Jose Semblante Buenconsejo [Project Partner]
Jose Semblante Buenconsejo is Professor of Musicology at the University of the Philippines College of Music. He has researched on Agusan Manobo (spirit) possession ritual and looked at it from a particular historical point of view of the materiality of communication (Songs and Gifts at the Frontier: Person and Exchange, Routledge, 2002). He has published an essay on the cultural history of late 19th century ilustrado piano music in Philippine Modernities (UP Press, 2017) which won the Best Book in the Social Science in 2018 by the Philippine National Book Development Board. His interest in ethnographic research was what brought him to media representations, particularly producing, directing and writing documentary film projects, one of which “Seven Dances of Life,” was nomimated in the Best Documentary Film category in 2018 Gawad Urian. An alumnus of the University of the Philippines (BM Musicology, 1988), University of Hawaii (MA Ethnomusicology, 1993), Dr. Buenconsejo earned his PhD in the anthropology of music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He is currently exploring the transformation of traditions within affordances of recording technology and continues a long-standing theoretical interest in memory and experience.