It was the 1930s. A five-year-old child from a poor family in Tainan heard a phonograph playing Robert Schumann’s version of Traumerei during the theater screening of a silent movie. He was moved to tears.
Eighty years later, that boy, Hsu Wen-long (許文龍), the founder of Taiwan’s Chi Mei Group, has opened the Chimei Museum (奇美博物館) to the public in his native Tainan. It features a prized collection of nearly 1,400 violins, violas and cellos, some of which were crafted by the greatest luthiers in history, such as Andrea Amati from the 16th century and Antonio Stradivari in the early 18th century.
Hsu’s lifelong love affair with violins is one of the many stories told in Island of 1000 Violins (稻田裡的音符), a documentary that explores the past and present of classical music in Taiwan. It contains rare archival footage of interviews with academics and musicians in Taiwan and Europe, including virtuoso pianist Chen Pi-hsien (陳必先), international violinist Lin Cho-liang (林昭亮), talented young violinist Sophie Wang (王子欣), German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Szymanowski Quartet from Poland.
Photo Courtesy of Public Television Service
Directed by Mark Kidel, a documentary filmmaker from the UK known for his award-winning works about sitar legend Ravi Shankar and pianist Alfred Brendel, the co-production by Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS, 公共電視台) and Franco-German TV network Arte took nearly three years to complete.
It offers an overview of how Western classical music was introduced to Taiwan and adopted by generations of Taiwanese musicians. The film blends history with biography, showing how the collective and the personal have mutually informed one another and are constantly evolving.
Hsu and his museum serve as an eloquent example of such a dynamic process. Introduced by Western missionaries and soldiers, classical music was fermented in Taiwan during Japanese rule as part of their plan to convert the country into a model colony — modernization at that time meant emulating the West, including its musical heritage.
Photo Courtesy of Public Television Service
The Americanization of Taiwan began soon after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) fled China in 1949. As writer Yang Chao (楊照) says in the film, a big part of Taiwan’s experience with westernization/Americanization involves not just movies and rock ‘n’ roll, but also classical music.
A new generation of classical musicians emerged during this time. Chen was among the first to win awards at international competitions and further her studies abroad. She says in the film that her time in Germany taught her about the concept of individualism.
“Solitude makes people think, introspect and reflect…People can only dream in silence. And in Taiwan, silence doesn’t exist,” she says.
Photo Courtesy of Public Television Service
It is the personal experiences and thoughts like Chen’s that shed light on the adoption of the Western classical tradition by Taiwanese musicians.
The Taiwan-born, Australian and US-educated Lin, for example, observes that Taiwanese musicians arent’ usually inquisitive. Consequently, they don’t question what they are taught.
“I think everybody wants to save face. You don’t want to embarrass people in front of their colleagues,” Lin says.
Photo Courtesy of Public Television Service
Chen believes it is because harmony is a highly appreciated virtue in Asian cultures. This approach poses problems when performing classical music, which is meant to question, rebel or even cause revolutions, Chen says.
“I try to make my Asian students feel agitated, frantic or enraged. But they always want to be smooth, elegant and charming. Most of the time, I must lead them to explore the opposite side of being nice and wonderful,” she adds.
Hsu, who considers himself the “protector” not the “owner” of Chimei Museum’s prized collection, continues to help foster new generations of musicians. He makes sure that the valuable string instruments are loaned to young talents for free.
Photo Courtesy of Public Television Service
Island of 1000 Violins ends with the young violinist Wang’s training in Salzburg, Austria. To Wang, who at age 16, had already performed with the National Symphony Orchestra (國家交響樂團), emulation is no longer prime concern.
“Maybe Asians can’t express emotions as freely as Europeans, but we do have our own feelings and ideas. We have our own points of view when it comes to interpreting music,” she says.
■ Island of 1000 Violins will air on PTS HD channel at 4pm and 9pm tomorrow. The production is in Mandarin, Hoklo, French, English and German with Chinese subtitles. More information can be obtained at www.pts.org.tw/theislandof1000violins.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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