Three years ago, female artists from Mongolia, France, Iran, Indonesia and Taiwan's Atayal tribe (泰雅族) gathered in Taipei for Trees Music & Art's (大大樹音樂圖像) Women's Voices Festival (女歌節), an event to share women's life experiences through music and poetry.
Tomorrow at the Taipei Zhongshan Hall (台北中山堂), women's voices will be once again heard through the folk songs of Finland's most respected contemporary accordionist and composer Maria Kalaniemi and Taiwan's Hakka musician and poet Lo Si-rong (羅思容).
Kalaniemi has a 20-year professional career in folk music behind her, but her first musical training was in classical music. Her first encounter with traditional Finnish music came when she went to study at the acclaimed Sibelius Academy's then new folk music department.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TREES MUSIC AND ART
Rigorous academic training aside, Kalaniemi was enlightened by the importance of improvisation and experimented with traditional sounds in order to create something new. The future folk music legend then formed the pioneering all-women ensemble Niekku with four other students in 1983, and their three albums and concerts at home and abroad have established them as the pioneers of what has become known as the New Finnish folk movement.
While her musical vocabulary is inspired by the singing of Kalevala poetry, shepherd music, Finnish gypsy tunes, kentele music and Finno-Swedish traditions, Kalaniemi has taken an experimental attitude toward all kinds of music and worked extensively with musicians in different fields such as jazz, big band, classical and pop.
At her Taiwan debut concert, audiences will have a taste of Kalaniemi's music at its most intimate as she presents meditative and improvisational themes from her new solo album Bellow Poetry released in 2006.
An award-winning poet and singer/songwriter from Miaoli, Lo's artistic sensibility was seeded in her upbringing in a poetic family and her music is often regarded as a variation of the lyrical eulogies on nature embedded in traditional Hakka mountain songs and literature. Taken from Hakka folk tunes and influenced by a free-flowing rhythm, the female musician has written hundreds of folk songs in Hakka, Hokkien, and Mandarin to bring a new vitality to traditional music and offers her own perceptive of love, family, nature and humanity through her lyrics composed as a wife, a mother and an independent woman.
Concertgoers can attend Kalaniemi's workshops at the Witch House (女巫店) on Sunday free of charge to get better acquainted with the Finnish folk maestro and her musical cosmos, while Lo will share her lyric poetry at the Fembooks bookstore (女書店) on May 26.
Music workshops by female musicians will be held throughout next month and vocal artist Ridina Ahmedova from the Czech Republic and Taiwan singer/songwriter Mia Hsieh (謝韻雅) from A Moving Sound are tentatively scheduled to take center stage in July. To keep up with the festival's upcoming events, visit www.treesmusic.com/festival/2007wv/2007wv.htm.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless