Why Filipinos Became Early Adopters of Western Music · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Le Minh Khai refers to the book of D. R. M. Irving in explaining the long history of Filipino musicians playing Western music:
…there was a rich experience of musical contact and exchange between Spaniards and Filipinos that began not long after the Spaniards established their control over the Philippines in the sixteenth century.
Filipinos therefore learned Western musical forms long before many other peoples in Asia, and that to some extent can explain why they started to be sought after in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when aspects of Western culture started to take hold in other Asian societies.