Sunday, August 10, 2008 Mercado: Sterile sniping By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
“EGO-TRIPPING.” That’s how Mayor Tomas Osmeńa dubbed inclusion of Gov. Gwen Garcia’s father, Rep. Pablo, and brother, GSIS manager Winston, in this week’s list of six “Garbo sa Sugbo” awardees.
“Not credible,” the mayor snapped. “It’s like me giving (my wife) Margot an award.” Well, not quite.
But it’s more like His Honor naming his close-in gun slinger PO3 Adonis Dumpit as a Cebu City Charter Day awardee. At that time, Dumpit faced several criminal charges. He still does.
Osmeńa decides Charter Day awardees by his lonesome. Dumpit would get a P50,000 award with the plaque, he said. But Dumpit’s fellow awardee, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, would not.
“The P50,000 is the least of the lady’s concern,” Inquirer said. “But will the President of the Philippines agree to stand, cheek-by-jowl, with the mayor’s gunman garlanded with criminal charges?”
(Footnote: She did not. Instead, the President came to Cebu a few days earlier and received the award. )
Cebuanos are sick of this sterile sniping. Here’s some unsolicited advice. To ensure credibility, why don’t you create independent judges, like the Magsaysay Awards? They could then give awards instead to unpolitical Cebuanos.
Like who? Cebuano composer Vicente Rubi and the lyricist who produced the carol, “Kasadya Ning Taknaa.”
A Philippine Star article says 94-year old Josefino Cenizal and lyricist Levi Celerio are considered for “National Artist” awards for this carol. They merely converted “Kasadya” into “Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit.”
“Are we going to take this sitting down?” asks Cebu Normal University museum curator Romola O. Savellon.
Jullie Yap Daza wrote in a 1978 Times Journal column. “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). Rubi sought out Mariano Vestil, who lived then in Basak Cebu, to do the lyrics. Both produced “Kasadya Ning Takna-a.” First sang in Cebu in 1933, the carol spread to other areas.
“The most that Rubi ever received for his works was P150 for each of the five daygons, recorded in 1976, for Vicor.”
That’s $2.68 cents in today’s exchange rate,” 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.”
Daza wrote that Rubi and Vestil never got what were due them in royalties. 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…
Belated tribute came in 1981. Cebu Arts Foundation and Cebu Province cited them for their: “priceless contribution to the enrichment of Cebu culture, specifically in the field of music, through (the) deathless daygon: Kasadya 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.”
