After its well-received first season held in November, Sun Son’s (身聲創藝團隊) world music concert series returns, beginning tomorrow night.
Running until May 9, the two-month long gala presents a lineup of tribal sounds, traditional and fusion music from India, Latin America, eastern and southern Europe and the Middle East.
The music series is part of a grander project that artistic director Leonson Ng (吳忠良) has been working on for several years.
Having amassed an admirable collection of traditional musical instruments from around the world during its travels, the group, which formed out of the merger of Sun Son Theater (身聲演繹劇場) and a percussion ensemble, has long wished to draw attention to world music.
The plan to build a gallery to house the collection began to take shape early last year. A couple of typhoons, three floods and five months later, Sun Son celebrated the inauguration of its music gallery.
Musicians and performers from Sun Son open the current series with a performance that features dance, body movements, masks, the sounds of Turkish drums, gongs from Southeast Asia and traditional string instruments from Easter Island and Albania.
Many more musicians and groups follow in the coming weeks: the London Shamisen Club, which combines ballads from Turkey and the Balkans with an Asian twist; Hamnava, a Middle Eastern hand drum band known for fusing different types of ancient beats with contemporary rhythms; Japanese sitar plater Yo and tabla drummer Waka; and French pianist and accordionist Lionel Pinard.
Evening performances aside, activities will be held each Saturday.
Sun Son’s treasury of traditional musical instruments opens daily from 1pm to 9pm with free guided tours available. Visitors are encouraged to build instruments according to their own inspiration or have a go at drumming.
The scheduled lectures and courses will be conducted by Peter Kuhnsch, a university lecturer and multi-instrumentalist from Leipzig, Germany, who will introduce and demonstrate hand drums from the Middle East on March 7 and March 8. On March 14, Chou Chung-wen (周仲文), director of Human Music Gallery (人類音樂館) in Taichung City, explores the history and rhythms of tribal music.
Visit www.sunsontheatre.com for more information.
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