Rondalla Club of Los Angeles

One of the sounds you are most likely to hear at any Filipino cultural night, wedding, or community celebration is the bright plucking of the rondalla, the traditional string ensemble of the Philippines. For nearly half a century, celebrated performer and teacher Tagumpay de Leon, known to his friends and students as Uncle Pi, has been a leading figure performing and preserving this delightful music in the United States. Under the tutelage of Uncle Pi, the Rondalla Club of Los Angeles is highly regarded as one of the most outstanding rondallas in the nation.

String bands known as rondalla are key expressions of Filipino culture across the more than twothousand inhabited Philippine islands and throughout the diaspora. The instruments of rondalla were introduced by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, but Filipinos quickly put their distinctive stamp on what was once the music of the colonizers. As Uncle Pi says, “Now when you see a rondalla you know it’s from the Philippines.” Rondalla features five plucked string instruments: the guitar and the bajo de uñas (now supplanted by the double bass), and the bandurria, the laúd, and the octavina, each with 14 strings.

Tagumpay Mendoza de Leon was born in 1945 in the province of Nueva Ecija, north of Manila. As one of eight children of the pianist Iluminada Mendoza and composer and bandleader Felipe Padilla de Leon, he studied numerous instruments—not just the piano, accordion, and violin but also the rondalla instruments that populated their home. While in college, De Leon and his siblings formed a family rondalla. He jokes that he chose the bass as his primary instrument because it had only four strings to navigate, but he quickly realized the challenge of carrying a much larger instrument when they performed around Manila. In 1971, De Leon moved to Los Angeles for work as an engineer while continuing to serve as a musician in the Filipino community, playing a central role in multiple groups, notably the Fil-Am Family Cultural Group. In 1991, as the demand grew for rondalla at cultural nights at area colleges, De Leon founded the Rondalla Club of Los Angeles (RCLA) with his late friends Nitoy Gonzales (rondalla director of the renowned Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company) and Leonilo “Boy” Angos. Since then, Uncle Pi has cemented his legacy not only through stellar performances but also with his faculty appointment at University of California, Riverside, as well as through RCLA, by teaching subsequent generations of rondalla musicians who now live and perform across the country.

At the 83rd National Folk Festival, De Leon will lead a group of outstanding performers from California, New York, and Georgia: Patrick Tanega, Eric Ilustrisimo, Kathleen Mangusing, Will Simbol, Ryan Sumampong, and Lakshmi Ramirez. The ensemble ranges in age from their 30s on up to Uncle Pi’s 81 years of wisdom. Nearly all were his students and carry forward his legacy of cultivating Filipino culture through music. As another former student said when Uncle Pi received a National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship in 2021, “De Leon’s stalwart reverence for the repertoire of traditional folk songs radiates outward to both fellow players and audiences.”