Resounding Taiwan

Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island

Nancy Guy, Nancy Guy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000431216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

This book vibrantly demonstrates how the study of music allows for identification and interpretation of the forces that form Taiwanese society, from politics and policy to reactions to and assertions of such policies.

Contributors to this edited volume explore how music shapes life — and life shapes music — in Taiwan, focusing on subjects ranging from musical life under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) through to the contemporary creations of Indigenous musicians, popular music performance and production, Christian religious music, traditional ritual music and theatre, conceptions about sound and noise, and garbage truck music's role in reducing household waste. The volume's twelve chapters present diverse approaches to their sounding subjects, some deeply rooted in the methods and concerns explored by Taiwan's first generation of ethnomusicologists. Others employ current social theories.

Presenting a window into the cultural lives of the residents of this multicultural, politically contested island, Resounding Taiwan will appeal to students and scholars of musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology and Asian studies more widely.

1 Resounding colonial Taiwan through historical recordings

Some methodological reflections

Ying-fen Wang

DOI: 10.4324/9781003079897-2

Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule saw drastic changes in its soundscape and musical life. Western music, originally transmitted by missionaries, was widely disseminated by the Japanese colonizers through military bands and school music education. The gramophone industry and radio broadcast further disseminated Western music and Japanese popular music. Japanese traditional performing arts were brought and enjoyed by the Japanese settlers, while Taiwanese performing arts thrived because of economic prosperity before they were suppressed after 1937 under wartime policy. In short, colonial Taiwan had a vibrant soundscape.

After Japan ceded Taiwan to China’s Kuomingtang (KMT) government in 1945, however, Taiwan’s colonial past was gradually silenced. Most people who grew up in Taiwan under the KMT’s pro-China policy, myself included, were not aware that Taiwan had a colonial past. Moreover, we did not know much about the island on which we lived.

It was not until the lifting of martial law in 1987 that people in Taiwan began to actively rediscover the island and its history, and so did musicologists. However, limited by their unfamiliarity with Taiwan’s history, language barrier, and training in ethnographic methods, musicologists relied mostly on oral history and fieldwork for gathering data. Furthermore, because of the lack of historical recordings, they had little idea about what colonial Taiwan sounded like.

Fortunately, starting from the 1990s, record collectors began to gradually recover sounds from the island’s colonial past through excavating 78-rpm records (hereafter SP for “standard play”). The publication of Hearing the Sounds of Taiwan History (聽到臺灣歷史的聲音, Huangxi Wenhua Xuehui 2000), which reproduced 100 traditional musical and operatic SP records into 10 CDs with an accompanying book, brought scholars’ attention to the sounds of colonial Taiwan. However, exposure was limited to music and theater scholars. It was not until the release of the documentary film Viva Tonal (跳舞時代, Guo and Jian 2003) that scholars and the general public became aware of and interested in the sounds of colonial Taiwan and the modernity they represented. The increasing sharing of Taiwanese pop songs on the internet by record collectors¹ and the subsequent online databases of SPs created through the collaboration between academic institutions and record collectors further stimulated interest in the sounds of colonial Taiwan, particularly Taiwanese pop songs.²

Aside from commercial recordings, ethnographic recordings made by linguists and musicologists from the 1920s to the 1940s also became available for academic study. These include recordings of Indigenous languages and songs recorded by Kitasato Takeshi (北里闌) in 1921 and 1922, Tanabe Hisao (田邊尚雄) in 1922, and Asai Erin (淺井惠倫) in the 1930s, and those of Taiwanese music made by Kurosawa Takatomo (黑澤隆朝) and Masu Genjirō (桝源次郎) in 1943 (for details, see Wang 2008a, 249–55; more on Kurosawa and Masu’s recordings below). Thus, there has been virtually an explosion of historical recordings, both commercial and ethnographic, that are now available for studying the soundscape and musical life of Taiwan under Japanese rule.

How can we “re-sound” colonial Taiwan through these historical recordings? What can the sound of historical recordings tell us about Taiwan under Japanese rule?

My simple answer for now is: Sound has much to tell us once we know how to listen. I use “once” instead of “if” because it is only when we know how to listen that we can understand what sounds have to tell us.

How do such “transformative moments” occur when sound turns from noise to something intelligible and decipherable? I propose that it is by using an integrative and dialogic approach to study sound as processes that noise could turn into decipherable and meaningful sound. By integrative and dialogic approach, I mean to integrate different sources and research methods and cross-reference them dialogically. Specifically, I am referring to the integration and cross-referencing of oral/aural and visual sources as well as that of historical and ethnographic methods.

As for studying music as processes, it may be useful to revisit Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s tripartite model of music semiotics (Nattiez 1990): poietic processes, the material reality of the work, and esthetic processes. Poietic processes denote the processes in which a musical work is created. “The material reality of the work” refers to “the physical traces that result from the poietic process.” The esthetic processes denote how the work is received (Nattiez 1990, 15). In addition to the tripartite model, Nattiez further adds the dimension of the semiology of analytical discourse, which in itself also involves the poietic process, the neutral level (the analytical discourse itself), and the esthetic process (Nattiez 1990, 135).

In this chapter, I reconstruct and reflect on the poietic processes of my own analysis of the historical recordings that I began studying in 2000. I choose four examples to illustrate what I mean by “an integrative and dialogic approach to studying music as processes.” I begin with my study of the ethnographic recordings made by Kurosawa and Masu in 1943, followed by my study of the commercial recordings produced by Taiwan Columbia Records, to show how I study their processes of producing the recordings. Then I use Zhang Fuxing (張福興), the first Taiwanese musician to study Western music in Japan, and Pan Rongzhi (潘榮枝), a nanguan master teacher in colonial Taiwan, to illustrate how I study the creative processes behind the music that they recorded for record companies.

My discussion of each example consists of three parts. First, I point out the importance and past misconceptions of the subject. Then, I outline my research process, including how I started and conducted the project, the difficulties I encountered, and the transformative moments that helped me overcome the difficulties. Thirdly, I summarize how my breakthroughs revised past misconceptions and shed new lights on the subjects.

By reflecting on the poietic process of my research, I aim to show that we need to wait patiently for the transformative moments to occur before we know how to listen to the sound we are studying. I also want to emphasize that during the process of research, such transformative moments may occur a few times, each time opening new horizons for us to broaden and deepen our understanding of the subject we are studying. I suppose this is true with all research, be it on sound or not. These transformative moments usually become the most memorable moments that we treasure long after the project is over.

Example 1 Kurosawa's wartime survey of Taiwanese music in 1943

Kurosawa Takatomo (1895–1987) and Masu Genjirō (1904–95) were two Japanese musicologists who were commissioned by the Taiwan Governor-General Office to carry out the first comprehensive survey of Taiwanese music in the spring of 1943. Together with recording engineer Yamagata Takeshi (山形高靖), they formed the “Formosan Folk Music Investigation Team” (臺灣民族音樂調查團) and spent three months in Taiwan conducting round-the-island fieldwork and then recording and filming both Han Chinese and Indigenous music. They also did a survey of Indigenous musical instruments through questionnaires filled out by police officers in 155 Indigenous villages.

After risking their lives to return to Japan, Kurosawa and Masu compiled their recordings and film footage into 26 SPs and a 10-reel documentary film. Unfortunately, most of their collected materials from Taiwan were destroyed in the Tokyo bombing in March 1945. However, an editing copy of the 26 SPs in Kurosawa’s home luckily survived. At the request of UNESCO, Kurosawa and Masu selected items from the 26 SPs, compiled them into two sets of 12 SPs, and sent them to UNESCO and IFMC (International Folk Music Council) in January 1951.³ In 1953, Kurosawa presented his findings about Taiwanese Indigenous music at the IFMC conference held in France. Both the 12 SPs and Kurosawa’s presentation caught the attention of leading musicologists in Europe. Items from the 12 SPs were later included in world music anthologies in Europe, United States, and Japan, thus further disseminating Taiwan Indigenous music globally (for details, see Wang 2008a, 2018).

