Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies

Western classical music flourished under the patronage of Imelda Marcos. While this legacy is often touted as a positive one, the genre of music itself and its imbrication with colonialism and racism cannot be ignored. This essay illustrates how Marcos harnessed Western classical music and conceptions of the global and universal to access ideological capital and claim a place for the Philippine nation as an equal in the international community. While the New Society also heralded nativism as nationalism, Western classical music and its trappings of Whiteness and modernity paralleled the regime’s elite cosmopolitan aspirations.