenced.
Los diarios también nos permiten seguir el trabajo de las bandas durante un período de crisis y algún peligro. Desde agosto de 1896 hasta diciembre de 1897, las Fuerzas Armadas españolas se enzarzaron en una guerra con los insurrectos filipinos que luchaban por la independencia. El mando militar respondió a esta amenaza de dos formas que afectaron a las bandas. El primero fue la creación de un nuevo regimiento de soldados de herencia indígena para proteger la capital de la invasión de sus compatriotas.
Palabras claves: Filipinas, Manila, colonia española, banda militar, siglo XIX, festivales religiosos, Revolución filipina, Edi Remenyi During the second half of the 19th century, Manila, the Philippines, was a large, active, industrialized, cosmopolitan port city that served as the Spanish colony's administrative and cultural capital of what was known as Las Islas Filipinas. 1 By the year 1850, approximately 250,000 people resided in greater Manila. The ever-changing and diverse demographic makeup of the population tabulated by the colonial government included a very significant majority of residents who were of native descent. Smaller groups of mixed race Asian/Europeans, Asian immigrants, a comparatively small number of Spaniards, plus foreigners from Europe and the Americas completed the urban population picture. 2 Each month, approximately 150 ships from many countries entered and exited the expansive Bay of Manila. Again, local governmental estimates of the scope of the trade that passed through the capital suggest that in the closing thirty years of the 19th century, Manila was an extraordinarily active and bustling trade center. Although a great deal has been known concerning this long-established Spanish colonial capital (1571-1898), certain parts of its history, especially the last half of the 19th century, are only now receiving attention from scholars.
One of the least understood topics, Manila's professional performance life, suffers from an evidentiary vacuum that has obscured large parts of these copious activities. The principal forces preventing the appearance of a study such as this one before now, one devoted to the extensive, public, performances of the capital's professional Spanish regimental bands, can be explained in large part by three inter-leaved events in Manila's past. On May 1, 1898, this port was subjected to a colonial invasion by the armed forces of the U.S., mobilized to pursue the Spanish American War. The cruel conquest that ensued, the ruthless dismantling of the civilian and governmental institutions, and the complete re-subjugation of the population of the archipelago by the new U.S. colonial occupiers forced a myriad of extreme changes onto the way of life in the capital. This new government's unrelenting campaign to de-Hispanify and de-Catholicize the population produced extensive scholarly embargoes, both within the archipelago and internationally, upon most matters involving the entire Spanish colonial period. 3 A second and related catastrophe, one with far more significant direct impact upon Manila's physical and material history, befell the Philippines in 1941 when the Japanese Imperial armed forces invaded and occupied the U.S. colony during World War II. Three years later, in 1945, the battle by the re-assembled colonial U.S. and Filipino armed forces to retake Manila from the Japanese Empire raged for approximately thirty days, ending on March 3. According to the U.S.  War Office, the human and physical devastation wrought throughout the capital was second only to that found in the European city of Warsaw, Poland. 4 The losses of all kinds were staggering, including the destruction of more than 690,000 volumes in the National Library, as well as the complete loss of virtually all of the historical music and dramatic performance materials from churches, schools, and theaters. 5 This mayhem also finally erased most of the surviving physical traces of the capital's performance history before 1900. Digging out from these interlinked disasters has taken a very long time and remains ongoing. This study represents another step toward illuminating the public, professional performance life of this colonial capital.
In a 2015 article based upon an examination of surviving issues of the 19 th -century Manila daily newspaper the Diario de Manila, I presented some of the first evidence in the 21st century that the research tide had taken a new direction. That study, devoted to the performance history of the first European opera company to visit the capital, Alfred Maugard's Compañía de ópera lirica y francesa, drew on unexamined data to reconstruct the company's performance calendar for 1865. Maugard had purchased advertising space in the newspaper the Diario de Manila from August to December. 6 Those advertisements and this landmark moment in the capital's music history were not discussed in print before. The present study reports on information recovered primarily from another of Manila's daily papers, El Comercio. 7 The preserved issues (1869-1873, 1875-1883, 1885-1898), all surviving in whole or in part in microfilm copies, shed direct light upon the work of the seven military regimental bands serving in Manila during the twenty-seven years 1871-1898. This newly-revealed data illuminates one of the most active, colonial concert traditions existing in the capital before the U.S. invasion. The Spanish language press, i.e., the research tools used for this study, were almost exclusively in the hands of Spanish expatriates. As a modern communication medium, these daily papers were perfectly positioned, sadly, to perpetuate the profound ills of colonialism. 8 In the particular case of the professional performing arts, they provide examples of this negative impact, some of which we will see below. On the other hand, the daily papers offer today a novel and useful source for certain types of information highly relevant to the facts of daily life in this city.
In this study, our attention will be focused first on the regimental wind bands' free, weekly, public concerts performed on the city's main paseos and public squares. The papers also comment on other activities undertaken by these ensembles, such as their contributions to major military pageants, their participation during various formal governmental occasions of state, and some rare but spectacular appearances they made in the city's theaters. Lastly, through band music's prism, we can examine a critical turning point in the history of the colony, the impact of the Filipino revolution of 1896 on the bands' performance life. Though this point will be made again below, except for the Spaniards who served as the conductors of many of the ensembles, all of the bandsmen were of native birth and held the rank of enlisted soldiers. This was a racial requirement. These seven regimental wind bands have received recent scholarly attention in a pioneering 2014 study by Arwin Q. Tan. 9 His article was the first in the 21st century to focus on these ensembles. Tan describes their origins, makeup, and the design of the bands. He also discusses their musical activities in Manila and identifies many leading conductors, or Músico mayor. His discussion of the social milieu within which the bandsmen worked reveals a great deal about colonial culture's oppressive and corrosive forces upon their lives. 10 The information offered here from the daily press expands in two significant ways what was known in 2014, most especially in the area of the particulars of the bands' performance activities, and they also reveal the diversity of titles and composers of the hundreds of works that were played. These data categories seemed to be of primary importance for a follow-up study devoted to the public performance lives of these ensembles. 10 Tan, Bands, was a pioneering work, and it is particularly helpful as it gathered and synthesized previously known information on the work of Spanish regimental bands and also detailed the individual contributions of influential Filipino musicians. The importance of the role of the bands as institutions for music education is also discussed on pp. 64-65.
