THE CORDILLERA: ITS LAND AND PEOPLE

A VAST MOUNTAINOUS REGION

As a physical region, the Cordillera Gran Cordillera Central, to be complete is a row of great mountain
ranges occupying half of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Its rugged mountainous backbone contains many
peaks exceeding 2,000 meters in height, with rolling hills and stretches of river valleys along its flanks.

Around 230 km long and 120 km wide, with an irregular shape, the mountainous region's estimated total area is
about 17,500 square km.

Thus, the Cordillera is both the highest and the single largest mass of mountains in the entire Philippine
archipelago.

Physical map of the Cordillera region

SIX PROVINCES AND A CITY

As a recently-defined administrative region, the Cordillera is composed of the six provinces of Apayao,
Kalinga, Abra, Mountain Province, Ifugao, and Benguet, plus the chartered city of Baguio. These provinces
have a total land area of almost 18,300 square km.

The bulk of the Cordillera mountain range, as a physical region, is covered by this Cordillera administrative
region (CAR). The Cordillera's foothills extend into a few other adjacent provinces in the nearby Ilocos and
Cagayan Valley regions.

Political map of the Cordillera region

NATURAL RESOURCES

The Cordillera region is very rich in natural resources. It is especially famed for its huge gold deposits, pure
stands of pine forest, and rich soils and water sources that have enabled its people to sustain agriculture on
mountainside rice terraces.

Resources map of the Cordillera region

Mineral resources; forest resources; rivers and water resources; soils and agriculture

THE CORDILLERA PEOPLES

The Cordillera is more heavily populated compared to the other mountainous areas of the Philippines. Based on
the year 2000 census, its six provinces and one city has a total population of more than 1,365,000 people.

As in the rest of the country, the great majority of the region's population are peasants engaged in farming and
other small-scale production and side occupations. The next biggest sector is composed of formal wage workers
and informal odd-job workers in non-farm occupations. There is also a sizeable number of students, salaried
employees, and professionals in the few urban and town centers.

Indigenous peoples

A big bulk of the Cordillera population is composed of closely-related indigenous peoples. Collectively, our
peoples are popularly known as Igorot. Often we are also grouped into a number of ethnic or ethno-linguistic
identities, such as Apayao or Isneg, Tinggian, Kalinga, Bontoc, Kankanaey, Ibaloy, Ifugao, and Bago.

These groupings, while convenient, do not fully reflect the real particularities and the extent of diversity among
the region's peoples. In fact, most of us indigenous peoples identify ourselves primarily with specific
communties called ili (literally, home village, hometown, or home territory).
Each ili is a self-identifying community with a specific territory, which is its ancestral land. While there are
diverse types, an ili usually consists of a closely-knit cluster of villages, or a core village and its outlying
hamlets, whithin a more or less defined territory.

A mix of indigenous, non-indigenous, and migrant peoples

Bigger and more diverse populations are found in Cordillera's melting pot areas, such as those in urban (or
rapidly urbanizing) Baguio-Benguet and in the foothills and valleys adjoining the great lowlands of Luzon. In
these areas, the original indigenous communities have given way to hybrid communities composed of varied
mixtures of indigenous and migrant peoples.

PROBLEMS AND ASPIRATIONS OF THE CORDILLERA PEOPLES

The Cordillera peoples face the same problems as the rest of the Filipino nation. These basic problems have
been summed up by the national democratic movement of the Philippines as imperialism, feudalism and
bureaucrat capitalism, whereby only a small national elite reaps great political and economic benefits. On the
other hand, millions of peasants and workers, even the middle class, are marginalized and exploited while the
nation reels from one crisis to another.

National oppression

As indigenous peoples, we additionally suffer a distinct problem of national oppression and ethnocide at the
hands of foreign colonial powers in earlier times, and presently by the present Philippine state and its foreign
masters. Our people have been forcibly integrated into the dominant social system and prevented from seeking
our own way to development. At the same time, the system subjects us to various kinds of discrimination and
inequalities.

As a violation to our inherent right to self-determination, ethnocide and national oppression as directed against
our peoples have the following forms and manifestations:

State denial and non-recognition of our rights of collective ownership, priority use and management over our
ancestral lands and resources
Development aggression (imposition of destructive socio-economic projects in the name of national
development or national interest such as megadams, large-scale mines, megatourism, NIPAS, etc)
Militarization
Political misrepresentation
Commercialization of indigenous culture
Institutionalized discrimination
Violation and non-recognition of our indigenous socio-political systems and processes
Government neglect of basic social services to indigenous peoples

The right to self-determination

To combat national oppresion is to assert our right to self-determination. That is our right to freely choose and
develop our own path as indigenous peoples. CPA believes that the best way to exercise this right, while
remaining part of the broader Filipino nation, is for our peoples to advance genuine regional autonomy (GRA)
within the framework of a united, independent, and democratic nation.

