Ateneo's citation of Alfonso C. Bolipata
ALFONSO C BOLIPATA
Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi
Alfonso ‘Coke’ Bolipata is the one of the country’s leading musicians; he’s a seasoned performer, teacher, writer, and administrator of a community school for music and the arts. He has been widely recognized for his performances and efforts in cultural development, and was a recipient of the 2000 TOYM Award (Ten Outstanding Young Men), the Katha Award for his recording Pelikula, the 2001 Aliw Award Best Instrumentalist for his performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra, the 2002 Gawad ng Maynila Award, a National Book Award (Book Design) in 1997 for his children’s book Water in the Ring of Fire, and the NCCA Alab ng Haraya Award.
A child prodigy, Coke comes from a family of musicians and received his first violin lessons at the age of eight from master musician Oscar C Yatco as a scholar of Stella G Brimo. His lessons continued with Basilio Manalo and Rizalina Buenaventura. At age twelve, he won First Prize in the National Music Competitions for Young Artists, subsequently leaving to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His teachers include Dorothy Delay, Jascha Brodsky, Felix Galimir, and James Buswell. He was a member of Alexander Schneider’s New York String Orchestra and an original member of the New World Symphony in Miami under Michael Tilson Tomas.
He has performed worldwide as a soloist and chamber musician (Bolipata Trio, Keats Trio, Gavin Quartet) in the major halls in America, as well as in numerous concerts in other countries such as Canada, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, China, Spain, and France. He has performed with the Beijing Philharmonic, the Nagoya Philharmonic, and the Bulgaria Radio Orchestra, and as a regular soloist of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra and Saint-Saens Rondo Capriccioso with the Sophia Philharmonic of Bulgaria.
In 1990, Coke received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington) and Artists Affiliates (New York) to bring culture to the rural areas of America. This served as an impetus for his return to the Philippines. He opened an art space on his family’s mango orchard in Zambales, where he brought in artists and mounted exhibitions of their works, and offered extension violin classes to children from the local community. His brother, the cellist Ramon Bolipata, held regular classes in cello and his sister, Plet Bolipata, offered art classes. Coke had his first violin workshop with twelve students from the community, whom he taught under a big tree as there were no classrooms yet at the time.
He called the place CASA San Miguel and developed it into a community-based art center that integrates arts and the rural community. It has brought art, music, theater, dance and film to the barangays, orphanages, and indigenous communities in the province. Twenty of CASA’s scholars pursued music courses in the country’s leading conservatories such as the UP College of Music and the UST Conservatory of Music. Some of them studied music abroad, in Germany and the United States.
After a few years of violin lessons, some of the students, the scholars in particular, are taught how to teach the instrument to young mentees. Cokes calls it ‘playing’ it forward. It’s part of their system that if one is a scholar of CASA, one has to teach six hours a week. Thus, many of them are now mentors themselves in CASA. A number of them have also taught in Centex, a public school in Tondo, Manila for underprivileged children, with private sector support, where Coke also holds regular classes in violin.
CASA San Miguel has now engaged close to 2000 children from the local community in the art and music process, as well as some of the most prominent artists in the country today, including Elmer Borlongan, Don Salubayba, Myra Beltran, Carlo Gabuco, and Leeroy New, among others. Its facilities include a 300-seat auditorium designed for chamber orchestra concerts, theater plays and operettas, and a Museum of Community Heritage, which features the rich heritage of Barangay San Miguel, the town of San Antonio and the province of Zambales. Many of CASA’s alumni have gone on to make names for themselves with prizes in local and international competitions, grants for residencies, international seminars, exhibits and workshops. A CASA San Miguel alumnus or alumna can be found in every orchestra in the Philippines today.
Coke also shares his love for music and the arts beyond CASA San Miguel. In 2000, he co-founded the Metro Manila Community Orchestra and the Symphony By The Sea Community Orchestra in Subic SBMA. He has also served as a trustee of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the executive director of Miriam College’s Music Center for Applied Music, and is currently a commissioner to the Philippine National Commission of UNESCO. He has significant award-winning contributions to local television and cinema as a producer (Puting Paalam, Concierto, Mangatyanan), actor (Boses), composer (theme song of Ina Kinasusuklaman Ba Kita), and film scorer (Boses, Boundary).
CASA San Miguel is now on its 25th year. In the year 2000, it came at the crossroads, because it had become unfeasible for the school to continue. The board rethought their questions when the students expressed how much the school meant to them. “It’s beyond music, it’s really about self-esteem, about confidence, about defining themselves. So from then on, that became our reason for being. That we are here to give the kids a chance to discover who they are, to have experiences, overcome difficulties, and make music together. A lot of what we do here has helped them cope with difficulties in their own lives. Music has become their moral backbone, so to speak. Music has become something that you can rely on when you’re having a hard time, whether it’s pressure from school, pressure from parents, personal problems…. I think it’s very important for
them to have that to fall back on. What you learn in music goes beyond music. It enters your life—the way you make decisions, the way you think, your values,” Coke says.
For nurturing the love of music among Filipino youth and mentoring young violinists, especially those from the social margins; for creating a center which celebrates local culture and the arts, thus inspiring and cultivating pride in the community; for animating the spirit of generosity among his students and fellow artists, and concretely demonstrating that the arts may be an instrument for social transformation, the Ateneo de Manila University proudly confers on Alfonso C Bolipata the 2017 Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi.
