Beitou District (北投), famed for its hot springs, is doubling as host to a musical feast this weekend. The Taiwan Moon Lute Folk Music Festival (台灣月琴民謠祭) comprises concerts tomorrow and Sunday at the Beitou Hot Springs Museum by a slew of the country’s top folk musicians.
The new festival began earlier this month with a series of lectures by folk virtuosos, who demonstrated the two-string instrument’s widespread use in Taiwanese music.
Iconic musician Chen Ming-chang (陳明章), who organized the event, said the moon lute, or yueqin (月琴), is a representative instrument of Hoklo music and commonly used in a variety of genres: Gezai opera (歌仔戲); Hengchun folk music (恆春調); nanguan (南管); beiguan (北管); chia-ko (車鼓); and liam kua (唸歌), a Taiwanese performance art form that interweaves talking and singing.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Moon Lute Folk Music Association
“The yueqin is to Taiwan as the samisen is to Japan, or morin khuur to Mongolia,” Chen said, referring to stringed instruments from those countries. “It represents our culture’s most classical characteristics. I hope one day people will come to Taiwan to see yueqin or liam kua shows, just like we go to see samisen or kabuki shows when visiting Japan.”
Tomorrow evening there will be an open jam session with renowned musicians, including Chen and Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥), that is open to anybody who wants to show off his or her yueqin skills.
Chen said the instrument generates a distinctive sound that is somewhat similar to that of blues music. Because of its simplicity, the yueqin’s timbre is more fluid and flexible than that of more elaborately designed Chinese instruments.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Moon Lute Folk Music Association
“After Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功, better known as Koxinga) and his gang came to Taiwan, it was unlikely that they would go back to China just to buy a musical instrument. They were poor and could only use what was available at hand. They put together some wood planks, and now you have this simple tool that can produce amazingly complex music,” said Chen, who has taught yueqin to some 200 students in Beitou over the past two years.
On Sunday, octogenarian folk legends including Chu Ting-chun (朱丁順), under whom Chen has studied yueqin and Hengchun folk tunes, as well as Yang Hsiu-ching (楊秀卿) and Wang Yu-chuan (王玉川), both of whom are highly revered liam kua virtuosos, will perform.
Hailing from Yunlin County, the Wu Tien-lo (吳天羅) family’s Hsuyang Chia-ko Troupe (旭陽車鼓劇團) will show Taipei audiences the art of chia-ko, a type of grassroots operatic theater that combines song, dance, spoken dialogue and drama.
All of the festival performances will take place on the lawn outside the museum’s main building.
Aside from the musical performances, an exhibition of hand-painted moon lutes will run through Oct. 2 inside the museum, which was built in 1913 during the Japanese colonial era and designated as a heritage site in 1997. It is located a short, pleasant walk from Xinbeitou MRT Station (新北投捷運站).
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
RSS