But attaining GRA is not just a matter of putting new laws, setting-up new agencies, and new sets of officials
into place, GRA hinges on the attainment of full national freedom and genuine democracy. It requires an
overhaul of the entire socio-political system. Thus, CPA participates in the Filipino peoples movement for
national freedom ang democracy and links with other progressive forces in completing this historical task. #
THE EVOLUTION OF CORDILLERA REGION'S ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES

The first Cordillera town was founded in 1599, in Bangued, as a mission in what is now the province of Abra. A
few other units of local administration were established in the 18th century, along the fringes of the mountain
region. Colonially administered settlements were established among the natives of the lower Abra river valley
and among peoples in the area where the Cordillera connects with the Caraballo mountains, in what is now the
province of Nueva Vizcaya.

Nueva Vizcaya was created as a military province in 1840, to protect the settlements of subjugated Christians
against frequent attacks from their independent Cordillera and Caraballo neighbors. Another military province
was created in central Abra in 1846. Still another was established in 1850 in La Union, whose population then
was more Igorot than Ilocano. La Union included a district called Benguet, which covered the present Trinidad
valley and neighboring areas, and which had been "pacified" in the 1830s by infamous Spanish military
commander Guillermo Galvey.

The first commandancies were formed in the 1840's and 1850's. The Tiagan commandancy (1847) covered what
is now the triboundary of Abra, Ilocos Sur, and Mountain Province. The Bontoc commandancy (1852) covered
the area from Mainit to Banaue. The Lepanto commandancy (1852) covered the area from Besao to Suyoc. The
Benguet commandancy covered the stretch from Buguias to Itogon. The Saltan commandancy (1859) covered
the area from Pinukpuk to Tinglayan.

From the 1880s to the 1890s, the Spanish colonialists reorganized old commandancies and created new ones.
The Saltan commandancy was replaced by the Itaves, which stretched from Ripang (near present-day Conner)
through Bulanao (in present-day Tabuk) to a point in what is now Paracelis. Lubuagan, Tanudan and Tinglayan
were placed under the Bontoc commandancy, which no longer included Banaue. Banaue was placed under the
new Kiangan commandancy (1889) that covered most of what is now Ifugao province.

Other new commandancies were formed in 1891: Kayapa in what is now the border area of Benguet, Ifugao and
Nueva Vizcaya; Amburayan in what is now Ilocos Sur; and Apayao around the Pudtol area. The Kabugaoan
commandancy was supposed to cover Calanasan-Kabugao area of Apayao and the Tineg area of Abra, but its
existence remained only on paper.

After the Americans defeated the Filipino revolutionaries, they established their own Cordillera boundaries that
closely approximated those of the Spanish commandancies. The US colonial authority set up Mountain
Province in 1908 as a "special province", organized into several sub-provinces: Apayao, Kalinga, Bontoc,
Ifugao, Benguet, Lepanto, and Amburayan.

The Americans retained Abra, La Union and Nueva Vizcaya as units separate from Mountain Province, despite
the fact that Abra geographically and culturally belonged to the Cordillera, and that considerable portions of the
populations of La Union and Nueva Vizcaya then consisted of mountain peoples.

In 1917, the US colonial government's Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes recommended that the western border of
the Mountain Province be pushed eastward, such that the entire subprovince of Amburayan and large slices of
Lepanto and Benguet would be made part of Ilocos Sur and La Union. The adjustment was made in 1920. Also,
the subprovince of Lepanto was dissolved, and its various towns and villages turned over to Ilocos Sur,
Benguet, or Bontoc.

The old Mountain Province would be retained under the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 and under the
Republic of the Philippines from 1946 onwards for the next 20 years.

In 1966, the old Mountain Province was divided into four new provinces: Kalinga-Apayao, Ifugao, Benguet,
and Bontoc (which retained the name Mountain Province).

In 1972, martial law paved the way for a wide-ranging government reorganization. The Cordillera provinces
were placed under two regions: with Benguet and Mountain Province falling under Region 1 (Ilocos) and
Kalinga-Apayao and Ifugao falling under Region 2 (Cagayan Valley).

