Ryan Cayabyab among recipients of 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award

MR.C Renowned musician, composer, conductor and National Artist Ryan Cayabyab. FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — Renowned musician, composer, conductor and National Artist Ryan Cayabyab will be honored as among this year’s recipients of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

Ramon Magsaysay Foundation chairman Ambassador Jose Cuisia Jr. announced this Friday and said Cayabyab will be recognized “for his compositions and his performances that have defined and inspired Filipino popular music across generations.” 

“His indomitable, undeterred confidence to selflessly seek, mentor and promote young Filipino musical genius for the global stage, and in showing us all that music can indeed instill pride and joy and unify people across the many barriers that divide them,” Cuisia also noted about Cayabyab, who is popularly known in Philippine music industry as “Mr. C.”

Aside from Cayabyab, two journalists from Myanmar and India , a human rights defender from Thailand  and a youth peacemaker from South Korea will also be given the Ramon Magsaysay Award this year.

The formal ceremony will for the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award will take place on September 9 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. 

Presented by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, the annual Ramon Magsaysay Award is esteemed as Asia’s premier prize and highest honor that “celebrates greatness of spirit and transformative leadership in Asia,” according to its website.

Since 1957, the Ramon Magsaysay Award has been conferred to more than 300 “outstanding men, women and organizations whose selfless service has offered their societies, Asia, and the world successful solutions to some of the most intractable problems of human development,” it added.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award, said to have been established to preserve former Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay’s example of integrity, courage, and idealism, is deemed as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. /kga