Teodoro Araullo - The other Filipino Waltz King

    The early years of Filipino classical music during the late-Spanish and early-American period were less given attention compared to the times of Nicanor Abelardo onwards. Although recently, studies on composers from this early era (1869-1916) of music such as Jose Estella, Marcelo Adonay, and Julio Nakpil were being researched and published. 

    One composer from this era stood out to me for some reason. His name is Teodoro Araullo. Like other composers from this period, he was a composer of marches and waltzes. However, despite his almost total obscurity today, he is actually one of the most popular composers from the early American period, rivaled only by Jose Estella. For that reason, he might just be the "Prince" of Filipino Waltzes, but that's just an informal title by me!

Huang Chen-Mou 黃楨茂 - Filipino-Chinese composer

    I first encountered Huang Chen-Mou's music in the book Rizal: The Songwriter, Musician, and Music Lover by Danny Yson, published in 1995. In the last chapter, he reproduced some works by composers that set Rizal's poetry into music. One of them was Huang's setting of Rizal's "Ultimo Adios." It immediately caught my curiosity, because the lyrics were translated to Chinese! It's also by a composer I've totally never heard of before. About a week later I found myself deep in the rabbit hole researching all I could find about this composer.