In 1988, two years after Marcos was ousted, the mountain provinces were reconsolidated as the Cordillera
Administrative Region, this time including Abra. In 1995, Kalinga and Apayao became separate provinces.

The Hudhud consists of narrative chants traditionally performed by the Ifugao community, which is well known
for its rice terraces extending over the highlands of the northern island of the Philippine archipelago. It is
practised during the rice sowing season, at harvest time and at funeral wakes and rituals. Thought to have
originated before the seventh century, the Hudhud comprises more than 200 chants, each divided into 40
episodes. A complete recitation may last several days.

Since the Ifugaos culture is matrilineal, the wife generally takes the main part in the chants, and her brother
occupies a higher position than her husband. The language of the stories abounds in figurative expressions and
repetitions and employs metonymy, metaphor and onomatopoeia, rendering transcription very difficult. Thus,
there are very few written expressions of this tradition. The chant tells about ancestral heroes, customary law,
religious beliefs and traditional practices, and reflects the importance of rice cultivation. The narrators, mainly
elderly women, hold a key position in the community, both as historians and preachers. The Hudhud epic is
chanted alternately by the first narrator and a choir, employing a single melody for all the verses.

The conversion of the Ifugao to Catholicism has weakened their traditional culture. Furthermore, the Hudhud is
linked to the manual harvesting of rice, which is now mechanized. Although the rice terraces are listed as a
World Heritage Site, the number of growers has been in constant decline.The few remaining narrators, who are
 already very old, need to be supported in their efforts to transmit their knowledge and to raise awareness among
young people.

Rhythm
Rhythm encompasses the idea of time as it relates to music. The specific beat, time signature and
tempo of a song all fall under the element of rhythm. More complex aspects of rhythm include syncopation
and tempo changes.

Melody
Melody in music is a sequence of pitches that often acts as a theme in a piece of music. Melodies are
built around musical scales, and often repeat throughout a piece of music. Melodies are generally
described as conjunct, which means smooth sounding and easy to play, or disjunct, which means that the
melody has large pitch jumps and is harder to play.
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Harmony
Harmony is the expanding of the melody into chords and accompaniments. If you look at a piece of
music, you can see that melody is the horizontal movement of notes while harmony is the vertical stacking
of notes. Harmonies and the chord progressions that derive from them are based on the same scales as
melodies.

Dynamics
Dynamics is the relative loudness or quietness of a section of music. A great deal of musical
expression can be achieved simply via use of dynamics. Italian terms such as "piano" (meaning quiet) and
"forte" (meaning loud) are used to describe dynamics.

Timbre
Timbre is the specific sound that a certain instrument produces. It is because of musical timbre
that we can tell the difference between an "A" note played on a trumpet, saxophone or a piano. Timbre is
sometimes called the "tone color" of a musical instrument.

Texture
Texture refers to the way that the various individual musical lines in a song work with each other.
Textures range from monophonic -- one melody line with no harmony -- to homophonic -- one melody
accompanied by one harmonizing accompaniment -- to polyphonic -- multiple melodies being sounded at
once.

Form
The form of a piece of music is basically the way that all of the parts are put together. Letters
usually designate certain parts of a song, so it's possible to spell the form using letters. For example, A B A
(known as ternary form) is a common form of music in which one section is played, followed by a totally
different section, followed by a repeat of the first section.
Read more: What Are the 7 Elements of Music? | eHow http://www.ehow.com/info_8220517_7-elements-
music.html#ixzz2WNPzPQ54

Pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.[1] Pitches are
compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,[2] which require sound whose
frequency is clear and stable enough to distinguish from noise.[3] Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical
tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.[4]

Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but pitch is not a purely objective physical property; it is a subjective
psychoacoustical attribute of sound. Historically, the study of pitch and pitch perception has been a central
problem in psychoacoustics, and has been instrumental in forming and testing theories of sound representation,
processing, and perception in the auditory system.[5]

HornbostelSachs (or SachsHornbostel) is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich

Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in the Zeitschrift fr Ethnologie in 1914.[1] An
English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961. It is the most widely used system for
classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists (people who study musical
instruments).

Hornbostel and Sachs based their ideas on a system devised in the late 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon,
the curator of musical instruments at Brussels Conservatory. Mahillon divided instruments into four broad
categories according to the nature of the sound-producing material: air column; string; membrane; and the body
of the instrument. However, these categories were not new; they derive from the Natya Sastra, a roughly two-
thousand-year-old Indian theoretical treatise on music and dramaturgy. Mahillon limited his system, for the
most part, to instruments used in European classical music. From this basis, Hornbostel and Sachs expanded
Mahillon's system to make it possible to classify any instrument from any culture.

