Award-winning Filipino composer/scholar Paul Gabriel L. Cosme (b. 2000) blends and breaks boundaries in his constant search for home. Being at the interstices of his native Philippines, its diaspora, and neighbors to the East and West, Paul’s works seek to make connections and elucidate shared histories between various cultures and communities that he has since called his home.
As a composer, Paul combines various media, forms, and sound worlds from Asian and Western traditions with classical, pop & rock, jazz, and traditional artists from the United States and through Asia and the Pacific. His music often draws from and engages narratives of immigration, social issues, diaspora, poetry, local rituals, myths, and mythologies. He collaborates with musicians and groups such as the Grammy-winning New Jersey Symphony, Grammy-nominated JACK Quartet, Pulitzer Prize-winning Raven Chacón, taiko master Kenny Endo, shakuhachi player Christopher Blasdel, kulintang player Ronald “kulintronica” Querian, sheng performer Loo Sze Wang, koto player Maruta Miki, geomungo player Ik-Soo Heo, pianist Angela Kim, violinist Ignace Jang, founding critical race theorist and visual artist Mari Matsuda, New York-based Contemporaneous, Sugar Hill Salon Collective, members of the Hawaiʻi Symphony and Minnesota Orchestras, Gugak musicians from Seoul National University, and many musicians he considers his dear friends.
His works gained recognition at home and abroad with institutions like the American Choral Directors Association, Edward T. Cone Institute at Princeton University, Beth Morrison Projects in New York, Asian Composers League, and Philippine National Commission on Culture and the Arts. His current major projects include a Kennedy Theater production of David Saar’s The Yellow Boat reimagined towards Philippine aesthetics with Cebuano director Emmanuel Mante.
When Paul is not composing, he likes to improvise on the kulintang, a set of bronze knobbed gongs from Mindanao, Southern Philippines, which he had the fortune to play in the Honolulu premiere of 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner and Navajo composer Raven Chacon and Carcross/Tagish curator Candice Hopkins’s Dispatch.
As a scholar, Paul investigates Filipino so-called national culture(s)–from folk, “high” art, to pop–in the 20th and 21st centuries. His recent work traces developments in Philippine popular music, Original Pilipino Music, and national identity by comparing Filipina singer-songwriter Moira dela Torre and American popstar Taylor Swift. He currently works on two projects: the first examines Pagsamba (To Worship), a mass setting by Filipino National Artist José Montserrat Maceda, in relation to the cultural formation of the Filipino identity as an intracultural phenomenon. The second explores how various Filipina popular singing voices resist colonial modernity in the Philippines. His previous works were on Filipino National Artists Lucrecia Kasilag and her contributions to Philippine cultures, and analyses of her intercultural compositions. Paul received prizes and grants for his research and presented his work at international conferences and centers such as the University of Hawai’i Center for Philippine Studies, International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and the International Council on Traditional Music and Dance (ICTMD).
Paul currently studies composition as a doctoral student at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. He was a Graduate Degree Fellow at the East-West Center and the recipient of the John Young Award in Arts & Letters. A winner of the Lila Bell Acheson Wallace Endowed Prize in Music, Paul graduated with highest honors from Macalester College where he majored in Music and International Studies. His teachers include Randy Bauer, Victoria Malawey, Donald Reid Womack, Takuma Itoh, and Thomas Osborne.
Paul loves dogs, the morning dew, Beethoven op. 132, Pinoy indie music, mangoes, and his favorite Filipino dish—sinigang.