Growing up as the child of Filipino immigrants in California, Christine Bacareza Balance gained first-hand knowledge of the Filipino American music scene by singing in a band and volunteering at a community-based Filipino American theater near San Francisco. Balance, associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts and Sciences, explained in a Cornell research article that these experiences informed her first book, “Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America.”
“There wasn’t much scholarly research about Filipino Americans and popular musics,” Balance said in the Cornell Research article. “What did exist was often written by folks who were to in the field of performance or popular music studies, so they focus on the textual materials, not the actual sound of the music or the aspects of a live performance versus recording.”
