At Home with Mr. C

It was a wonderful experience to pick the mind of a multi-awarded composer, renowned maestro, and more recently, National Artist for Music ― none other than the Music Man himself, Mr. Ryan Cayabyab.

He was born Raymundo Cipriano Pujante Cayabyab on May 4, 1954 in Manila, Philippines. Like most musicians, Cayabyab was drawn first toward his mother’s piano at an early age (four), at a time when having an upright in the living room was de rigueur for every middle-class family. Except that the young Ryan’s family was not ensconced in the middle class, and his mother was no ordinary mother. Celerina Cayabyab happened to be an opera singer and a professor who taught Voice at the College of Music at the University of the Philippines, and they lived, as it remains the privilege of UP Faculty to this day, in a house made of sawali and G.I. sheets on the University Campus. But plain as it was, the house was large, and filled to the rafters — with their family of six and a complement of 10 lady boarders who all happened to be enrolled in the same college.

His mother died when he was only 6, and her wish was that no one of her children would make music as a line of work; knowing how tough life is for a musician with insufficient income.

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” ― Victor Hugo

Initially driven by this thought, he decided to take up a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. But about this time when he was searching for an employment to sustain his studies, he soon joined with then-Senator Salvador Laurel as accompanist for the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) Chorale Ensemble. Noting his incomparable ability on the piano, the Senator presented him a scholarship that would allow Ryan to alter his course and hold learning in music. This changed the direction of his life, as he eventually graduated from the University of the Philippines College of Music, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Music, Major in Composition. For the next two decades, he became a full professor for the Department of Composition and Music Theory at the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music.

Cayabyab decided to write music in the late 70’s, that age that charted the birth of “Original Pilipino Music” and “Manila Sound” — and the birth of Ryan Cayabyab from musical director, pianist, and arranger, into Ryan Cayabyab, composer. Having learned from the greats, he would write for the greats. He would write not just love songs and pop songs and movie theme songs, but full film scores, modern musicals, entire operas—as if the sweep of his career had naturally played itself, and as if every composition of his had simply written itself out to sound deceptively easy and natural and instantly memorable.

At home with any genre, Cayabyab excels as a composer of the eclectic, the modern, and popular music. Awarded in 1978 as one of TOYM (Ten Outstanding Young Men) of the Philippines, he emerged as the only Asian winner of the Onassis International Cultural Competition in Greece with his “MISA 2000.” His works vary from specially made full-length ballets, theater musicals, choral pieces, a crowd set to unaccompanied chorus, and orchestral pieces, to salable recordings of popular composition, film scores and television specials.

His musical output consists of several masses, award winning film and television scores, short symphonic works, ten full-length Filipino musicals, a major opera, full length ballets, solo and instrumental works, orchestrations of Filipino folk, popular and love songs, three one-man (he provided all 16 voices) a cappella song albums, and scores of popular songs sung by top Filipino recording artists. In addition to winning several international music festival competitions, he has won countless awards from the film, television and recording industries.

All told, Cayabyab’s roots lie firmly in Philippine soil, where he is one of our few true homegrown and home-educated talents. This may seem an irrelevant detail to the casual career observer, or, more precisely, listener of music, but a quick review in our memory of Cayabyab’s compositions will reveal the clear and proud difference.

Despite his nationally-renowned stature, Ryan Cayabyab is energetic, eager, and disarmingly modest, matching, note for note, his popular image as a smiling, bespectacled, and ageless talent. “Mr. C,” by which he is known equally to those who know him personally and those who don’t, in fact, works as a perfect contraction of two things — an honorific reserved for those whose genius firmly lies beyond reach, and a term of endearment for those whose said genius never gets in the way of their approachability. This is the legacy of Mr. C: a musical genius that the Philippines can truly be proud of.