Ouido-ing my way to an EP

I was maybe around 9 or so, biking around Project 6, Quezon City, when I heard the sound of someone playing the piano coming from one of the apartments in a row along Road 3. The door was open, and from the road I saw her and I walked my BMX closer to get a better look at how her fingers moved on the keyboard. She noticed me, stopped playing, smiled and asked if I wanted to try it. I was shy as a child, but at that moment I found myself getting off my bike and walking in. She stood up from the bench, I sat down and just looked at the keys.

Her name was Cecil, and she was a piano teacher. She showed me a simple finger exercise, then asked me to try it out and for the first time in my life I played the piano. She said she liked the way my fingers moved and asked if I would be interested in taking piano lessons. I said I’d be back, I’d ask my mom.

My mother said yes, we bought that blue Michael Aaron Grade One Piano Book, and for the next few weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I sat down with Ate Cecil and learned the basics of playing the piano and on Saturdays, since we didn’t have a piano at home, she let me practice for free for a couple of hours. To be able to practice at home, I drew piano keys on our window sill and I would go through the exercises on it and just imagined the sound in my head.

My favorite pieces were “Sandman’s Lullaby,” “The Birdling’s Serenade,” and “The Swing.” One Saturday, I was left alone in their living room to practice and I lifted the bench cover and browsed through the other piano pieces and chanced upon a Grade 2 version of the swing. I tried to play it and like that version better and on my next session with Ate Cecil, I showed off. She smiled but reminded me to be patient and not just jump to more advance pieces just because I could sort of read the notes and play them. She pointed out that my fingering was wrong, I played certain bars inaccurately, etc.
I breezed through the first half of the book, and struggled when we got to the sharps and flats. I never got to finish the learning all the pieces in the book.


I don’t remember exactly why anymore, but I stopped going to Ate Cecil’s. Maybe it was because I got busy with the Workshop for Creative Survival, where I got introduced to theater with my mother as my teacher. I didn’t even get to learn how to play chords. Although in that workshop, I learned how to play basic guitar chords.

Years later, I was an assistant stage manager at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In the play, “Larawan” (a Filipino translation of Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of an Artist as a Filipino”), and in one of the scenes, Tony Javier played by Ricky Davao, was supposed to play the piano. Ricky wasn’t a pianist, so we had a second piano on the opposite side of the wall from where the piano was onstage where a pianist, Ian Eballe, played what Tony Javier was supposed to play with Ricky going through the motion of playing onstage, finger-sync-ing “A Tisket, A Tasket.” There was a piano in the conference room which served as Tanghalang Pilipino’s rehearsal space, and one afternoon Ian saw me tinkering with it. He suggested I learned the piece in case, for one reason or another, he couldn’t make it to a show. But the piece was just too complicated for me. But I did ask him to teach me basic piano chords, and with that limited knowledge, I learned to play basic chord progressions. Piano sheet music for songs would usually have the chords at the top of the staff, and I was amused that I could play basic piano accompaniment to some Broadway songs in the books stacked inside the piano bench at the conference room. John Arcilla and I must have tested everyone’s patience that time we were both obsessed with “What I did for love,” that’s all the sound that came out of the conference room whenever there were no rehearsals.

With those basic chords I learned from Ian, I started playing around with my own melodies. A couple of years later, working at an advertising production house, a co-worker who was also a roommate heard playing around with a Casiotone, and asked if I could set a poem he wrote for his girlfriend to music. I tried and was able to come up with a basic chord progression for it, but didn’t get to really finish it.

Then I moved to Baguio, and moved by the scene at our balcony one afternoon where an invisible group of gong payers gently filled the air with their music just as fog was slowly rolling in and covered the mountains, I started to write down the following lyrics to capture the moment:
“Unti-unting binabalot ng ulap ang kabundukan, tila be isang batang sa pagtulog ay kinukumutan...”
But the moment called for more than just words, I felt, so armed with a guitar with a couple of strings missing and those basic guitar chords I learned as a young boy, I started composing a melody for the words. And that was the first song I ever completed: “Sa Saliw ng mga Gangsa.”

I don’t sing, though, and since I’ve forgotten how to read notes, and much less write. So whenever I compose, the only way I could preserve the composition is to memorize it or do a rough recording so I could teach it to the singers and musicians I choose to collaborate with.