In 1869, Joaquín de Loyzaga, a Spanish entrepreneur living in Manila, launched his new, afternoon daily paper, El Comercio. 11 Three years later, in 1871, he expanded his editorial policy by adding a new column titled "Música." "Música" reported some of the forthcoming performances of the seven Spanish regimental bands stationed in and around the capital. These columns were not advertisements, such as those purchased by Alfred Maugard in 1865. In actuality, they were public service announcements aimed at informing his Spanish-literate readers of the particulars of the free weekly public concerts played on the plazas and paseos of the city. 'Música' continued to appear in this daily until 1898. These notices turn out to be a veritable treasure chest of new, trustworthy information. They always include the concert date, location, and a list of the pieces to be played, plus many of the composers' names. The transcription below is from one of the earliest of the Música entries from El Comercio.
14 January 1871, La del núm. 5 (regimental band) tocará mañana en el paseo de la luneta las piezas siguientes: A sample program from each of the 27 years, given in Table 1, provides a starting point for learning more about the music performed and the inestimable value of these brief columns for charting the extensive performance undertakings provided by the colonial government. The opportunity to know and examine the performers' tools make it possible to reverse substantially the 20 th -century vacuum that had obscured their artistic contribution to a significant segment of the public, professional concert life of the capital. This abundant data also permits us to learn about these ensembles' values and goals by examining their activities and accomplishments. While the opportunity to study surviving music that might have been preserved in Manila's libraries, archives and personal collections no longer exists, we now have reliable, chronological evidence upon which to initiate a research process devoted to the free performances of the seven bands. This introductory study is only an opening to a research project that will very likely continue for years.
11 Two assessments of Loyzaga's journalistic work can be seen in Trinidad Hermenegildo Pardo de Tavera, Noticias sobre la imprenta y el grabado en Filipinas, Madrid, 1893, Tipografía de los hijos de M. G. Hernández, pp. 42-43. See also Carson Taylor, History of the Philippine Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1927, pp. 20-21. 12 The transcriptions of the texts from El Comercio will be supplied as printed, except when an obvious error is detected or modern Spanish spelling or orthographic conventions have been imposed. There is considerable variation in the punctuation, the identifications of titles, and the spelling of composers' names. Non-Spanish names are often spelled irregularly. Preserving the original 'look' of the listings was maintained when the information would not be misunderstood. For example, the name Johann Strauss is often missing the second 's' in his last name. The listing of works also shows a great deal of variation in the spelling of titles. One consistent editorial intervention was made with the genres of opera, operetta, and zarzuela. Composer's names not provided in the papers are added within closed brackets. Although the list above consists of a small sample of the programs, some standard features found in the concerts can be discerned. Most presented six individual works from different genres. Arrangements from opera, operetta, and zarzuelas are the most numerous. Within those general categories, overtures, extended dramatic scenes from opera, memorable marches, and bandstrated arias and ensemble numbers for soloists appear. A wide range of individual dance forms are also regularly on the programs, some derived from opera and zarzuela plus a significant, additional group of stand-alone waltzes and rigodones, to name just two. Many programs conclude with a popular dance the pasodoble.
During this era, concerted music composed expressly for wind bands was rarely produced by most European composers or the composers who resided in Manila, European or native born. Music that began life as purely orchestral/instrumental numbers, such as overtures and marches, therefore received priority. Rossini's overture to the opera William Tell is a staple found throughout the entire period. Verdi's overture to Aida, Bellini's to La Sonnambula, Gounod's overture to Faust, and Mercadante's to the opera La Vestale are also presented.
It is also important to note that these concerts were offered year-round because of the mostly benign weather in Manila, except, of course, for the cancellations necessitated during the rainy season, which usually lasted from July to September. The two most-utilized concert venues, the Luneta and the Paseo de Magallanes bordered the Bay of Manila and the mouth of the Pasig River, respectively [See Map A below]. The evening breezes off the water in both places, even today, are a particularly welcome relief from the heat and humidity of the typical daytime hours. Both locations were readily accessible to residents, had a bandstand, and were provisioned with some small comforts of chairs and benches for audience seating, plus a limited number of street lamps.
Columns in El Comercio also note that many attendees also made their way to the concerts in horse-drawn carriages, but never provide the number of people. Though the pattern varies from week to week, concerts took place on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday during the hours 5:30-9:30 PM. Performances could feature one or two bands. As the decades wore on, concerts were given in additional locations, the Plaza de Santa Cruz and the Plaza de Goiti, to name two. 13 The high level of regularity of these performances marks a unique artistic accomplishment in public, urban music making at the close of the 19th century.
Loyzaga made another fortuitous change in El Comercio in 1885. A preexisting official military column titled Parte militar also began to name the regimental bands performing evening, outdoor concerts during a particular week. No musical works or composers were supplied. Never more than one sentence long, this new practice did bring about a substantial increase in the number of band concerts announced in this paper. For example, 62 concerts were listed for the year 1883 in "Música." Three years later, 126 performances were provided by both columns. This simple modification revealed almost 50% more performances in Parte militar. The full impact of this one change can be seen in Table 2. Table 2. Annual total of concerts per year.* When taken altogether for 1871-1898, the 'Música' columns and the data from Parte military provide evidence for at least 2,755 free concerts. 14 There are losses from the runs of El Comercio, so the totals offered must be considered an undercount. Again, coming to grips with the full implications of this number of concerts will take additional time to evaluate and understand.
