Of songs and awards

“All deep things are song,” Thomas Carlyle once wrote. Thus, a Philippine Star article says 94-year-old Josefino Cenizal is being considered for a “National Artist” award. It adds: He composed the country’s most loved carol. Did he?

“At age 23, in 1937, Cenizal started arranging and composing music for movies,” the article notes. “His music can be categorized into two periods: 1937 to the 1960s and “mod-60s to the present”. 

“Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit… the Christmas carol he composed (lyrics by Levi Celerio) is more known than him,” the column adds. During this earlier period, “he wrote the music for “Ang Pasko…which Celerio converted into a Christmas song.”

Proclamation No. 1001 of April 1972 anchors “National Artist” titles. These go to Filipinos who contribute significantly “to development of Philippine arts” in nine fields:  music, dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film, broadcast arts, fashion design and architecture. There’s a “Catch 22” category: “Allied Arts.”

The Cultural Center administers the awards. The first award was posthumously conferred on painter Fernando Amorsolo. Other awardees include: Sculptor Napoleon Abueva; theater director Lamberto Avellana; authors Nick Joaquin and F. Sionil Jose; and film director Lino Brocka.

The problem is: the late Vicente Rubi composed that carol, writes Cebu Normal University museum curator Romola O. Savellon. “Are we going to take this sitting down?”

This is a country that boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas, Jullie Yap Daza wrote in a 1978 Times Journal column. “(Yet) no effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol ‘Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit” (translation of Kasadya Ning Takna-a) to its composer: Vicente D. Rubi of Cebu.”

Rubi composed the music for a Cebuano drama festival called Pili  Kanipa-an,” Alex Dacanay wrote  in  Panorama Magazine (13 December 1987)  “It  always fell on December and therefore invariably had a Christmas theme.”

Rubi sought out Mariano Vestil, who lived then in Basak Cebu, to do the lyrics. Both produced “Ka Sadya Ning Takna-a”. The piece won hands down. “Filipinos felt in the music a sense of home.”  First sang in Cebu in 1933, the carol spread to other areas.

Today, in Bohol, Negros Oriental, Southern Leyte, Northern Mindanao, Cebu and elsewhere, carolers still sing the same infectious beat that Rubi and Vestil blended 75 years ago. It’s an exuberant carol. Listeners are drawn in with the singers. “Bualahan ang tagbalay/nga gi awitan.” (“Blessed are the homes where carols are sang”).

“For P150, He Wrote Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit”, Dacanay titled his Panorama article. “The most that Rubi ever received for his works was P150 for each of the five daygons (Visayan for carol), recorded in 1976, for Vicor.”

“At today’s post Fernando Poe Jr candidacy’s exchange rate, that’s $2.68 cents,” said the Manila Standard article: “Advent Wreaths and Hijacked Carols” (December 6, 1995). This is raw exploitation. Today’s jargon calls that ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ theft.”.

“(Doesn’t that) make a mockery of the festival that this carol sings of?  Bagong tuig, bagong kinabuhi, the Cebuano original and its Tagalog adaptation proclaim. It echoes the Advent cry of Isaiah: ‘Break the fetters of injustice…and break every yoke./  Then, will your light break forth as the morning’…”

Ms Daza wrote that Rubi and Vestil never got what were due them in royalties. Both were no longer young then.  “Nong Inting” was an impoverished widower. On the last of his repeated trips to the record company, he was told:  payment had been given to another person.

Until he was confined in a hospital charity ward, Rubi would shuffle to his door to teach startled carolers, sometimes tin-cap tambourine banging kids, how to sing his daygon.

Lyrcist Mariano Vestil died 24 years after Rubi. The Inquirer column (Dec. 7, 2004) on his death was titled “A Bitter Sweet Carol”. It read:

“Few noticed the songwriters obituary, stashed below the fold of a newspaper’s inside page a few days back. But this note on an obscure lyricist’s passing…evokes images of Christmases past…

“Twenty years after Rubi’s death, as his obituary notes, the lyricist Vestil went to his grave, also bereft of benefits and recognition – although their carol continues to resound, albeit in forms that Rubi and Vestil never sought…

“But those who crassly exploited the talented daygon musician and lyricist have kindred spirits here: in the cartel that flogged an onerous levy on coconut farmers; in loggers who triggered those flash floods or generals who fiddled with soldiers’ skimpy retirement benefits. These are “the Napoleons of crime,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle muses, 

“Christmas unique grace is that both the carol writer and the carol thief can say with the shepherds and kings: ‘Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us, the Inquirer column said.

Belated tribute of sorts came in 1981. Cebu Province and Cebu Arts Foundation adopted a citation for their: “priceless contribution to the enrichment of Cebu culture, specifically in the field of music, through (the) deathless daygon: Kasayda Ning Taknaa.”

Dacanay reports that some of Rubi’s unpublished songs are kept in a special box by one of his daughters: Mrs Ludvina Rubi-Navarro. “Some day, perhaps, (they’ll be published) to regale an audience more deserving of them.”*

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