A compilation of folk songs recorded at Ciwkangan Village in 1967 were returned to the village yesterday, the product of work by the Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) and the Ostasien-Institut e.V. Bonn in Germany.
The recordings were made in the village in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱) on June 12 and 13, 1967, when musicologist Lee Che-yang (李哲洋) traveled to the Amis-majority area amid a booming folk era, which is said to have profoundly influenced the development of Taiwanese culture.
Shih Wei-liang (史惟亮), who graduated from the NTNU institute, gave copies of a collection of Taiwanese folk music, including the recordings from the village, to Alois Osterwalder, who was director of the German institute and a primary sponsor of the folk movement.
Photo courtesy of Shih Mei-ying
Osterwalder returned the collection to Taiwan, saying that the tapes should be in their rightful place to be listened to by people who need them.
The collection consists of more than 4,000 recordings on more than 50 reels.
After they received the tapes, students and faculty at the NTNU institute embarked on the painstaking task of dubbing the tapes, scanning writing on their casings and correcting information.
They took their work to the village to be reviewed for accuracy, said Lu Yu-hsiu (呂鈺秀), the NTNU institute’s chairwoman.
The age of the recordings added to the difficulty of the task, as most of the performers had passed away, Lu said.
According to the notations on the casings, the people of Ciwkangan recorded 23 songs, but only 17 of them remained, she said, adding that four were not satisfactory, leaving 13 songs on the compilation.
The recordings are the only known record of the music of the village and are an invaluable piece of Aboriginal history, she said.
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