Some essential features of the work entailed in the free concerts can be discerned. First, they functioned as one stable, public component of the governmental promotion of colonial domination. Though the performers in the regimental bands were all individuals of local descent, virtually no representation of indigenous peoples' music was featured in concerts until after the 1896 Filipino Revolution. All performances were free and open to the public in highly accessible locations, the largest number offered by any body of professional performers in the second half of the 19th century. After 1880, these outdoor venues became more accessible because of a mass transit, streetcar [tranvía] system constructed throughout the capital. 15 The regularity of the concerts was based upon the ethic of discipline cultivated throughout the Spanish military. While in no way a complete listing of the titles featured in all of the concerts, the hundreds given in 'Música' columns provide a reasonably fair and accurate sample of the pieces that were heard. In fact, they offer the only surviving window today on the repertory itself. Given the sparse data published on the regimental bands in the dailies published before El Comercio, we must remain eternally grateful to Joaquin de Loyzaga for this unique documentation.

OPERA AND ZARZUELA EXCERPTS FEATURED IN THE BAND CONCERTS
A second total, equally staggering as the working totals of the free performances themselves, involves the many European operas, operettas, and Spanish zarzuelas performed in band excerpt arrangements. For just these popular genres alone, at least 200 titles and their composers have been identified. [See Table 3] This prominent place that European opera and zarzuela occupied in the "Música" listings demonstrates conclusively that these genres held a central position in the bands' work and, by extension, a privileged place in the concert life of the capital. The temporal and geographical diversity of these works also make us aware of another critically important fact, the scope of the vast amounts of published band music existing in Manila at the end of the 19th century. The complete loss of this incredible body of printed scores and instrumental parts is deeply tragic. Though these gaps may never be fully filled in, fortunately, there are surviving collections of contemporary band music surviving in Spain. 16 There are 19 th -century publisher catalogs that can be consulted to help future scholars recover relevant information on some of the parts and scores themselves. Now, this daunting hunt can begin in earnest.
• https://n2t.net/ark:/80373/d3wc79 • Download: https://n2t.net/ark:/80373/d3rp41 See also Ricardo Fernández de la Torre, Historia de la música militar de España, Madrid, 2014, Ministerio de Defensa, pp. 309-343. Documentation on a wide range of titles performed by Spanish regimental bands during the years 1850-1890 is offered including some limited information on the Cuban and Philippine theaters of the Spanish American War. Table 3. European opera, operetta, and zarzuelas presented in band arrangement by the regimental bands. At first glance, key facts stand out. There are at least 200 individual works in this group composed by 60 composers. The representation is distributed among composers from the five western countries, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. For comparison purposes, it can be pointed out that at least 66 European operas by 29 different composers received at least 548 fully staged performances in Manila from 1865-1897. Thirty-two operettas by eleven composers were presented in 50 theatrical presentations during the years 1878-1890. 18 Unknown to current scholarship is the fact that the Spanish zarzuela made its first appearance on a Manila stage in Luis Olona's El Duende, on 22 February 1851, as reported in the Diaro de Manila. The number of zarzuelas continued to rise slowly during that decade. By 1860 zarzuelas were a staple genre performed complete or in excerpts in multiple theaters for the remainder of the century. While incomplete, the band data reveal that the directors sought to entertain their audiences by providing both programming diversity and continuity with other performing theater companies working in the capital.
While the calendric regularity of the free performances was derived from the ethic of military discipline, their very ubiquity may also have blunted the journalistic desire to comment on most of these performances. A general absence of reviews makes it difficult to judge the impact or the quality of most of the concerts. There are also very few descriptions of the size or makeup of the audiences that gathered. Nonetheless, free band presentations provided a durable and dependable cultural foundation for live music. Fortunately, there are some rare and well-described special moments when the regimental bands received particular attention in the press for outstanding, unique contributions to this thriving metropolis' celebratory and entertainment life. We turn now to an examination of some of these memorable undertakings.

MASSED REGIMENTAL BAND MANEUVERS AND CELEBRATIONS
Turning to the dailies again, we can observe some unique moments when the regimental bands received special recognition for outstanding contributions to the capital's celebratory and entertainment life. Through the military's hierarchical command structure, they were tasked to commemorate special events held in honor of the Spanish monarchy. The opportunity to bring the seven bands together in one location created a one-of-a-kind, sonic monument, reminiscent of those prominent, honorific, royal sculptures erected in the city's main paseos and civic squares.

A gran retreta militar
One of these events took place on Monday, 15  The formal ceremony began after the collected regiments marched out of the city center to the parade ground known as the Campo de Bagumbayan. The massed concert featured ten works. The bandmasters of the Artillery Regiment, regiment numbers two, three, four, and six, conducted. Alas, these individuals were not named in the press account. The longer pieces, all well known, consisted of arrangements from operas, Meyerbeer's La Africaine, Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix, and Meyerbeer's Le pardon de Ploërmel.
After the concert concluded, the Gran Retreta Militar commenced out of the Bagumbayan, through the walled city out of the Parian Gate, and across the Spanish Bridge into the neighborhood of Quiapo. During the parade, the bands and the corps of cornets played unidentified pasodobles. As a particular point of interest, at least four of the regular, weekly concert sites utilized for the free concerts are identified on MAP A: the El Paseo de la Luneta (A), El Paseo de Magallanes (B), the Plaza de Santa Cruz (C) and the Plaza Goiti (D).
The impact of a celebration of this nature can be understood as an extended, moving pageant. Hundreds of bandsmen dressed in their formal uniforms, each led by a mounted squadron flying their regimental flag passed through several important neighborhoods and their central, public, gathering places substantially expanding the opportunity for the citizens in these many neighborhoods to observe and also feel directly included in the celebrations for this Royal Marriage. The extraordinary power of massed music performance to elevate the human spirits and create a unique celebratory experience was a perfect tool to promote the important character of this royal event and reinforce the power of dynastic marriages for the survival and growth of the monarchy. The collective presence of so many Filipino bandsmen must have been very impressive.

