When Genghis Khan's army ravaged Eurasia eight centuries ago, the formidable Mongolian worriers brought along not only swords and spears, but also chants and musical instruments. The morin khuur, a Mongolian horse-headed fiddle, has been one of the country's most adored folk-music instruments, playing out the sounds of the steppe even before the time of Khan. Now, this culturally significant instrument has been revived by the Mongolian State Morin Khuur Ensemble (蒙古國家馬頭琴大樂團), which will stage three performances in Taipei and Kaohsiung starting Thursday.
Identified by UNESCO as a masterpiece of oral heritage, the morin khuur has only two strings made of horsetail hairs. Despite this, its musical spectrum is wide enough to mimic everything from a soft breeze in the grasslands to horses galloping on the steppe. Playing it involves nimble manipulation of the finger pads, fingernails and the backs of the fingers. Its register is somewhere between a viola and cello.
Yet, unlike the mellow sounds produced by the Western arched instruments, the square sound box lends the music a feeling of hollowness. "The sound of the morin khuur has a sense of vastness and expansiveness, like going through all the vicissitudes of time but still holding pride and dignity,"said Hsu Po-yun (許博允) of the New Aspect Cultural and Educational Foundation (新象文教基金會), who has spent years studying and collecting ancient musical artifacts from Central Asia and has taken up the mission to introduce the sonic marvels from the little-known culture to local audiences.
For its Taiwan debut, the 30-member Mongolian ensemble will be joined by renowned vocalists of urtiin duu (folk long-song) and khoomii (overtone, throat singing), which are also native to Mongolia. Other artists will enrich the sonic portrait of mountains, rivers, animals and everything that is part of the nomadic way of life.
Commonly accompanied by morin khuur, urtiin duu is sung in verses, employing a wide vocal range, while khoomii features bi-tonal chanting soaring from penetrating low droning hums to sonorous high-pitched whistles.
Consisting of a morin khuur quartet, yatga, a Mongolian-zither quartet and percussion group, the ensemble will perform folk music and compositions by Natsagiin Jantsannorov.
Jantsannorov was a Mongolian cultural minister noted for his ingenious fusion of traditional Mongolian sounds with contemporary music. The author of the music to several films, Jantsannorov has more than 200 compositions to his name, many of which have traveled across the world with the ensemble that has performed in world-famous theaters such as the Bolshoi Theater of Russia, Carnegie Hall in the US and the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. Lauded as Mongolia's Mozart, Jantsannorov will hold a lecture on Mongolian music Tuesday at the National Recital Hall (國家演奏廳).
Apart from yatga, which was traditionally played for the pleasure of royal families, other Mongolian treasures will make their first appearances in Taiwan today, according to Hsu. These include the Tobshuur, or two-stringed lute, and an ancient harp-like instrument used to play melodies in the same style as "throat singing." Both instruments are a common feature of the tribal music of Central Asia and South America.
For their second performance in Taipei, the Mongolian ensemble will team up with the Youth Orchestra of the Taipei Chinese Orchestra (台北市立國樂團青年國樂團) to perform contemporary Han-Chinese and Taiwanese tunes, which have been adapted to the sounds of the morin khuur and yatga.
Free tickets are available at the service counter of the National Concert Hall.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would