José Maceda

José Maceda (1917–2004) was a Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist who developed one of the most distinctive compositional voices of 20th-century Asian music. Trained as a concert pianist in Europe and the United States, he returned to the Philippines in the 1950s to conduct ethnomusicological fieldwork on Southeast Asian music traditions, particularly the drone-based gong music of Mindanao. His compositions from the 1960s onward — including Ugnayan (1974), which used 68 transistor radios transmitting simultaneously across Manila — integrated field recordings, mass participation, and slow temporal processes into large-scale, site-specific works.