BIRTHDAY CEREMONIES FOR THE PRINCESS OF ASTURIAS, 1881
Less momentous state occasions, such as the annual celebrations of Royal Birthdays, were occasionally commemorated by the regimental bands' massed performances. On the morning of Sunday, 25 September 1881, the formal birthday celebration for the Princessa de Asturias, María de las Mercedes, began at 9 AM in the Manila Cathedral. Archbishop Pedro Payo y Piñero, O. P., presided. According to El Comercio, a solemn, orchestral Mass was sung, and a concerted Te Deum was performed at the end of the mass, both offering special thanks to God for the continuing good health of the Princess. Both unidentified musical works featured the Cathedral men and boy choir and orchestra conducted by Maestro Blas Echegoyen. All of the principal officials of the city attended, including the Governor-General, Fernando Prima de Rivera. That evening the birthday banquet took place in Malacañan Palace, also hosted by the Governor-General (See Photograph 1).
The seven regimental bands were assembled in the Palace grounds in massed formation to perform an impressive, prize-winning march entitled "Los Tercios de Flandes" by Enrique Breca before the interior ceremonies commenced (See Title Page below). 20 The Músico mayor of the Artillery regimental band, José Carreras, conducted. 21 This new composition had been featured at a special event in Madrid in 1880 when the Spanish capital's military regiments gathered to mark the dedication of the statue of Calderón de la Barca on the Plaza of Santa Ana, Madrid, dedicated to the famed poet and military man Pedro Calderón de la Barca. El Comercio noted that the performance of this march highly entertained the Governor and the distinguished members of the Manila Audencia, colonial officials, and other dignitaries. It appears to have been the capstone performance of a remarkable birthday party. Not at all coincidentally, the day before the birthday, the regimental bands appeared in mass formation on the paseo known as The Luneta, located just adjacent to the Campo de Bagumbayan, where the Gran Retreta had begun (see Map A). This expansive, civic prelude to the Princessa's birthday ceremonies also included all seven regimental bands. The numerous and distinguished audience included the Governor-General, the Archbishop, The General of the Marina, and the President of the Audiencia (city magistrates). The Grand March, Los tercios de flandes by Breca was played twice, with a fifteen-minute intermission taken between them. Some of the dignitaries made addresses to the large crowd, though the speakers were not identified.
These memorable contributions made by the regimental bands to Royal events, a wedding and a birthday, added a particularly European luster through the music and unique sonic monuments in honor of royalty's importance. While there were other annual occasions of state where one or more regimental bands participated, these two events were both the most complex and comprehensive of those written up in the press. They also were powerful reminders of the regimental bands' singular power to enact through spectacle the unquestioned importance of the hierarchy of colonial rule.

A LANDMARK PAROCHIAL CONCERT SERIES
Another regular feature of the reporting on the bands in El Comercio involved the printing of announcements for the forthcoming, local religious festivities of the larger parish churches scattered throughout the walled city and the expansive suburbs. In the midst of longer columns an individual regimental band, or perhaps two bands would perform on the feast day of a parish's patron saint. In the aggregate these performances further contributed to the musical life of the capital. Because these appearances take place irregularly, and El Comercio never identifies the music performed, it was difficult to generalize about their actual impact. Fortunately, we have substantial information about a series of seven concerts presented by the Artillery Regimental Band celebrating the feast of Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1883.
The historic parish church of St. Francis of Assisi, the first Franciscan church in Manila (1578), went to extraordinary lengths to commemorate the Novena and the feast. Beginning on the 10 th of December and continuing until the 16 th , this regimental band performed seven, consecutive evening concerts on the atrium of this 18 th -century church (See Plate 4 below).
Lest we think that these seven concerts comprised the entirety of the novena's celebratory activities, El Comercio informs us that the friars contracted some un-named professional bands to perform daily while processing throughout the streets immediately surrounding the church, both in the morning and afternoon hours. After each formal concert by the Artillery band from seven to ten PM, a professional fireworks display was released, lasting from 10 PM until Midnight. Because no other series of events of this diversity was ever described in the Manila press for a parish celebration, this musical triumph of the Artillery band calls out to be described in almost the same breath as the massed events discussed above. Excerpts from a total of fourteen operas and four zarzuelas were played. Ten of these were overtures. The Músico mayor, Laureano Carreras y Roure, conducted this unprecedented concert series featuring 34 different European composers and one Spanish Manila resident, Ignacio Massaguer y Campenye. 22 Massaguer's contribution, "Carmen, Polca Mazurka I," was a fantasy based upon Bizet's opera Carmen, further emphasizing opera's importance during this run of performances. The significant musical diversity could be viewed from one vantage point as a distilled microcosm of the broad repertory explored throughout the military band tradition itself. If this author's perusal of the dailies' data can be trusted, no band before or after this undertook this much music in such a compressed time frame. During those more than fourteen hours of music, the ambition and talent of the Músico mayor Carreras and the abilities of the bandsmen must have been tested to their very limits. Employing any criteria, this was an astonishing set of accomplishments. This series comprised a unique moment in the performance annals of the capital.

THREE UNIQUE REGIMENTAL BAND PERFORMANCES IN MANILA'S THEATERS AND THE ROYAL PALACE
On three different occasions, a renowned European touring musical virtuosos led special events conducting members of the regimental bands in performances. The first, consisting of two concerts, occurred in the Sibacon Theater in 1855. The second took place in the gardens of Malacañan Palace in 1883. The last happened in the Teatro Zorilla in 1895.