Kurosawa’s 1959 article, which provides the first overview of the variety of singing styles of Taiwanese Indigenous music, was translated by Hsu Tsang-houei (許常惠) and became an important reference for the folk song collection movement led by Shih Weiliang (史惟亮) and Hsu in the late 1960s (Kurosawa 1967; Liao 2005, 88, 93). Later, Kurosawa’s book and record album (Kurosawa 1973, 1974) were further regarded as the canon on the subject, and his characterization of the musical scale and singing style of each Indigenous group has been widely accepted as representing the “authentic” tradition of Indigenous music.

Despite Kurosawa’s importance, writings about his works on Taiwanese music are often sketchy and erroneous. Part of this is due to the language barrier and the inaccessibility of Kurosawa’s book and recordings as well as primary data. But part of this also reflects the prevalent neglect of the importance of process.

In 2001, I joined Liou Lin-yu (劉麟玉), a Taiwanese musicologist teaching in Japan, to study Kurosawa’s archival materials kept at the Library of Kunitachi College of Music.⁴ With funding from Taiwan’s governmental agency,⁵ we conducted a two-year project from 2001 to 2002 and continued to work on it until my book and our co-edited CD-set were published (Wang 2008a; Wang and Liou 2008).⁶

During the years I spent on the project, there was an important shift in my focus. Initially, I focused on reconstructing and contextualizing the motivation, process, and products of the team’s survey as well as the reception of its products in the West in order to answer the question “Why and how did Kurosawa and his teammates carry out a survey of Taiwanese music during wartime?” Moreover, because of my background as a nanguan researcher, I was interested in what Kurosawa’s materials could tell us about Han Chinese music in colonial Taiwan. Hence, I supplemented his observations on Han Chinese music with other sources to examine the wartime musical life of the islanders (Wang 2004; Wang 2008a, 259–84). Similarly, I integrated Kurosawa’s observations on the musical change of the Indigenous people with those made by others before 1943 to obtain a fuller picture of the influence of Western music and Japanese popular songs on Indigenous music (see Wang 2005; Wang 2008, 285–334).

Despite this, however, I was paying little attention to the sound of the Indigenous recordings. To my ear, they merely confirmed the characterization of Indigenous music first made by Kurosawa and later accepted as standard knowledge, and there was nothing new that caught my interest.

A turning point came in 2005–2006 when Liou and I followed Kurosawa’s footsteps to visit the Indigenous villages where the team did fieldwork. Our main purpose was to find out the identities of the singers who performed and/or recorded for the team and the villagers’ evaluation of their singing.

During this fieldtrip, we used Kurosawa’s documentation about the singers’ names, age, and gender as the basis to uncover their identities. In addition to interviewing the villagers, we also tried to find their biodata in the household registration records from the Japanese colonial period. Through this process, we discovered that most of the singers that the team documented were political leaders, ritual experts, musical talents, and leaders in youth troupes (青年團), which explained why they were selected. Moreover, we were able to locate a dozen living singers as well as family members of the deceased ones. We interviewed some of them and also repatriated copies of the recordings and photos taken by the team.

Meeting them in person, looking at the photos and listening to the recordings with them, seeing how they were moved to tears, and sharing the moments with them were transformative experiences for me. It brought me closer to the time and place when the recordings were made, and I felt I was finally able to “feel” history (Cohen 2014, 115). Once I got to know the people and the place, the recorded Indigenous sound started to become meaningful to me.

These experiences changed my relationship with the Indigenous recordings. From then on, I completely shifted my attention from the team’s Han Chinese materials to its Indigenous materials. Interestingly, this was also what happened to the team. Their original plan was to spend 1.5 months on the Indigenous music and 1.5 months on Han Chinese music. But after their fieldwork in Pingtung and the East Coast, they were completely swept away and decided to focus mainly on Indigenous music.

To put the team’s Indigenous recordings in historical context, I compared them with the same songs recorded before and after 1943. In particular, I did a thorough comparison of the historical recordings of Atayal songs from the 1920s to the 1940s and discovered a gradual change from speech to song, from two-tone scale to pentatonic scale, and from indefinite pitches to equal temperament. I further...