Desperately Seeking Composers

It's been a few days after Valentine's Day. yet, not surprisingly, we still hear a lot more of those love songs being played over the radio, all in celebration of the so-called love month.


No, this is not a story about love. Sorry to disappoint you. This is about the songs from the past that we have come to love. The very same songs that are making a comeback on the local airwaves because some up and coming singer has decided to make a revival of them. On other occasions, it is the more established performers who do the reviving of a song or two.

I admit that I have never been a big fan of revival songs. For me, the songs are good enough as they originally were. Why go through the process of changing some of the melodies and passing them off as songs rendered in a different way?

I used to admire local singers like Jaya,the Queen of Soul, and Regine Velasquez, known as Asia's songbird. They are undoubtedly one of the finer voices that our country has produced. However, when they started riding the revival bandwagon and began producing albums that contained revival songs, my admiration for them has greatly diminished.

Where have all the great Filipino composers gone? Where are the likes of Cecille Azarcon and Odette Quesada, two of the more prolific songwriters of our land who made timeless love songs and even gained several awards for their works two or three decades ago? Has no one equally talented been able to step into their shoes?

To date, there is only Ogie Alcasid who consistently makes original Filipino music. And this also gets me to ask, 'why not produce an album for her love, Regine, that will not carry an array of revived songs?'

To make matters worse, many of our singers these days have not limited themselves to merely reviving local songs. They have now gone international, reviving well-loved love songs like Bluer Than Blue, Love Will Lead You Back, and I Love You Goodbye, just to name a few.

Have our singers been reduced to a group of performers capable of only reviving old songs? There are lots of new singers in our midst these days. I find Nina and Kyla paricularly good, but their decision to do revivals has become a great disappointment. Why can they not just stick to composing real-to-goodness original songs?

There's also the issue about royalties. Is this still being observed whenever song revivals are made?