Formally, the SachsHornbostel is modeled on the Dewey Decimal Classification for libraries. It has four top-
level classifications, with several levels below those, adding up to over 300 basic categories in all. The top three
levels of the scheme are described below.

At various times, and in various cultures, various schemes of musical instrument classification have been
used.

The most commonly used system in use in the west today divides instruments into string instruments,
woodwind instruments, brass instruments and percussion instruments. However other ones have been devised,
and some cultures also use different schemes.

The oldest known scheme of classifying instruments is Chinese and dates from the 3rd millennium BC.[citation
needed]
It groups instruments according to what they are made out of. All instruments made out of stone are in one
group, all those made out of wood in another, those made out of silk are in a third, and all those made of
bamboo in the 4th, as recorded in the Yo Chi (record of ritual music and dance), compiled from sources of the
Chou period (9th-5th centuries BC), and corresponding to the 4 seasons and 4 winds (Kartomi, 1990).

The 8-fold system of pa yin ("8 sounds"), from the same source, occurred gradually, and in the legendary
Emperor Shun's time (3rd millennium BC) it is believed to have been presented in the following order: metal
(chin), stone (shih), silk (ssu), bamboo (chu), gourd (p'ao), clay (t'u), leather (ko), and wood (mu) classes, and it
correlated to the 8 seasons and 8 winds of Chinese culture, autumn and west, autumn-winter and NW, summer
and south, spring and east, winter-spring and NE, summer-autumn and SW, winter and north, and spring-
summer and SE, respectively (Kartomi, 1990).

However, the Chou-Li (Programs of Chou), an anonymous treatise compiled from earlier sources in about the
2nd century BC, had the following order: metal, stone, clay, leather, silk, wood, gourd, and bamboo. The same
order was presented in the Tso Chuan (Tso Commentary), attributed to Tso Chiu-Ming, probably compiled in
the 4th century BC (Kartomi, 1990).

Much later, Ming dynasty (1300s-1600) scholar Chu Tsai Yu recognized 3 groups: those instruments using
muscle power or used for musical accompaniment, those that are blown, and those that are rhythmic, a scheme
which was probably the 1st of scholarly type, the other earlier ones being traditional, folk taxonomies.
(Margaret Kartomi, 2011, Upward and Downward Classifications of Musical Instruments-
musicology.ff,cuni.cz)

More usually, instruments are classified according to how the sound is initially produced (regardless of post-
processing, i.e. an electric guitar is still a string-instrument regardless of what analog or digital/computational
post-processing effects pedals may be used with it).

String instruments are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme
of musical instrument classification, used in organology, they are called chordophones. Some common instruments in
the string family are guitar, sitar, rabab, electric bass, violin, viola, cello, double bass, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, bouzouki,
and harp.

Woodwind instruments (also called woodwinds) are a family of musical instruments within the more general
category of wind instruments. There are two main types of woodwind instruments: flutes and reed instruments
(otherwise called reed pipes). What differentiates these instruments from other wind instruments is the way in
which they produce their sound. Woodwinds can be either soprano, alto, tenor or bass.[1]

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A trumpet, foreground, a piccolo trumpet behind, and a flugelhorn in background

A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular
resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones,
literally meaning "lip-vibrated instruments".[1]

There are several factors involved in producing different pitches on a brass instrument. Slides, valves, crooks, or
keys are used to change vibratory length of tubing, thus changing the available harmonic series, while the
player's embouchure, lip tension and air flow serve to select the specific harmonic produced from the available
series.

The view of most scholars (see organology) is that the term "brass instrument" should be defined by the way the
sound is made, as above, and not by whether the instrument is actually made of brass. Thus one finds brass
instruments made of wood, like the alphorn, the cornett, the serpent and the didgeridoo, while some woodwind
instruments are made of brass, like the saxophone.

A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater
(including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles), or struck, scraped or rubbed by hand, or struck against
another similar instrument. The percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments,
following the human voice. [1]

The percussion section of an orchestra, however, traditionally contains in addition many instruments that are
not, strictly speaking, percussion, such as whistles and sirens. On the other hand, keyboard instruments such as
the celesta are not normally part of the percussion section, but keyboard percussion instruments (which do not
have keyboards) are included.

Percussion instruments are most commonly divided into two classes: Pitched percussion instruments, which
produce notes with an identifiable pitch, and unpitched percussion instruments, which produce notes without an
identifiable pitch.[2][3]