No other event in the year 1964 has fired the imagination, stirred the national pride, and stimulated artistic and cultural interest of the Filipinos more than the spectacular victory of Gemma Guerrero Cruz Araneta as Miss International of 1965. Her regal beauty, so typically Malayan and yet of truly international appeal…her poise, education and self-evident dignity…her ‘magnificent disrespect for money” (as one equally famous newspaper columnist phrased it)…her genuine and every personal concern for Boys Town…and the inner beauty that could not help but radiate from her and set her apart from ordinary beauty queens who were merely pretty and glamorous in a purely physical sense…all these qualities worked like magic to build up overnight an image so distinctive and grand that Gemma has become a household word and everyone will swear that she shall become part of history. The event naturally triggered off an avalanche of artistic works – poems, short stories, musical compositions. Every one of them an eager, sincere and conscientious effort to produce an artistic tribute to her beauty and stature. And everyone of them really inadequate in the sense of doing full justice to the greatness that is Gemma. Like each of these attempts, this album –we admit right off-must likewise be inadequate. But like all others, there is almost a compulsion to express in some way or another, in this case musically, the admiration and regard which all Filipinos necessarily feel for our own Miss International. It is therefore in this spirit of humility that we offer this musical bouquet. The songs herein incorporated will have to speak for themselves. As recorded by the classic kundiman great Ruben Tagalog and arranged and conducted by the distinguished Leopoldo Silos, this is a modest but very sincere tribute to Miss International of 1965, the Philippine very own – Gemma Guerrero Cruz Araneta.