This column celebrates the vibrant literary culture and heritage of Dumaguete City, in anticipation of its bid to be designated as UNESCO City of Literature under the Creative Cities Network. It is produced by the Buglas Writers Guild, a network of literary artists from Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor. Each week, we will focus on the work of one local writer. For this month, the guest editor is Dumaguete fictionist Ian Rosales Casocot.
Albert Louis Faurot was Dumaguete’s quintessential Renaissance Man—he was, after all, a consummate educator, a prolific author, a well-regarded concert pianist, a tough art critic and a sensitive collector, and a demanding choir master. The first two weeks of March is an important time to memorialize him: he was born on 7 March 1914 in Lamar, Barton, Missouri in the United States, and died on 15 March 1990 in the city he had come to love and call home, Dumaguete.
He was also a missionary, and engaged in that capacity mostly through the teaching of music. Before he came to live in the Philippines, he had spent a significant part of his young life in China, having gone there in 1936—just 22 years old—right after graduating from Oberlin. He taught music at Foochow College [in what is now Fuzhou]—and also later taught at various Chinese educational institutions, including Foochow Christian University, the National Fujian Academy of Music, and Hwa Nan College.
Even during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945, Faurot managed to build a reputation not only as a teacher but also as a choral conductor, an opera producer, and a piano recitalist. He became fluent in Mandarin and was part of a period of intercultural collaboration, forming connections with composers Huang Tzu and Zhao Yuanren. He arranged patriotic “school songs” and numerous Chinese folk songs, incorporating them into his programs alongside Western classics and new works by both Western and Chinese composers. During the Japanese occupation of Fuzhou in World War II, he and his students were evacuated to Shaowu and Yingtai. For six years, he continued teaching and performing in an abandoned temple, relying on a piano and a collection of 1,500 78rpm records as his instructional materials.
But eventually his Chinese sojourn ended. Like other foreign teachers in China, his career was disrupted in 1950 due to the outbreak of the Korean War, prompting him to join a wave of displaced academics and artists striving to rebuild their lives elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.
He settled in Dumaguete in 1952, where he began teaching at the new School of Music at Silliman University. Faurot soon found himself becoming the paragon of a man of all the arts—a Renaissance Man, so to speak. His house at the end of Langheim Road in Silliman campus—which he thusly called End House—was designed in such a way that it also became a gallery for art exhibitions, a salon that could host lectures and talks, and a performing space that could accommodate small chamber music concerts. It became a repository of picture postcards sent back by former students from great museums and monuments of the world, and also became the “hangout” place for many of Dumaguete’s artists, including musicians, writers, visual artists, dancers, theatre artists, and academicians.
He began a popular course on arts appreciation, which is still being taught today; he helped the Tiempos build the nascent National Writers Workshop, the first creative writing workshop of its kind in Asia; he founded the Order of the Golden Palette, the organization of campus visual artists; he taught for the famous Honors Program of Silliman, where he challenged students to develop critical thinking; and he began the Silliman University Men’s Glee Club.
That choral group, which Faurot founded in 1962, became one of his greatest legacies in Dumaguete culture. Established at the request of the University Religious Life Council, the Men’s Glee Club was essentially formed to fill the need for a convocation choir. It started with 45 members [or perhaps 50—accounts do vary], all of them springing from various units in the university, and all of them chosen through auditions for their voices, and also for their talent in dancing and playing various instruments. As an enticement, a Glee Club scholarship was offered to a soloist each year. [Dumaguete Mayor Ipe Remollo was formerly a member of the Men’s Glee Club.]
On the year the Men’s Glee Club was founded, the Yale University Men’s Glee Club also gave a series of concerts at Silliman—and this group became a model for the new club to operate, and essentially helped establish its traditions. This included electing its own officers—Dr. Nichol Elman, when he was student, became its president in 1969—who were then tasked to plan and carry out the group’s many activities, including planning its various concert tours. This left Maestro Faurot to do the selection and preparation for the music.
Music was his life, but Faurot was also a prolific writer. To augment his course on arts appreciation, he authored a popular textbook, Culture Currents of World Art, first published in 1974 by New Day Publishers [later reprinted in 1981]. He would also publish a complementary book, Culture Currents of World Music, co-authored with Isabel Dimaya-Vista. That book would come with its own recorded samples—perhaps the first of its kind in Philippine academic publishing. He would also author Prayers of Great Men in 1976.
But Faurot burnished his literary reputation with A Little Book of Wang Wei: Poems Translated from the Chinese, published in the early 1990s—around the time of his death—by the Philippine Literary Arts Council [or PLAC]. At 56 pages, it is a small but treasured book, and was lost for a time—until copies of it were found in 2022 in boxes at the house of National Artist for Literature Gemino H. Abad, an original member of PLAC. While Manila writers were instrumental in its publication, the book was very much a Dumaguete project: Faurot asked his colleague Augusto Ang Barcelona, the architect behind the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, to contribute the Chinese-style illustrations in pen and ink. He also asked another Sillimanian and Dumagueteño, Rev. Martin Liu, to do the calligraphy for the book. Meanwhile, the Tiempos and their daughter Rowena Torrevillas were on hand to advise him on the translation, some of which first saw publication in Sands and Coral, the literary folio of Silliman University. Another PLAC member [and adopted Dumagueteño], the poet Alfred A. Yuson, designed and produced the book.
The book was, in a way, a project of personal reminiscences, particularly of his years as a missionary teacher in China. Faurot had enrolled at the famous Hua-Wen Hsueh Hsiao in Beijing [then Peking], and was determined to learn to read Chinese poetry in the original. “Later,” he writes in his preface to the book, “during the years as a refugee in the mountains of Fukien, I found a Mandarin scholar who came each day to read with me. My favorite book was the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, and my favorite poet, Wang Wei, the poet of field and garden, mountain and river.”
That predilection for natural observations [and social relations] was how Faurot came to love Wang Wei, whose importance in world literature stems from his mastery of both landscape poetry and Buddhist-inspired verse, and was renowned for his serene, evocative imagery and profound engagement with nature, making him a highly influential figure in Chinese literature, alongside Li Po and Tu Fu. “All his life,” Faurot writes, “Wang Wei sought out the beauty of country scenes, of rivers, lakes, mountains; and captured them in his verse. Court life involved many partings with friends, as favor smiled or frowned; and each farewell was the occasion of an exchange of poems… Wang was sensitive to the changing seasons, the weather, the times of day, and each poem no matter how short evokes its own atmosphere of place and time.”
Here are three poems by Wang Wei translated by Faurot for the book:
The Lotus Gatherer
Day after day you pick pink water-lilies,
Returning in the dusk from the long isle.
Watch how you handle that pole in the pond,
Lest you wet your water-lily bordered gown!
My Bamboo Lair
So soft I hum and strum my zither,
Nestled in my bamboo lair,
Not even mountain folk can listen.
Only moonbeams meet me there.”
My Apricot Studio
Veined apricot was hewn for rafters,
Scented sedge was sewn for roof.
Clouds unnoticed drift between them.
Go, make rain on other folk!
The conception for the book may have begun around the time Faurot was able to return to China in the improving political climate of the late 1970s and 1980s. There, he gave lectures on and recitals of contemporary music, including what were probably the first performances in China of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I (composed in 1972) for amplified piano. After these China tours, he earnestly began collecting his translations of Wang Wei’s poetry, and adding more to what was already there.
But why Wang Wei as an object of fascination? Perhaps this was one Renaissance Man recognizing another, and Faurot admitted as much in his preface for the book: “Wang Wei had a genius able to express itself in three arts—poetry, painting, and music. He has been called ‘China’s Renaissance man,’ and the period in which he lived, the early years of the Tang Dynasty [618-906], compared to the high Renaissance in Florence.” Like admiring like, so to speak.
In his 38 years in Dumaguete, Faurot raised the bar for everyone in achieving [and appreciating] great things in the arts—in music, in painting, in literature—for which he will always be remembered. The lecture series on arts and culture currently administered by the Silliman University Culture & Arts Council is named after him, and a lane near End House is also named in his honor. He is buried at the American Cemetery in Daro.
