Browning the Foxtrot:
Implications of Cultural Hybridity and Blackface Minstrelsy in Reckoning Nicanor Abelardo’s “Naku….Kenkoy!”
James Carl L. Osorio
Master’s Student, Mead Witter School of Music
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Popular music blossomed in the colonial Philippines through its association with cabarets – sites where American culture penetrated the Filipino consciousness (Fernandez, 2000). Francisco Santiago (1889-1947), the first Filipino to receive a doctorate in music, expressed his fear of the popular as it generates a “dangerous tendency for imitation” (1931). Nevertheless, the growing local market for popular music encouraged Filipino composers to follow the hegemony (Schenker, 2016).
Filipino anthropologist Jose Buenconsejo (2018) credits Nicanor Abelardo (1893-1934) with transforming the kundiman, a popular song in the Spanish-ruled Philippines, into a sophisticated patriotic art song. After Abelardo’s untimely death, his students obscured his fondness for the popular (Manuel, 1955) to foreground the image that his true art lies within the kundiman. Unbeknownst to Filipinos today, poverty forced Abelardo to take random jobs in Manila, then already a modern site of cultural diffusion and borrowing (Keppy, 2019). Abelardo learned different popular genres and absorbed the latest “dance craze” from the United States while playing the piano for silent films. Due to the “cosmopolitan” nature of his grounding, he traversed between teaching composition at the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music and conducting the orchestras of renowned cabarets in Manila, much to the great dismay of his academic colleagues (Epistola, 1996).
Broadly using the lens of cultural hybridity, this paper makes sense of Nicanor Abelardo’s “Naku…Kenkoy,” a song modeled after the American foxtrot with text by Romualdo Ramos. In doing so, I rescue the song from the stereotype of Filipino mimicry (Talusan, 2021). Situating Abelardo’s use of an American form within the broader Filipino soundscape, I then contrast his version of the foxtrot with those of his contemporaries to demonstrate how Abelardo and Ramos produced veiled references to blackface minstrelsy as a subversive commentary to the elite. The implications of this are particularly felt in cabarets where bodies of the elite are brought together in dance. I attempt to shed a light on how blackface minstrelsy, with its negative overtones suppressed, traveled across the Pacific and how Abelardo negotiated with an imperialist culture while still maintaining maximum agency over his work.
James Carl Osorio is a graduate student of piano and historical musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include the intersection of sound studies and Holocaust history, race relations of America’s racialized others in the early 20th century, and Philippine modernity. He has presented in various national and international conferences in the U.S. and abroad.
A recording will be available on the CSEAS YouTube channel following the event.