• Cycle of Palaw'an love poems for a septet of reciting, gesturing, singing, dancing and ambulating performers

   

  Instrumentation

  Performer 1: Zither or lute;
  Performer 2: staff (idiophone consisting of a long wooden hand held stick with which performer 2 pounds the floor)/ xylophone (a number of wooden bars graduated in length to sound to a non-well-tempered series of pitches);

  Performer 3: idiophone consisting of banana leaves with stalks and blades/ grain-filled or seed-filled hand drum that is held horizontally/ goblet drum (single-headed drum (akin to the dabakan) played with two sticks made of rattan);
  Performer 4: idiophone consisting of bamboo with leaves with abutting stem/ wood blocks: a pair of non-well-tempered blocks of hard wood with a slotted resonant cavity/ a pair of wooden sticks;

  Performer 5: bamboo jew’s-harp (like the äruding) struck with a finger, not with a string/ claves (a pair of short and thick pieces of hard wood)/ a pair of wooden sticks;

  Performer 6: suling (a non-well-tempered bamboo ring flute with 6 holes, akin to the Palawanese bäbäräk)/ whip (idiophone consisting of two wooden boards joined by a hinge at one end)/ coconut shell idiophone consisting of one high-pitched coconut shell and one low-pitched coconut shell, both filled with dried beans and mounted on a wooden handle/ a pair of wooden sticks;

  Performer 7: log drum (large and hollow wooden idiophone with two slits).

• Duration: 6' 30"
• In 1 movement
• Composed in 2014
• First performance: 11.11.15 Harold Santos, Julia Yabes, Jason Verzola, Micky Undag, Virgil Jiminez, Ma. Cristine Orante and Jacques Dufourt Acuaverde resort, San Juan, Laiya, Batangas City, Philippines
• ISMN 979-0-9016525-7-6
• Parts: To rent the parts, please email <rc@robertcasteels.com>
• Downloadable scores for inspection:
  Salapa__opus_102_Final_A4__4pp___20pp_.pdf

Sälapa’ is the title of a cycle of Pala’wan love poems Casteels composed for a septet of playing, reciting, gesturing, singing, dancing and ambulating performers. Palawan is an island province of the Philippines situated between the Philippines and East Malaysia. The oral tradition of Pala’wan poetry is rich and highly charged with subtle metaphors. Sälapa’ means the betel box in Pala’wan language. The betel box is a metaphor for the body of the beloved woman. The finely chiseled box contains the areca nut which a man hopes to offer to the lady of his choice. To give a betel box signifies to offer one’s body. I selected stanzas from different Pala’wan poems to constitute a cycle in which the male figure is de-multiplied into six different persons. My wish is not to “neo-colonially” steal from an oral tradition nor to attempt to re-create the Pala’wan contest in love eloquence. Pala’wan poetry comprises songs of seduction in which the woman is invited to an impossible and forbidden adulterous carnal love. The woman curtly rejects this invitation. So doing, the poetry reminds the listeners of the powerful social and moral interdict. This Tristan duality resonates in the composer's European heart. As an artist ecologically engaged, Casteels strived towards a zero-carbon-emission performance by calling only for instruments made out of wood and bamboo, as he did in a previous composition titled Spirit of Wood opus 45 in 2003. Sounds from bamboo and banana leaves appeared prominently in his opus 60 Taman Suara in 2007. He adopted a different approach than in his Bird songs opus 66 of 2009 by incorporating in Sälapa’ aviary onomatopoeia that are truly used by English speaking ornithologists. Casteels used two Pala’wan scales in accordance with the function of each scale: the anhemitonic kulilal scale for the poem and the hemitonic läpläp bägit Pala’wan aviary scale for the melodies. The action of walking forcibly on the same spot whilst swinging the arms refers to the theatrical tradition Casteels saw in the municipality of Luisiana in the province of Laguna. Furthermore this peripatetic nature of the human soul corresponds to teh composer's European sense of being a Wanderer. The first performance of Sälapa’ concluded the final outdoor concert of the 33rd Asia Composers League International Festival and Conference in 2015 in the Philippines. The theme of this Festival was: "Likha - Likas, Reconfiguring Music, Nature and Myth".