Traditional Filipino Music: Instruments, Forms and Regions

Two Philippine oral traditions, the Ifugao hudhud and the Maranao darangen, carry UNESCO recognition as masterpieces of intangible heritage. Both are chanted rather than sung to fixed melody, and both predate colonization by centuries. They sit alongside bronze gong ensembles, Spanish-derived string bands and courtship songs under one wide umbrella: traditional Filipino music.

This guide covers all three layers of that tradition: the indigenous gong and chant music of the pre-colonial islands, the Spanish-influenced lowland forms that followed, and the American-era sounds that shaped the twentieth century. It also breaks down the instruments behind each layer, from Mindanao’s gongs to Luzon’s string bands.

At a Glance

Aspect	Details
Three broad layers	Indigenous or pre-colonial, Spanish-influenced lowland, American-era and modern
Northern gong tradition	Gangsa, flat gongs of the Cordillera highlands
Southern gong tradition	Kulintang, bossed gongs of Mindanao and Sulu
String tradition	Rondalla, introduced during Spanish rule (16th to 19th century)
Vocal forms	Kundiman, harana and balitaw
Epic chants	Hudhud (Ifugao) and Darangen (Maranao), both UNESCO-listed
Instrument families	Idiophones, aerophones, chordophones and membranophones
Where it survives today	Festivals, weddings, universities and cultural centers nationwide

Three Layers of Philippine Music

Historians and ethnomusicologists usually split Philippine music into three layers. Each formed in a different era, and each still survives in some form.

• Indigenous or pre-colonial music: gong ensembles, epic chants and instrumental music tied to ritual, courtship and farming, developed before sustained contact with outside traders and colonizers.
• Spanish-influenced lowland forms: music that blended European melody and instruments, brought by missionaries and settlers, with existing Filipino singing and dance, producing kundiman, harana, balitaw and the rondalla.
• American-era and modern forms: music shaped by the American colonial period from 1898 onward, including brass bands and jazz-influenced popular song, later feeding into Original Pilipino Music, a term still used for contemporary Filipino pop.

These layers do not replace each other. A Cordillera gong ensemble performs the same way it did five centuries ago, in villages a few hours from cities where a rondalla plays at Sunday Mass. Traditional Filipino music today means all of it at once, an archipelago’s full musical history playing side by side rather than in sequence.

Geography explains most of the variation. More than 180 ethnolinguistic groups live across the archipelago’s roughly 7,600 islands, and each developed its own instruments, tunings and repertoire in relative isolation before roads, radio or recorded sound connected them. A gong pattern from Kalinga and a courtship song from Cavite grew up on opposite ends of the same country, centuries apart, with almost no shared influence until the twentieth century pulled them into the same national conversation.

Traditional Filipino Instruments: The Complete Table

Ethnomusicologists sort instruments into four families based on how they make sound. Idiophones vibrate as a whole object, like a struck gong. Aerophones use a column of air, like a flute. Chordophones use vibrating strings, like a lute. Membranophones use a stretched skin, like a drum.

Instrument	Type	Region or Group	How It Is Played
Kulintang	Idiophone	Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug (Mindanao-Sulu)	Row of 5 to 11 small gongs struck with two wooden beaters
Agung	Idiophone	Kulintang ensembles across Mindanao-Sulu	Large suspended gong struck with a padded mallet
Gangsa	Idiophone	Kalinga, Ibaloy, Ifugao, Bontoc (Cordillera)	Flat gong beaten with a stick or played with the palm
Kubing	Idiophone	Maguindanao, Palawan, Visayan groups	Bamboo jaw’s harp plucked while shaped by the mouth
Tongali	Aerophone	Kalinga (Cordillera)	Nose flute played by exhaling through one nostril
Palendag	Aerophone	Maguindanao and other Mindanao groups	Bamboo lip-valley flute blown at an angle
Tambuli	Aerophone	Lowland and highland communities nationwide	Hollowed carabao horn blown to send signals over distance
Kudyapi	Chordophone	Maguindanao, Maranao, Manobo	Two-stringed boat lute plucked by hand
Bandurria	Chordophone	Rondalla ensembles nationwide	14-string lute played with a plectrum in tremolo
Octavina	Chordophone	Rondalla ensembles nationwide	Mid-range rondalla lute, plucked in tremolo
Laud	Chordophone	Rondalla ensembles nationwide	Deeper rondalla lute, plucked in tremolo
Guitarra	Chordophone	Rondalla ensembles nationwide	Six-string guitar strummed for chords and rhythm
Bajo de Unas	Chordophone	Rondalla ensembles nationwide	Upright bass plucked by hand for the bass line
Dabakan	Membranophone	Kulintang ensembles across Mindanao-Sulu	Goblet drum struck by hand or thin sticks

The table only starts the list. Kulintang and gangsa lead their own regional ensembles, covered in more depth below. The kudyapi, a boat-shaped lute plucked rather than bowed, remains the main stringed instrument in several Mindanao repertoires. The tambuli, a hollowed carabao horn, once carried messages between villages long before radios existed.

