Lee Tai-hsiang—— Free Spirit of the Taiwan Music Scene

Lee Tai-hsiang's absentmindedness is widely known among people in the broad casting and recording industries.

While in Tainan last October to promote his new album, he suddenly remembered that he had promised to take part in a concert that same night in Taipei, and slipped off to the airport to catch a flight back. But after he got there he found that he had forgotten his ID card and couldn't get on the plane. So he wound up staying in Tainan after all.

Recording companies that have worked with him know that they had better make sure his scores are all in order before he goes into the studio, or the music is likely to come to a sudden halt halfway through.

And many people have seen him suddenly get flustered while talking to them and mutter to himself, "Seems like I've forgotten something. . . ." With a start they wonder to themselves, "Who's the poor fellow this time?"

Lee's entry into the music world was equally unplanned and haphazard.

He spent three years in first grade, doodled on his papers, got "goose eggs" on all his tests, and never talked to anyone. They thought he was autistic.

Then in the fifth grade, his teacher discovered that those doodles of his were rather interesting and had him enter a drawing contest. He won. After that, he gradually began to open up.

After high school, Lee tested into the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, intending to be a painter. But he found that some of the technical design courses left him cold. "What should I do?" he recalls having asked himself. "The ones who looked like they had it the best--no tests, no studying, just messing around with their instruments--were the music majors."

Even without a strong "musical back ground" (he had liked the sound of his father's violin when he was small and had learned how to play a bit in junior high school) he managed the switch to music.

Hsu Ch'ang-hui, who taught at the academy at the time, recalls that Lee's uninhibited, nonchalant personality made his response to music direct and personal. "He's very musical," Hsu says.

Lee relied on his talent to go his own way. "He didn't like classes," a friend recalls. "He said his teachers were Mahler and Beethoven. . . . He'd practice the violin like crazy for 13 or 14 hours a day, all to get the attention of some girl in the piano section."

Lee's music fully expressed his personality. He liked powerful, imposing pieces, played with gusto and energy. He remembers he actually scared a few canaries to death once at a friend's house practicing. The media described him in concert as a "wild note."

But just because the personal coloring was so strong, the music's original spirit was often lost: Beethoven turned into "Lee-thoven," as Hsu Ch'ang-hui says. So Hsu encouraged him to take up composition instead, more suited to someone with such a strong individual style.

After graduation, Lee married a classmate (without her parents' consent) and moved to Malan, his hometown, near Taitung, where he saved up money to go overseas. Two years later, he moved back to Taipei, just as experimental music was being introduced to Taiwan. Lee was intrigued.

"Serious music is divided into traditional, classical music and experimental music. I wasn't interested in classical, so I naturally opted for avant-garde," Lee says.

Along with his friends Hsu Po-yun and Wen Lung-hsin, Lee took up composing weird, experimental pieces featuring bang ing garbage cans, kicking the floor, and so forth. "Even though experimental music tries to create new worlds, it must still move people to have meaning. If it's so strange that nobody can accept it, that's just showing off," Lee says. He himself considers his work at the time to have been immature experiments.

In 1973 he went to the Music Experimental Center at San Diego State University, California, to study avant-garde music. There he began to reflect on the direction of his music. The real task at hand, he felt, was to keep Chinese folk music from being swallowed up by classical, contemporary, and pop.

On his return to Taiwan in 1974 he became conductor of the Taiwan Provincial Orchestra. But after two years he quit to devote himself fully to composing.

At the same time, he began to "dirty his fingernails" composing commercial jingles. He has written over 600 in all and has even appeared in a couple of TV commercials himself.

While writing commercial jingles was for business, composing popular songs was aimed at improving the public's taste. When he got back from the U.S., popular music on Taiwan was rife with Western and Japanese tunes. "Someone was needed to stand up and express his own ideas," Lee says. Pop songs with a fresh sound, like "Olive Tree," "A Spring Story," and "Don't Say Good-Bye," were his answer to the challenge.

At this time he came to know Yao Hou-sheng, a producer at Synco Records, who encouraged him to put out a new and different kind of album--recording Chinese folk tunes played with Western instruments.

Lee's 1978 album Country caused quite a stir. Taking the most traditional Chinese folk tunes, Lee arranged them for a Western symphony orchestra and added a rock-and-roll beat. Some critics thought the songs lost their country flavor, but most listeners loved it. The album sold half a million copies and was a hit with young and old alike.

Following up on Country's success, Lee turned out three more albums of Chinese folk music played to contemporary rhythms, arrangements which still fill Taiwan's airwaves. His score for the 1979 movie Smiling Faces won him a Golden Horse award.

Since then he has composed songs for seven albums, sung by three different female vocalists, all of which have been popular with young listeners. And his career seems lately to have taken yet another twist: last year he cut his first album singing his own songs.

It was last year too that his music began to attract attention overseas. An executive from the Dutch recording company Philips heard some of his songs on a trip to Taiwan and invited him to the Netherlands to record a couple of albums of his music. Those People, the Sky, and Places has already sold over 50,000 copies on Taiwan alone and has further confirmed Lee's strengths as a pop composer.

Not everyone is pleased, however. His old teacher, Hsu Ch'ang-hui, is concerned that in trying to please the public Lee may find it rather difficult to return to the serious music he left behind.

For fans of popular music, of course, the best thing would be for him not to "go back" at all.

"I'd still like to create some things with more meaning and value," Lee maintains. But he also says he feels like he may have crossed the Rubicon. Now that he's set out down the pop music path, there may be nothing for it but to march straight on and hope the road gets a little broader ahead.

[Picture Caption]

courtesy of Polygram

Once in the recording studio, Lee Tai hsiang has the air of a maestro. Here he is discussing his album Those People, Sky and Places with members of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra. (courtesy of Polygram)

Lee's success at composing and his talented voice enable him to perform his own songs. (photo by Chien Yung-pin)

Country has been Lee's most popular album to date.

Lee's success as a singer enables to make commercials, like this one for Nescafe. (courtesy of Unicom)

A face of his that's hard to imagine--patiently teaching his daughter to play the piano. (photo by Chung Yung-ho)

Once in the recording studio, Lee Tai hsiang has the air of a maestro. Here he is discussing his album Those People, Sky and Places with members of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra. （courtesy of Polygram）

Lee's success at composing and his talented voice enable him to perform his own songs. （photo by Chien Yung-pin）

Lee's success as a singer enables to make commercials, like this one for Nescafe. （courtesy of Unicom）

Country has been Lee's most popular album to date.

A face of his that's hard to imagine--patiently teaching his daughter to play the piano. （photo by Chung Yung-ho）