The world-renowned French saxophone virtuoso, Ali-Ben Sou-Alle [Charles Jean Baptiste Soualle], who resided in Australia from 1853 to 1855, expanded his concertizing goals and traveled to Manila in late August or early September of 1855. 23 The local press does not provide his exact arrival date. It must have occurred with sufficient time to make the necessary arrangements before his first concert on Saturday, September 15th. While working in Australia, Soualle's concertizing habits found him billing himself as a virtuoso woodwind performer with an Arabic pedigree. He often appeared clad in appropriately exotic costumes (see Plate 5 below). 22 For a recent biography of Ignacio Massaguer Campenye, see: • https://labellafilipinamassaguer.wordpress.com/biografia/ • https://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2020/10/25/2052008/tia-dely-magpayos-100th-birthday-la-bella-filipina 23 Soualle is a figure that has fascinated students of the saxophone. The website adolphesax.com published a biographical entry in 2008, which was unsigned. While in Melbourne, he often appeared in concert programs that regularly featured the participation of the 40th British Regimental band. This circumstance goes a long way toward explaining his desire to hire an ensemble of band musicians upon arriving in Manila. Typically, in his Melbourne performances, Soualle was one of several soloists, accompanied by piano or the regimental band. His Australian press reviews were generally very positive. Soualle's preferred instrument was the new and relatively unknown soprano saxophone, which he styled as the turcophono. It is suggested that he had modified it to enhance its expressivity. With his traveling companion, one Mr. Valere, they hired the Teatro Sibacon for two concert dates and contracted 120 regimental band members from the Artillery band and bands number six and seven. 24 Two MONSTER concerts, Soualle's billing name, were performed on 15 September and 13 October.
These undertakings were unique and just too important to omit from this narrative devoted to the regimental bands. Fortunately, they were advertised in another Manila daily paper, the Boletín oficial, and received two concert reviews of sorts (see Plate 6). Perhaps because this unprecedented performance by foreign performers was the first documented in the press to employ members of the regimental bands within a Manila theater, most especially in such a significantly large number, the advertisement perhaps can be forgiven for pointing to this feature and the unique instrument that Soualle would perform on, the Turcophono, instead of listing the individual titles of the pieces. To try to ascertain the details of the works presented, we can turn to a concert review published in the Boletín oficial from the 19th of September, Wednesday.
The unsigned column opens by noting the very positive press clippings that had preceded Soualle's arrival in Manila and his eminent reputation. A large, select, enthusiastic audience was assembled for the performance. At his admission, the journalist tells us he is not a trained musician, which explains why the opening number, an opera aria from Lucrecia Borgia [Gaetano Donizetti], is provided without composer attribution or the identification of the text that was sung. Of special importance for this study is the fact that his very next thought is to offer high praise for the indigenous bandsmen, especially for the quality of their musical response to the conducting of the formidable Soualle. The second piece was also an aria from the opera Lucrezia Borgia. Again, no composer name or text cue is provided, a pattern he repeats for the last aria from the Barber of Seville [G. Rossini]. Mr. Valere's singing is described negatively. In fairness, it must be noted that no professional opera company had as yet visited Manila. That wouldn't happen for another decade in 1865. By contrast, Soualle's playing technique is described as brilliant. One could certainly have hoped for more specific information about the works he played. The story closes by repeating that the audience showed the highest enthusiasm for the performance.
The advertisement for Soualle's second concert appeared on Saturday, the thirteenth of October also in the Boletín oficial. It carried almost the same language as the first, with only some minor changes. Again, no indications are provided for what would be played. The review, published on Tuesday the sixteenth of October, reports first on the disappointingly small audience. An abundance of competing, dramatic events in the other theaters are offered as the explanation for the minimal crowd. No musical works are commented on, but Mr. Valere is now vigorously praised for his extensive vocal range and strong singing. Sadly, the bandsmen receive no mention.
Soualle's two mixed concert programs featured European opera excerpts by Mr. Valere, originally criticized but subsequently praised, and additional instrumental works conducted by Ali-Ben Soualle, though we never learn which were accompanied by the massed bands. Soualle was reputed to have played five instruments during the performances, but only the turcophono was explicitly named. Alas, the advertisements and the reviews leave many features of the performances without clear descriptions. The proposed third performance was abandoned, and Soualle and Mr. Valere departed Manila for Singapore. Again, that exact date is unknown. The Singapore newspaper The Straits Times and Singapore Journal of Commerce places the two artists in that city on Tuesday, 13 November 1855. 25 On a positive note, one fond echo surviving form Soualle's brief time in Manila did appear in the form of his published musical work titled: Souvenirs d'Australie y et de Manille. 26 AliBen Soualle's unique moments of music making with the Manila regimental bandsmen did provide a brief but glowing first witness to the high quality of the performing skills of the Filipino bandsmen. The Malacañan Palace performance took place on Thursday, 21 October 1886, organized by four of the Manila regimental bands, Artillery, Numbers 1, 6, and 7. As reported by El Comercio, Remenyi was invited to conduct the massed ensembles in an outdoor concert in the palace gardens (see Plate 9 below). Quite unusually, the Governor-General, Emilio Terrero y Perinat, opened this event to the public. Two hundred bandsmen performed. Each band, conducted by its own Músico mayor, played a work. Alas, only one of the conductors was identified, Teodoro Villapol. Maestro Remenyi conducted three of the four massed numbers. The first work played by the massed bands, the overture to the La gran marcha de las Antorchas by Giacomo Meyerbeer, was so enthusiastically applauded that the response forced Remenyi to promise the audience a repeat performance later in the program. Next came the overture to the opera Robert le Diable (Roberto el Diablo) by Meyerbeer, conducted by the Músico mayor, Teodoro Villapol. The third excerpt from Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots followed, but no conductor was named. Remenyi executed the encore and then closed the entire program by conducting "La Stella Confidente," by Vincenzo Roubaudi, in a band arrangement of this famous 1878 love song. During the interval that followed the works for massed bands, an award ceremony was presided over by the Governor-General. A highly esteemed Manileño, one Sr. Kartmann [again no first name is provided], was recognized for his significant and substantial contributions to the historic modernization of the regimental wind bands undertaken during the year 1851. Kartmann was honored for singlehandedly enlisting three Manila entrepreneurs Adolpho Roensch, Augusto Elzinger, and Juan Agusto Guichard [& Sons], to obtain the most up-to-date band instruments available from the leading European manufacturers (A. Guichard's inventory of instruments available in 1851 can be seen in Table 5).

