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Danongan Kalanduyan is one of the most prominent kulintang musicians in the country. (Kulintang is an instrumental form of music composed on a row of small gongs accompanied by larger suspended gongs and drums). He began playing the kulintang as a child in his village, eventually becoming a master musician. In 1976, a Rockefeller Foundation grant brought him to the University of Washington, Seattle, as artist-in-residence in the department of ethnomusicology, from which he received an MA in 1984. Later that year, he moved to California and became the musical director of the Klilang Kulintang Arts of San Francisco, and, since 1989, he has been the director of the Filipino Kulintang Center. He received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1995.

Photos courtesy the artist