Organizations/Performing Group:

TUGMA, Faculty Adviser, 2018-present
International Council for Traditional Music, member, 2010-present


Lilymae Franco Montano is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines where she teaches Philippine Music, Kulintang, and Indonesian Gamelan. She finished her master's degree in Music major in Musicology in 2008 at the University of the Philippines. She recently received her doctorate degree in Music major in Ethnomusicology at the Philippine Women's University in 2021 and was awarded a Research Grant by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts with her dissertation title "Village Life, Festival, and Transformation: Ifugao Music and Society in the 21st Century."

She is active in giving out lecture-workshops about Philippine Music in different schools, CCP’s Pasinaya, and abroad. In 2013, she became chair of the Traditional Music category for NAMCYA and became a resource person for research workshops in various provinces. She was the facilitator and resource person for the Immersion Program Workshop in the 2018 Banaue International Music Composition Competition.

She is a member of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) wherein she presented papers about her research on music traditions in Banaue, Ifugao for the Symposium of ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia in Singapore (2010) and Manila (2012). Her recent paper (2020) entitled “Festivalization: The Formation of Ifugao Society and Its Music Transformation” was presented in a new study group of ICTM hosted by the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. Her research on Ifugao music and culture resonated in the 2014 National Conference on Philippine Studies and on the 2nd International Conference on Cordillera Studies in 2017.

As a performer, she plays kulintang under the tutelage of Prof. Aga Mayo Butocan and Japanese koto under sensei Nishijima. She is a member of the Asia Traditional Orchestra that performs each year in different cities in South Korea since 2009. She performed with the orchestra in Jakarta and Bali in 2019.