EDI REMENYI CONDUCTS AT MALACAÑAN PALACE 1886
After this special recognition ceremony, the attendees were invited inside the Palace to hear Edi Remenyi and Isadore Luckstone, pianist, present additional works; unfortunately, the pieces are not identified in the newspaper. Though not stated expressly, there is some reason to conjecture that this unique event was set up by the Músico mayores of the participating bands through their respective regimental commanders to acknowledge both the quality of the bands and also to showcase a pivotal player in the history of the professionalization of the regimental bands in 1851, Sr. Kartmann. This was a fitting way to demonstrate gratitude for the early work of Mr. Kartmann by placing the spotlight upon the musical abilities of the contemporary bands, performing under the baton of one of Europe's most celebrated violinists, Edi Remenyi. En la acreditada relojería joyería y almacén de efectos de D. J. A. Guichard é Hijos se hallan de venta instrumentos de música recién llegados, á los precios siguientes:

OPERA AND A REGIMENTAL BAND
Last, but far from least, mention must be made of the appearance of the Artillery Regimental Band during four memorable performances of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, mounted in the Teatro Zorrilla by a touring Italian opera company on Wednesday, July 31, Sunday, July 4, Thursday, July 8 and Saturday August 17, 1895 (see Plate 10). Masterminded by the impresario, Ciro Cavalieri, this season's culminating presentations can only be described as the apotheosis of European opera cultivation in Spanish Manila. Unlike the other 23 operas, which Cavalieri presented in a rotating pattern of performances, Wagner was saved exclusively for the very last. The astonishing number of the musicians, dancers, and actors participating topped out at 118 individuals, among them being 80 instrumentalists, including 24 Artillery bandsmen. Wagner stipulated that the on-stage orchestra for Lohengrin include strings, piccolo, triple flutes, clarinets, oboes, bassoons, English horn, bass clarinet, four horns, triple trumpets, trombones, and one tuba. The percussion were timpani, cymbals, triangle, and tambourine. 28 The Artillería bandsmen were part of this on-stage ensemble. While we will never know the precise details of the contributions of the Artillery band, their presence completed the musical and dramatic impact of this opera upon the Manila audiences.
Lamentably, the only players not identified by name in El Comercio's write up were the Regimiento de Artillería players, a culminating slight to the perpetually faceless and nameless Filipino bandsmen. El Comercio's Spanish music critic, Oscar Camps y Soler, who compiled the inventory, could not step quite far enough over the racist divide maintained in his paper to identify the regimental band players, even though the vast majority of the named orchestral players and chorus singers were known Filipino musicians.  The accomplishments of the 1895 opera season were unprecedented and unsurpassed in Manila in the 19th century. Cavalieri had succeeded in performing twenty-four different operas over eighty performances in a season that stretched from Sunday, February 3rd to Saturday, August 17th. As mentioned above, his performing forces were the largest of all of the companies to play Manila. He was the first impresario to bring a professional ballet company to the capital, headed by the Italian choreographer Ercole Cinquegrani. Four of the nine dancers were himself, his two daughters, and one son. They formally re-introduced European ballet to Manila audiences fortytwo years after Antonio Appiani had brought European ballet to Manila in 1853. 29 Without question, Cavalieri's cast members' critical reception was the most uniformly positive of the seventeen other European companies that visited between 1865 and 1897.
Cavalieri's strategic decision to save Richard Wagner exclusively for the final performances slowly built the audience's interest in Lohengrin. Even Oscar Camps y Soler, a confirmed anti-Wagnerian critic, contributed to this rising anticipation for a work and a composer never before heard on Manila's stages. Camps exhibited his concern aloud in El Comercio, speculating that the Cavalieri Company might prematurely complete their season with other audience-favorite operas before staging Wagner's highly challenging work. 30 In the end, Camps published a ringing tribute describing the enthusiasm of the Manila audiences for Cavalieri's entire season, for Richard Wagner's Lohengrin and for the prima donna, Señorita Emilia Parodi, in a starring performance as Elsa de Brabante. He notes the extensive shower of flowers and doves that rained down on the stage, and also the lavish gifts presented to Parodi on closing night, her last benefit performance in the capital and the very last by the company.

August 1895 El Comercio
Revista Musical Oscar Camps y Soler … Antes de que nadie me tire de los cabezones vóime de motu proprio á hablar de la beneficiada y de los detalles de la noche.
La Srta. Emilia Parodi prima donna assolutissima de esta compañía de ópera italiana del Zorrilla ha tenido el buen acero de dedicar su serata d' onore á los señores von Móllendorf y por esto, por tratarse de una ópera de Wagner y por las simpatías con que cuenta en Manila la apreciable artista, el teatro se ha visto abarrotado de gente, la entrada general inclusive, en que estaban los espectadores apiñados como granos de uva en los racimos.
Cavalieri, along with a strong cast, chorus, actors, and dancers, also assembled an instrumental ensemble of the finest Filipino musicians in Manila, including the Artillería bandsmen. Shockingly, one year after this company's triumphant season closed, Manila's civic life was set on a menacing trajectory in August of 1896, by the outbreak of the first organized and deadly revolt by Filipinos to terminate Spanish colonial rule.

THE FILIPINO REVOLUTION
On Wednesday, September 23, 1896, in the port city of Cavite south of Manila, a sizeable group of indigenous military personnel rose up against the Spanish military garrison. A priest, a justice of the peace, and an assistant were murdered (El Comercio). A wave of police investigations was launched throughout the capital region, searching for suspected collaborators with the rebellion. This essay certainly is not the place to recount this complex story's details, mainly because there are some competing iterations of the historical record. 31 Sticking to the descriptions given in El Comercio, a decidedly partisan, colonial voice, the response on the part of the regimental wind ensembles was their immediate public resistance to this menace, no doubt following the orders issued by the Spanish military leadership. The most visible, outward sign came in the free concert repertory. A new focus was placed on playing pieces highlighting Spanish patriotic subjects, patriotic battles, and nostalgic topics from the Spanish motherland. We will return to some of these pieces below. 32 Another of the Spanish military's invidious strategic responses to the rebellion was to create a new, Manila military regiment named El Batallón de leales voluntarios de Manila. We learn of its existence first, surprisingly, from a notice in El Comercio offering thanks to the Spanish Músico mayor of the Artilleria band Leopoldo Villapol on Monday, October 12, 1896. The day before, he had presented a copy of his most recent music composition titled Himno de los voluntarios to El Comercio, for which the editor thanked him. This hymn was eventually premiered on January 29, 1897, in a concert performed by the Artillería band, conducted by Villapol himself.
