Listening to José Maceda: A Conversation with Aki Onda

Floor 3, Theater and Online, via Zoom

As part of their contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2026, Aki Onda shares their ongoing research on Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda. Onda will discuss Maceda's project Ugnayan, Music for Twenty Radio Stations (1974), a large-scale work broadcast simultaneously across Manila. The presentation will address the socio-political dimensions of the composition, particularly its relationship to the Marcos regime. In conversation with composer and writer Bill Dietz and art historian Patrick Flores, Onda will further situate Maceda’s practice within the context of the twentieth-century international avant-garde, while addressing its entanglement with the historical narratives of the Philippines. 

This program is presented in partnership with Asia Art Archive in America. 

Speakers

Aki Onda is an artist, composer, and curator. Their visual and musical works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of cassette field recordings. Onda has presented their work widely at museums and exhibitions. Onda served as Guest Director of TPAM-Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (current YPAM), Japan and currently works as Curator-at-Large at Western Front, Vancouver. After residing in New York for two decades, he currently lives and works in Mito, Japan.

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of the National Gallery Singapore and Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, where he is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He is widely recognized for his scholarly contributions to art history, with a particular focus on the intersections between art, politics, and cultural identity in Southeast Asia. In Spring 2026, he is the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. 

Bill Dietz is a composer and writer, born in Arizona. His work on genealogies of reception and the "political aesthetics of listening" is often presented in festivals, museums, and academic journals, but also in apartment buildings, magazines, and on public streets. Alongside his artistic work, he has served as artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne (2006-2014) and of Overtoon - Platform for Sound Practitioners (2022-2025). He has published two books of listening scores: one on his Tutorial Diversions series, for home performance (Eight Tutorial Diversions, 2009–2014, 2015); and the other, made up of “concert pieces,” based on historical and contemporary audience behavior (L’école de la claque, 2017). In 2013, he co-founded Ear│Wave│Event with Woody Sullender. With Amy Cimini, he co-edited Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (2020), and he is co-author, with Kerstin Stakemeier, of Universal Receptivity (2021). He has been co-chair Bard MFA's Music/Sound discipline since 2012