The Two Gong Traditions: Cordillera Gangsa and Mindanao Kulintang

Gong music is the oldest audible layer of Filipino tradition, and it splits along geography. Highland groups across the Cordillera play the gangsa at community gatherings. Lowland and island groups across Mindanao and Sulu play the kulintang at weddings, harvests and healing rites. The two traditions grew apart for centuries.

Kalinga musicians strike gangsa in groups of six or more, either standing and striking with a stick in the pattong style, or seated and playing with the palm in the toppaya style. The Ibaloy add two drums, the sulibao and kimbal, while the Ifugao play three gongs together using both mallets and bare hands.

Kulintang, by contrast, leads a five-instrument ensemble across Maguindanao, Maranao and Tausug communities. A row of small gongs carries the melody while supporting gongs and a drum lock into repeating patterns underneath. Full coverage of that ensemble, its tuning, and why women traditionally led it, lives in our guide to kulintang. The table below sets the two traditions side by side.

Feature	Gangsa (Cordillera)	Kulintang (Mindanao-Sulu)
Gong shape	Flat, no raised center	Bossed, with a raised center
Main groups	Kalinga, Ibaloy, Ifugao, Bontoc	Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug
Playing style	Struck with a stick or palm	Struck with two soft beaters
Typical ensemble	Six or more gongs plus drums	Five instruments, gongs and one drum
Musical role	Accompanies communal dance	Leads a fixed rhythm with improvisation
Religious layer	Predates and coexists with Christian influence	Predates Islam, still played today

Both traditions share one trait. They are built for dance. Cordillera gong music accompanies communal steps performed in a circle, while kulintang shares that same relationship: the singkil dance from Mindanao happens over live gongs, dancers weaving between crossed bamboo poles in time with the beat.

The Rondalla and Its Spanish Inheritance

Spain brought its plucked-string ensembles to the islands during three centuries of colonization, and Filipino musicians reshaped them into something new: the rondalla. The name traces to Spanish street ensembles like the murga and estudiantina, popular in eighteenth-century Europe. Filipino players adopted the format, then changed the instruments enough that a modern rondalla no longer plays quite like its European ancestor.

A standard rondalla has five instrument sections:

1. Bandurria: the lead melodic lute, the ensemble’s mainstay
2. Octavina: a mid-range lute filling out the harmony
3. Laud: a deeper lute carrying the lower melodic line
4. Guitarra: the standard guitar, played for chords and rhythm
5. Bajo de unas: an upright bass, plucked by hand rather than bowed

The bandurria is a pear-shaped lute struck with a plectrum in rapid tremolo strokes that create a sustained, singing tone. The Filipino bandurria carries fourteen strings across six string courses, two more than its twelve-string Spanish ancestor, built for a bigger sound.

Rondalla music became a fixture of Filipino social life. Ensembles played at weddings, baptisms, funerals and fiestas, and Spanish friars taught the underlying music theory alongside it. Town rondalla groups still compete and perform across the country, especially during fiesta season, and school-based rondalla programs remain one of the most common ways Filipino children encounter formal music training outside a church choir.

The ensemble also traveled. Filipino migrants carried rondalla playing to Hawaii, California and other overseas communities in the early twentieth century, and those groups still perform today, often at Independence Day events and cultural festivals organized far from the islands where the music began.

Vocal Traditions: Kundiman, Harana and Balitaw

Filipino courtship produced its own vocal repertoire during the Spanish era: three related but distinct song forms. Harana is a nighttime window serenade, sung live by a suitor and his friends. Kundiman is a formal art song, not tied to any one performance setting. Balitaw is a scripted sung debate between a man and a woman, most associated with the Visayas.

Each form carries its own guitar rhythm and structure. Harana runs in a habanera-derived meter and unfolds across four stages, from an opening call to a closing farewell, and our guide to harana covers each stage in full. Kundiman is set in triple meter and moves from a minor, melancholy opening into a resolved major key, detailed in our guide to kundiman.

Balitaw stays closer to its folk roots than kundiman does, with a man and a woman trading improvised verses over guitar in a bolero-like rhythm. It survives today mainly in Cebu and the central Visayas, ranging beyond romance into marriage and everyday village life. Kundiman also produced the Philippines’ best-known art-song composers, Nicanor Abelardo and Francisco Santiago, whose melodies are still taught in conservatories a century later.

Epic Chants: Hudhud and Darangen

Beyond gongs and guitars, the Philippines preserves two long-form oral epics recognized by UNESCO. The hudhud belongs to the Ifugao people of the Cordillera, and the darangen belongs to the Maranao people around Lake Lanao. Neither is sung to a fixed melody in the Western sense. Both are chanted, carrying histories, genealogies and moral lessons across hours or days of performance.

