Taipei Times: What prompted you to give up Western music and devote yourself to the study of Taiwanese culture?
Wang Chen-yi (
Unlike science or technology in which 2 plus 2 is always 4, there is no definite answer for art and culture.
It's wrong to think that our art and culture should be Westernized just because we also seek advanced technology. Art and culture belong to us. We should feel comfortable with our own art and culture and should be able to express our emotions and ideals through them.
Taiwan has adopted the principles of Western music for so long that we often look at our own culture with a Western point of view. As a result, we view our local music or culture as holding little value. Actually, if we could try to look at Western culture with our traditional views, we might dislike it as well.
Moreover, every culture has its own roots. Without those roots, the culture could not prosper. It is not possible to develop our own culture with foreign thoughts and values. Only when we are able to transform and localize the outside information can our own culture develop.
I was teaching music in Tainan in the late 1970s when Taiwan left the UN.
At that time, many people, including me, started to re-examine the influence of Western culture and remember our local culture.
With this change of mindset, I realized that what I taught did not match what I believed, so I quit my job and decided to do something for the good of Taiwanese culture.
TT: Traditionally, how has local music -- or Taiwanese music -- been influenced by Taiwanese culture?
Wang: Taiwanese culture is the culture of common people. It blends into people's daily lives and since nobody has extracted its value and spirit from society, it lacks the theoretical structure often developed by intellectuals.
In order to develop our local culture, we should first extract its essence from people's daily lives and build the theories of Taiwanese culture upon it.
As I studied the relationship between language and culture over 20 years, I discovered that songs of all nations or ethnic groups are based on their languages.
In other words, singing is the "musicalization" of language and language in itself has musicality.
Therefore, if a lyric and melody blends well, the beauty of both the language and the music will be manifested.
In the past, the Taiwanese language has also been musicalized into ballads and songs. The songs are about people's daily lives such as slaughtering pigs, street vending or seeking advice at the temples.
The songs tell stories and the melodies match the intonations of the words.
But during recent years, we have widely adopted Western music into our society and filled Western melodies with Taiwanese or Mandarin lyrics, which has damaged the beauty and harmony of both the language and the music.
Such music has already drifted off the proper course of culture development, in which the modern must be rooted in tradition.
TT: Are you saying that Taiwanese opera is the heart of Taiwanese culture because language is one of the most important elements of culture and it has played an important part in Taiwanese traditional songs and ballads?
Wang: Exactly. Taiwanese opera, especially the songs and ballads in the opera, is the expression of the concept of the Taiwanese style of singing. The songs appearing in the operas use the features and intonations of Taiwanese language. As a result, the songs are close to our lives and touch our heart.
Although the actors and actresses in Taiwanese opera are often people from lower social classes and the lyrics and stories are often illogical and filled with feudal thoughts, what should be emphasized is the value and the spirit of local culture revealed in the opera.
Therefore, within the 300 to 400 years of Taiwan's history, I believe the greatest contribution to our culture has not been made by intellectuals, but by those street artists who helped spread local songs and ballads and kept them alive for us to study today.
TT: Compared to the era when Taiwan was under the rule of the KMT -- the so-called outside regime -- has the environment for the study of local culture improved since the DPP came into power two years ago?
Wang: Nothing has really been changed. I think culture is something very subjective. To study culture without a well structured theoretical base is like guiding a boat without compass.
Not only scholars, but even the Cabinet's Council of Cultural Affairs has no clear idea as to what should be the next step of our cultural development.
As a result, as someone who has devoted myself to the study of local culture and Taiwanese opera, I feel very frustrated because even those who really love and care about Taiwan despise Taiwanese opera.
They ignore the value of Tai-wanese opera and they don't understand that it's actually something upon which future local cultural studies could be built.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching