To record Sagada’s traditional vocal and instrumental repertoire—this was the purpose of the project Collection and ReCollection: Recording the Traditional and Instrumental Repertoire in Sagada (Collection and ReCollection).
The project wants “to sustain the continued documentation of living traditions, while continuing to preserve the older records,” according to the report by Collection and ReCollection Project Coordinator Grace Ann Buenaventura.
The project participants were Grade 12 students the Saint Mary’s School of Sagada, Inc. (SMSSI), selected and enrolled under the Humanities and Social Sciences track. Workshop facilitators were UP Center for Ethnomusicology (UPCE) ethnomusicologists and archive custodians. Lectures and activities covered music research, collection of musical data, community archiving and basic archival preservation, data privacy and consent, as well as activities such as drawing maps of the community, sketching musical instruments, and conducting interviews with resource persons, among others.
In addition, Buenaventura reports that “underscoring the activity is community archiving, where the members of the community record themselves and have full control of the project and its outcomes.”
A recipient of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) 2025 Competitive Grants, Collection and ReCollection is headed by the SMSSI in partnership with the UPCE. It aims to equip SMSSI students and project participants with the necessary skills and tools to create, preserve, and access a sound archive of their own community.
Buenaventura’s report states, “the resulting archive is envisioned to contribute to the continuation of the rich musical traditions by using recorded audio and video for teaching and demonstration.”
The participants were able to document the Etag festival, with on-site workshops facilitated from 17 to 21 March 2025.
Collection and ReCollection involved 37 participants who gathered date, processed metadata, and played a significant role in making decisions affecting the future, using their data as one of the pioneering collections. The project has compiled 200 recordings, consisting of 167 audio files and 33 video files. The UPCE was able to compile the workshop modules into a training manual titled Practical Ways of Documenting and Archiving Traditions.—With a report from the UPCE