Ifugao elders chant the hudhud during rice harvest and funeral wakes, alternating between a lead narrator and a responding choir over a single repeated line. More than 200 chants make up the full repertoire, divided across roughly 40 episodes. Because Ifugao society traces descent through women, elderly women usually serve as narrators, a role passed within families. UNESCO recognized the hudhud as a masterpiece of oral heritage in 2001, later formally inscribing it in 2008.

The darangen runs even longer: 17 cycles totaling around 72,000 lines, several times the length of most Western epic poems. It predates the Maranao people’s conversion to Islam and draws on a wider Southeast Asian epic culture with roots tracing back to early Sanskrit literary traditions. Maranao elders still consult the darangen in settling questions of customary law, decades after its own UNESCO recognition.

Where Music Fits: Ritual, Courtship and Work

Traditional music was rarely performance for its own sake. It marked specific moments in daily and communal life, and each form attached to a function that outsiders often miss.

• Ritual and healing: gongs called on spirits or marked a cure in animist ceremonies, predating both Christianity and Islam.
• Courtship: harana and balitaw structured how young men and women signaled interest under family supervision.
• Farming and harvest cycles: hudhud chants accompanied rice planting and harvest among the Ifugao.
• Community and rite of passage: kulintangan ensembles among the Tausug still mark circumcision celebrations and weddings.
• Work and travel: the tambuli horn signaled danger, gathered a barangay, or marked distance between villages before any electronic alternative existed.

These functions rarely separated cleanly. A single event, a wedding, a harvest, a healing rite, could call for gongs, chants and instrumental music together, each piece doing a distinct job. That layered use of music across indigenous tribes of the Philippines is part of why so many forms survived without ever being written down.

Where These Traditions Stand Today

None of these traditions are frozen. University programs in Manila and abroad now teach kulintang and rondalla as coursework, not just family inheritance. Groups such as the UP Rondalla and various regional cultural troupes hold regular public concerts, and several state universities now offer credit courses built entirely around gong ensemble performance.

The National Commission for Culture and the Arts documents indigenous ensembles still active in the Cordillera and Mindanao, while diaspora communities in the United States keep kulintang and rondalla alive far from their home provinces. Filipino American cultural centers in California and Washington run regular kulintang workshops, often taught by students of the musicians who first carried the tradition abroad in the 1970s.

Some forms face real risk. Few young Ifugao still know the full hudhud repertoire, and UNESCO lists the practice as needing active safeguarding. Harana has all but disappeared as a spontaneous street practice, kept alive mainly through documentaries, booked performances and family memory rather than nightly courtship.

Traditional Filipino music survives because communities kept choosing to play it, gong by gong, verse by verse, long after each form’s original occasion faded. Readers who want the fuller cultural picture behind these instruments and songs can explore our History and Culture coverage, where dance, ritual and language sit alongside the music.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is traditional Filipino music?

Traditional Filipino music covers three layers: indigenous gong and chant traditions that predate colonization, Spanish-influenced forms like kundiman and the rondalla, and American-era and modern sounds. Each layer developed in a different period, and all three are still performed somewhere in the country today.

What makes Philippine music traditional?

Indigenous forms favor pentatonic scales, repeating rhythmic patterns and live improvisation rather than written scores. Spanish-influenced forms use Western harmony, triple or quadruple meter, and guitar-led accompaniment. Most traditional forms also tie directly to an occasion, such as a harvest, a wedding, or a courtship, rather than standing alone as entertainment.

What are 10 traditional Filipino instruments?

Ten commonly cited examples are the kulintang, agung, gangsa, kubing, tongali, palendag, kudyapi, bandurria, octavina and dabakan. They span all four instrument families, idiophones, aerophones, chordophones and membranophones, and come from regions across Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao.

Which is older, the kulintang or the rondalla?

The kulintang is far older. Its documented form dates to around the 13th century and predates the arrival of Islam in Mindanao. The rondalla arrived only after Spanish colonization began in the 16th century, making it younger by several hundred years.

Works Cited

National Commission for Culture and the Arts. “Traditional Forms of Music.” NCCA, ncca.gov.ph/about-ncca-3/subcommissions/subcommission-on-the-arts-sca/music/traditional-forms-of-music/.

UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. “Hudhud Chants of the Ifugao.” ICH UNESCO, ich.unesco.org/en/RL/hudhud-chants-of-the-ifugao-00058.

UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. “Darangen Epic of the Maranao People of Lake Lanao.” ICH UNESCO, ich.unesco.org/en/RL/darangen-epic-of-the-maranao-people-of-lake-lanao-00066.

Wikipedia contributors. “Rondalla.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondalla.

Wikipedia contributors. “Gangsa.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsa.

“The Maguindanaoan Kulintang of the Southern Philippines.” Center for World Music, Sept. 2021, centerforworldmusic.org/2021/09/instrument-kulintang/.