I have since dared to compose more musical pieces - background music to my plays, songs that evolve into a sung-through musical, etc.

In 2009, the people behind the Baguio Flower Festival invited me to screen the documentary I made on the history of Baguio City. My first thought was who would sit in front of a screen for an hour or so to watch a documentary at the of Session Road while a trade fair and everything that came with it went on? I thought of spicing the screening up a bit by performing songs after each segment of the documentary. The songs would either introduce a segment, or sort of sum it up or be a commentary in the end.

The first song I composed for that screening was “Kafagway,” a song that paints a picture of how I fell in love with this city, and ended up calling it my home.

A segment in the documentary talked about Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Baguio, and for it, I wrote a song called “Ano’ng Plano?” while the song “Kasaysayan o Titulo” was inspired by the story of Mateo Cariño, the Ibaloi who owned much of where the center of Baguio now stands and how the American government in the Philippines appropriated his family’s land to realize their dream of a hill station.

Later on, I adapted the basic concept of that screening and turned it into a theatrical performance, adding more songs into the repertoire, “Mithiin,” a song that was originally the theme song of the opposition which hoped to bring change to Baguio in 2004, and “Welcome to Baguio City (ca. 09 AD).”

These songs found their way into the multimedia monograph, “Kafagway: Sa Saliw ng mga Gangsa,” which is currently on exhibit at Cafe By The Ruins Dua.

An EP of these songs have also been released and may now be streamed/downloaded on Spotify.
PS. - the EP would not have been possible without the invaluable contribution of the following:
Ethan Andrew Ventura, the musical director I’ve been collaborating with for the past 12 years who arranged much of my compositions during that period, and from whom I’ve learned so much... he calls me “kuya” but he’s a mentor to me.

The Open Space artists who’ve been singing my songs through the years, and especially those who were part of this EP - Jeff Coronado, Eu Arcilla Caburao, Roman Ordoña, Jose Ball, Caesar.. thank you for keeping the fire burning.

And to my sons, Leon Karlos and Aeneas, whose contribution to this effort is as invaluable as they are inspiring.

And last but most importantly, my wife, RL (Alta Montagna), who, after being sneered at by a colleague with whom I shared my dream of composing music decades ago, encouraged me to give music a chance and was the first to believe that I could, in fact, compose...

A multimedia monograph?

So about a year since Celestina and I casually agreed to schedule an exhibit at the Cafe by the Ruins (Dua), Kelly Ramos’, curator, call came: she needed the title, poster design and write-up for the exhibit. I admit, when that call came, I had nothing yet.

Well, what it was going to be about, that I was sure of: Baguio.

At first I planned to do a straightforward photo exhibit. But when I started putting together the images that I thought merited a space on the wall, I couldn’t help but want to share the stories that went with the images so I started putting together pieces I’ve written in the last two decades or so. A couple of weeks before the scheduled opening, what I had was a collection of images, essays and song lyrics. Then, after listening to a previous recording of one of those songs, I thought of doing a recording of the rest and include that in the work.

What is it? Wikipedia defines a monograph as “a specialist work of writing on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author, and usually on a scholarly subject.” That’s kinda close. But I had images and music that went with it so I thought that a “multimedia monograph” would be the closest I’d get to describing what Kafagway: Sa Saliw ng mga Gangsa was.

There’s a poem inspired by an invisible cañao that developed into a song; commentaries on the current state of the city; letters to two mentors who have been huge influences on my being an artist; a photo of a blessed tree that I chanced upon across a valley in Loakan, and another one in the rain at the top of Kennon Road; there’s an image of a man walking home at dusk; among other stories of the last 25 years.

Although this may be considered as my first solo exhibition, this wasn’t exactly a solo work. For the recording, I collaborated with local artists: Ethan Andrew Ventura arranged and did the instrumentation on four of the six songs in the compilation which featured Eu Arcilla Caburao, Roman Ordoña, Joselito Balleta (Jose Ball), Caesar Salcedo, Jeff Coronado and my sons Leon Karlos Altomonte and Aeneas Altomonte.

At the opening of the exhibit last October 31, 2018, we performed those songs live to a crowd of mostly fellow artists and Baguio lovers.

The limited edition of 25 monographs, individually signed and annotated, are currently available at Cafe By The Ruins Dua, Upper Session Road, Baguio City and the exhibit will run until the end of this year.