With the creation of a new regiment, a band was assembled. The number of military bands in Manila rose to eight. This new company was intended to visibly demonstrate to the urban population that a large body of indigenous men had sworn their loyalty to the Mother Country and the Crown. It was also a not-at-all-subtle propaganda device to foreground indigenous heritage men enlisting to engage directly in the military conflict to protect the capital against their rebellious countrymen. As one might expect, under these precarious circumstances, the leadership of the new band was awarded successively to two Spaniards. On December 14, 1896, El Comercio identified Sr. Rafael Comas Arteta as the Músico mayor. Five months later, Sr. Francisco Barbat took over the leadership on May 4, 1897. Comas is more than likely the Spanish officer seated fourth from the right side in the second, full row in the photograph below. This image is the only photograph we have of a Manila regimental band at this point in history. Nevertheless, this lone plate provides some crucial points of information about this ensemble. 32 The impact of the revolution on the activities of the public, professional arts performance scene is significant and chilling. After fighting began on August  The 1896 original of this print resides today in the collection of the Instituto de Historia y Cultura Militar, in Madrid. It was first published in 2014 by Ricardo Fernández de Latorre. 33 This image appears to be a professional photograph, more than likely taken by one of several photographers advertising their services in El Comercio in 1896. Forty-two individuals are pictured in uniform, seated, and standing in five rows. While all of the players' instruments cannot be seen, in the front row, we find two side drums. Just behind them in the second row, reading from left to right, we see two flugelhorns, five cornetines and two Eb horns. In the third row, again reading from left to right, we see a bass drum, four valved trombones, the Músico mayor Rafael Comas Arteta, and one Bb baritone horn. Comas appears to wear an officer's hat and does not have the epaulets worn by the enlisted bandsmen. He is the only person not of Filipino descent. Again reading from left to right, we find cymbals, seven clarinets, and two flutes in the fourth row. In row five, two bass tubas (only their bell openings are visible) and four saxophones, two tenor and two alto, are pictured. In the absence of additional visual evidence for comparisons, this ensemble is probably typical for the times in several ways.
Some of the performances given by the Voluntarios band after their founding are noted by El Comercio and are collected in Table 7. There is every reason to believe that this total is an undercount. This new ensemble stepped into the eight regiments' performance schedule on Tuesday, 8 December 1896. This first appearance took place during the festivities for the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. They continued to present public performances until Friday, 18 March 1898, the last month that issues of El Comercio survive. • 21 JUNE 1897, EL COMERCIO. La fiesta del Santo Niño en Tondo.
• 16 NOV 1897 EL COMERCIO. La música de los Voluntarios. En el sitio de costumbre publicamos un anuncio del batallón de leales voluntarios de Manila abriendo un concurso para la provisión de plaza con objeto de organizar la banda de música del batallón.
• 7 JAN 1898, EL COMERCIO En Sampaloc. Ayer como último día de la fiesta que venia celebrando el arrabal de Sampaloc fue extraordinaria la concurrencia al mismo…. La procesión de la tarde estuvo muy concurrida;…. Asistieron á la procesión siete bandas de música, además de los voluntarios, y la de la Artillería que cerraba la procesión.... Returning our focus back onto all of the bands and the year and a quarter that the revolution lasted, from the fall of 1896 to late December 1897, we can observe apparent changes in all of the bands' performance habits. Taking a long view of the complete list of concerts in Table 8, we encounter a heretofore, unprecedented number of locally composed works featured during the free evening concerts. Individual, Spanish Músico mayores mostly penned these. The titles highlight memorable regional, successful military battles, such as those to capture the Muslim region of the island of Jolo and the town of that name in 1876. 34 Another work celebrates the successful launching of steam rail service in the Philippines, a milestone Spanish engineering accomplishment. 35 Another carries the title of (the Spanish) "Sword of Honor," while yet another celebrates the beauty of Spanish women. Loyalty to the (Spanish) Flag is expressed through music, and a work in honor of the Governor-General, the First Maquess of Peña Plata, was presented. Every month, four to six of these pieces were listed in the column "Musica." Put simply, the regimental bands now took up the task of the war effort in the form of music as public propaganda supporting the crown against the rebellion. What a tricky and challenging position the revolution must have placed the Filipino bandsmen in, both within their extended families and also as they were forced to function under both the suspicious oversight of the Spanish military command and the civil police. Life for them had to have been perpetually dangerous.

1896
Late in December 1897, the rebellion was halted, and both sides signed a peace treaty. On Friday, 24 December 1897, LA PAZ was formally declared and published in El Comercio on Monday, the 27th. This milestone in colonial history was commemorated a month later at Malacañan Palace on Monday, 24 January 1898. A magnificent celebration was presided over by the Governor-General, Fernando Primo de Rivera. That evening, special entertainment was supplied by the Artillery regimental band and the Batallón de Voluntarios band. How fitting.
Six days later, the Manila city government (Cabildo) publicly commemorated LA PAZ on Sunday and Monday, 30-31 January, and Tuesday and Wednesday, 1-2 February 1898. These elaborate pageants featured performances by almost every type of public performing ensemble found in Manila. All segments of the performing community were represented. [see Table 9] The goal was to "demonstrate" victory and a return to the normality of pre-uprising society. In addition to the twenty formally scheduled events, such as theater productions, a ball, and several horse and sporting races, many informal celebrations took place throughout the suburbs. Sadly, some unfortunate gaps in the run of El Comercio during January and the beginning of February 1898 prevent us from knowing most of what else the regimental bands might have contributed on or around these festival days.
