Wed, Feb 18, 2015 page4

• Students using ‘music’s healing power’ to recover

  HARD KNOCKS: Children at a high school that was devastated by Typhoon Morakot plan to take their show to Japan after winning a national choral competition

  • By Chen Yu-cheng and Chen Wei-han / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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  After surviving the devastation caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009, Liouguei High School in Kaohsiung’s Liouguei District (六龜) went on to form a choir that became national champions.

  Located in a remote and mountainous region, Liouguei High School includes students from other townships, such as Maolin (茂林), Taoyuan (桃源) and Namasia (那瑪夏) — the places worst affected by Typhoon Morakot.

  In the wake of the natural disaster that claimed hundreds of lives, school authorities in 2009 set up a choir to help school children recover from the tragedy.

  The chorus includes students from ethnic Taiwanese, Hakka and Aboriginal backgrounds.

  Dentist Chen Chun-chih (陳俊志) volunteered to conduct the choir, a decision that obliged him to travel a long distance from his home in downtown Kaohsiung.

  “I was shocked by the children’s empty eyes when I visited Liouguei for the first time,” Chen said, adding that local children mostly spent their time at Internet cafes and convenience stores, as there are few other places to go to in the isolated countryside township.

  The choir members were reluctant to practice and he had to entice them away from the playground or temple festivals back to the school to do so, he said.

  While most of the singers were musically talented, few could read music and they had little understanding of choral singing, so he had to teach the children phrase by phrase; he would sing a line and then they sang it after him, he said.

  Despite the choir having inadequate resources, they entered a national choral competition in 2010 — singing in tattered uniforms — and won the privilege to represent Kaohsiung in competitions, he said.

  The following year, the choir won first prize for junior-high school Hakka language choral singing at the National Competition of Folk Songs for Teachers and Students, he added.

  The chorus subsequently gave several performances nationwide, which culminated in a concert with the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra at Kaohsiung Cultural Center last year, he said.

  Prior to the concert, they staged a homecoming performance in Liouguei, where tearful residents gave them a standing ovation, Chen said.

  “Thinking back on what we have been through, I feel that our story is like that of the movie Kano,” he said, referring to the blockbuster film directed by Aboriginal actor and director Umin Boya (馬志翔), which features a baseball team formed in 1929 by a group of Taiwanese, Japanese and Aboriginal boys, who went from being “slackers” to ambitious baseball players under the guidance of their Japanese head coach, Hyotaro Kondo.

  Late last year choir members said they wanted to visit Tokyo — one of Kaohsiung’s sister cities — and Sendai, which was severely hit by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing tsunami, to offer support to the disaster victims via “music’s healing power,” Chen said.

  The children are now saving up for their trip to Japan, Chen said, adding that members of the school faculty are helping by contributing from their own pockets.
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