You were dancing to music you couldn’t understand at all, but isn’t that what music should be able to do? You were there with a boy you barely knew now, but whose life seemed intertwined with yours. He says this is the real fete de la musique, and you smile. Here? In this park? It’s practically empty.

Cue memory number 1: crowds at El Pueblo in Ortigas, to the sound of music overlapping with each other, sweat sweat sweat the name of the game, knowing who’s with the band the rule not the exception. This may be free you think, but there sure ain’t a lot of freedom here.

Bastions Park, in Geneve, Switzerland, seemed to be all about freedom. It wasn’t cordoned off in any way, and without streamers announcing the event or tarpaulins with sponsors and advertisements, it was farthest from your sense of what a commercial event should look like. Make that commercialized event. Because as it turns out, elsewhere in the world, closer to France where the fete de la musique began, freedoms are about the lack of capitalist intent.

In fact, this is just a park, standing in the middle of the tiny city of Geneve, ready for the taking. You follow the sounds of pop covers being sung by what you discover to be four adolescent girls on the stage nearest the entrance. It’s surprisingly touching: young voices, trained falsettos, unstable for some, but beautiful in its innocence.

You realize that this is freedom from the kind of star “quality” deemed worthy where you come from: in the land of Charice Pempengco, where singing (and looking) much much older than one’s years is the point. Where you come from, a bunch of girls un-made-up, in everyday clothes, singing without screaming, wouldn’t be in Fete (as you like to call it, i.e., “So like are you going to Fete?” complete with kolehiyala accent). Because where you come from, Fete means a night-out, a lot of booze, very little dancing, a lot of pretention.

Cue memory number 2: noise, real and imagined, visual and white, as the crowds pushed you from one stage to another, the bottle of beer in your hand spilling over your Chuck Taylors, people pretending to be cool when you know that what they consider to be rock ‘n’ roll outfits aren’t at all about “being rakenrol.”

Two different stages are set up far apart from each other at Bastions Park, allowing for enjoyment of individual music and not an amalgamation of what does become noise. The stage nearer to the entrance can be viewed from atop a hilly portion of the park, where benches and chairs are placed. Near the stage, a friendly game of football transpires. Where you are, the tables slowly fill with people carrying plates of hotdogs and plastic cups with beer.

You and the boy walk deeper into the park, at the center of which is a bigger stage, the one where the bigger bands perform. Whereas the first stage seems to be about community bands, this one seems to be for the bigger, professional acts. A band was setting up as we walk through the park, wanting to see what else is here.

Sporadically placed stalls are few and far between, making it possible to move through the area without hitting a roadblock in the form of a line for beers, or someone selling CDs. In fact, you can go through the area and not buy anything at all. But you’re a tourist, you remind yourself, and you’d like some of that European draft beer. So you ask the boy to order you the beer and hotdog combo—everything in French here—the better to experience fete in the land where it started. You find a seat near a whole family, mother child son daughter stroller all, eating the same stuff you are, and you are surprised by the friendliness. They smile at you as you choose your seat, and the couple at the table beside yours says hi. People pass through this area on their way to the front of the stage, with smiles on their faces, short conversations fill the air, laughter becomes easy.

You don’t understand anything but that seems to be irrelevant to the moment at hand.

Cue memory number 3: You don’t understand anything, but it seems to be the point of this Fete you travelled all the way to Mall of Asia for, yes, that godforsaken faraway place. You wanted to see how they’d rock it, and no, the change in venue barely meant any change in, uh, experience.

In this tiny patch of Bastions Park, the crowd was dancing to the music of a band whose name you don’t know, whose music is everything and familiar, because you have no name for it. You finish off your beer and stand closer to the stage, this music asking you to dance, you think, demanding that you dance. The mix of the horn section and native instruments fascinate you, not because you haven’t seen them before but because they are being used well, in fact, overwhelmingly so, as if it is the most normal thing, this combination.

You stay and dance until the end of their set, then begin walking around the park, looking for a souvenir t-shirt for your father. You insist that there must be one, because that is how events happen and make money where you come from. As you walk through the park though, you realize that this is less and less possible. One musician sits under a tree and begins to sing, oblivious to an audience. A small band with accordions and horns plays a couple of trees down, planting themselves quite well near the food and drinks, ignoring them made difficult.

Not that you’d want to. In this park, the diversity of music was such that you’d want to plant yourself in front of every other tree where a musician is playing. It would’ve been easy to take a tree, play your guitar, and become musician instead of audience, too. And yes, you realize that you don’t know the concept of jamming until you’re allowed to sing with the lone guy doing a Jason Mraz song.

We don’t know the concept of freedom that fete de la musique stands for, if we don’t know music to be possible in this way. With no rockstar complex, not a whole lot of stages, not a whole lot of the drinking and craziness, very little pretention. Instead there’s just music by itself, take your pick, weave through it like you would when you choose a pair of shoes, and settle for one (or two or three or ten), as you spend a day sitting on the grass, the random glass of beer in hand, the last of the cold spring winds reminding you to dress better next time. Next time.

Fete de la musique in the faraway land of Geneve, in the most unfamiliar of parks, is more rakenrol than any of the versions we’ve come up with in this country. How telling of the kind of life we live with—and give—music. Fete or no fete. (Katrina Stuart Santiago)

Photographs taken by the author.