Función de aire al aire libre en el campo de Bagumbaya.
Three months to the day after the last of the extensive celebrations of La Paz, the U.S. invasion forces, during a night-time, sneak attack, sank the entire Spanish Naval Fleet anchored in Manila Bay. That day Manila became an official theater of the Spanish-American War. Under these new circumstances, the Spanish forces and the government officials, aware of the apparent futility of armed conflict with the U.S., folded their respective tents with measured dispatch and incrementally fled the archipelago during the remaining six months. The still-simmering Filipino revolution for independence was never permitted to recommence fully by the new invaders, who were abetted by secret and public collusion from the Spanish military command to prevent the taking of Manila. Colonial domination of the capital passed uninterrupted from Spain to the U.S., only to be permanently ruptured in 1946.
One year after World War II, the U.S. signed the Treaty of Manila on Thursday, July 4. 36 The U.S. government abandoned its colony without the slightest whiff of an offer of cooperative and/or legal commonwealth status with the United States. Nothing more perfectly illustrated the evil mendacity of the entire U.S. colonial subjugation. Among the many indignities that the U.S. would continue to inflict upon this new, war ravaged nation was the profoundly scurrilous and honor less refusal to pay the wartime salaries owed to the conscripted Filipino soldiers who had fought so valiantly alongside their U.S. comrades in arms to rout the Japanese from the archipelago. At last, on Monday, February 23, 2009, 64 years after World War II, President Barack Obama signed into law the reparations action providing 198 million dollars to the now microscopic percentage of those conscripted Filipino soldiers who happened to have remained alive. 37

CONCLUSION
This introductory study, drawing on contemporary journalistic and government publications, has focused first on the here-to-fore undocumented 2,700+ public free concerts presented over twenty-seven years by the seven/eight regimental bands and also the identified titles and composers of hundreds of the opera, operetta and zarzuela excerpts performed during their free, weekly, public concerts. El Comercio also revealed additional information treating other aspects of the regimental band's musical impact upon Manila's performing life. The bands were, admittedly, a tool for the Spanish colonial military that had protected the Philippines from invasion by other predatory, European colonizers for more than three centuries. They also directly facilitated the  imposition of colonial Spanish culture upon the archipelago's indigenous population. That said, the bands contributed in unique ways to the public-concert spectacles of the capital. One could argue that they were a brightly "sounding" thread that ran throughout the civic, religious, and entertainment projects of a city of more than a quarter of a million people. The bands, as noted by Arwin Tan, were an enduring educational institution for musicians. Each ensemble became a significant consumer of large amounts of published music and substantial numbers of the most upto-date musical instruments. The regimental bands also provided regular, secure employment for hundreds of the most active and widely heard professional performers in the capital.
While it has been over a century and a quarter coming to the light, this recovered journalistic information has appeared at a remarkably fortuitous moment in the history of scholarship. Comprehensive digitization projects of a myriad of historical publications of all kinds now available from the world's leading libraries are approaching completion, particularly the portions of their holdings devoted to nineteenth-century European music. Contemporary computer-assisted searching and research tools have also made available a significant percentage of the musical scores for the works themselves, especially many named in this study. These are electronically accessible for free research worldwide. This opportunity to view and hear sizeable portions of the identified music in an audio or video form lays before us a host of new and highly challenging pathways for additional scholarship, not to mention being a most welcome, massive reversal of the "sonic vacuum" that had obscured Manila's regimental band performance life from when they stopped in 1898 up until now.
Unlike the music history of the first three centuries of colonial music-making in the capital, where a tiny number of European musical works and their composers survived and are known, this staggering explosion of information, reporting on not only the bands but also all segments of the public, professional performance life of the final half of the nineteenth century is gradually being recovered directly from the colonial press. While the newspapers survive incompletely, their contents overturn many of the ravages of the losses from natural forces and those of warfare. These dailies survived as a rare accident of fate and are housed in library collections located in Manila and on two other continents. Because a durable journalistic industry had taken root in the capital in 1848, we can today seek evidence of the work and lived lives of Manileños of all stripes for this half-century. They provide a unique window to study modern Manila's urban life, especially the public and professional performances.
The seven, finally eight Regimental Bands participating in the final stage of the ongoing oppression and disenfranchisement imposed by a 333-year Spanish colonial occupation were not only making a very significant contribution to the soundscape of this immense city, but also consisted of un-named and faceless indigenous bandsmen. This anonymity starkly highlights their particularly exploitative disenfranchisement. Though operating as a tool of this colonial system, they also produced unique public moments of distinction through the medium of music. The bands and bandsmen, when they combined their forces, erected singular musical monuments. Singly, they also created individual musical undertakings of accomplishment. Now that we have some working knowledge of what they undertook, we can view and understand a new, clearer picture of the capital's artistic life and a bit more about the men who played this music. The immense work to grow toward a fuller understanding of this newly revealed information's scope and impact must now begin in earnest.
Drawing our zoom lens back for a final time to ponder the thousands of professional band performances noted in the capital's newspapers, I have come to believe that the free, weekly outdoor concerts, presented on the public plazas and paseos by the seven/eight regimental bands, comprised a unique chapter in the music history of the capital. "Manileños" of many stripes were entertained through a diversity of musical genres, including European opera and zarzuela, not to mention the wideranging body of imported and locally produced popular music. The diverse fruits of European music dominated this unique, public, urban stage outside of Europe in a southeast Asian capital; admittedly, one made possible precisely because the profound inequality of colonial capitalism always served first the colonists' desires. Today, because of the newspapers, we are left with new clarity in this performance history's details, yet also face a deeply refracted picture, much in need of extensive, dedicated study and disentangling.