In 1934, at the age of 24, Taiwanese-born composer Chiang Wen-yeh returned to his hometown of Taipei after studying in Japan since childhood. Having been away for so long, he was delighted and moved by the new character of his old home. He turned these emotions into music, writing the famous work Formosan Dance. Eighty years later Rueibin Chen, a Taiwanese-born pianist of Austrian citizenship, returned home to perform this piece in commemoration of this early Taiwanese musician and to remind us that “Taiwan has its own classical music.”

Taiwan’s first generation of composers

Western music was first introduced into Taiwan by missionaries in the period of Dutch rule (1624–1668). Near the end of Qing-Dynasty rule (1683–1895), after Taiwanese ports were opened to foreign trade, churches were built near the four major harbors of Tainan, Tamsui, Keelung, and Kaohsiung, allowing Western music to penetrate more deeply into local society. Under Japanese rule (1895–1945), the Japanese, influenced by the West, placed Western music at the core of school music classes. Some Taiwanese whose tastes had been cultivated to appreciate Western music chose to go to Japan for further study, becoming the most famous composers of the early period of classical music in Taiwan. Examples included Chiang Wen-yeh (1910–1983), Chen Su-ti (1911–1992), and Lu Chuan-sheng (1916–2008).

Chiang’s Formosan Dance won an honorable mention in the arts competition at the 1936 Olympic Games. Rueibin Chen and Chiang share very similar backgrounds: Both left home in their early teens to study music overseas, and both were strongly influenced by Russian musicians such as the composer and pianist Alexander Tcherepnin. When Chen was in his 20s, he received sheet music of Chiang’s work from a Japanese musician and began to learn the pieces, so that today he is very well versed in Chiang’s oeuvre. “His works are very precise; he must have been very good at mathematics. Influenced as he was by his Japanese education, the pieces have a Japanese flavor, but what they express is his attachment to Taiwan.”

The series of ten works entitled Taiwan Sketches that depicted the scenery of Taiwan are among Chen Su-ti's most famous compositions. The pieces represent sights that Chen saw on a train ride from Tainan back to Taipei. Zhuo Fujian, former chairman of the Department of Music at National Taiwan University of Arts, offers the following assessment: “The foundation of Chen Su-ti’s works is classical, but there is a Taiwanese flavor, and from his compositions you can see images of Taiwanese society from that time period.”

Lu Chuan-sheng, known as “the father of Taiwanese choral music,” returned to Taiwan in the early 1940s, after which he began to collect folk songs. It was the middle of World War II, and the Japanese government was strongly promoting patriotic theater, which Taiwanese with their own ethnic consciousness resisted with the local play Yanji (“Capon”). Lu adapted folk songs as music for the play, inspiring enthusiastic responses from audiences and the spread of such songs. This effort to combine Taiwanese folk songs with orchestral music enabled downhome culture to be expressed artistically, overturning the views that many people had previously felt against folk music.

In 1936 Chiang Wen-yeh’s composition Formosan Dance won an honorable mention in the arts competition at the Olympic Games.(by permission of Liu Meilian)

Classical music, Taiwanese spirit

To help people at home and abroad to better know Taiwanese folk music, a number of musical organizations have begun to adapt and perform pieces with Taiwanese themes.

One example is the folk song conservation program of the ensemble Baroque Camerata. They reinterpret classic Taiwanese songs using the compositional structures of the Baroque period. In 2021 they released a CD and did concerts entitled “Image ‧ Taiwan,” for which they integrated Taiwanese folk music from the 1930s to the 1990s into concertos and used a multimedia musical theater format to take the audience on a journey through time in Taiwan’s changing society. These songs include Lu’s “If Only I Could Open the Door to My Heart” (written in Taiwanese), which describes the nostalgia for their hometowns felt by many rural young people who moved to the cities to make a living during Taiwan’s industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s. Lu wanted this song to be a source of encouragement for these young people. Moreover, it enabled the general public to discover and appreciate the elegance of Taiwanese-language songs.

In order to promote Taiwanese classical music, in 2016 the pianist Rueibin Chen founded “L’Ensemble du Ciel,” which includes piano, erhu (two-stringed Chinese violin), pipa (Chinese lute), and dizi (Chinese flute), thereby combining traditional Chinese instruments with Western ones. With such an ensemble, Chen hopes to demonstrate to the world the possibilities for blending traditional Chinese music and Western classical music, as well as the consummate skills of traditional Chinese musicians in Taiwan. “Taiwan probably offers the finest traditional Chinese music in the world, because the traditions have been maintained and passed on, whereas in China they were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution,” Chen said.

The group “One Song Orchestra,” founded by composer Lee Che-yi, uses classical music as a medium to express Taiwanese culture. The pieces they perform are mostly adaptations of classic Taiwanese-language songs, folk songs, or well-known film scores. For a previous concert dedicated to masters of Taiwanese film scores, One Song invited the senior film critic Lan Tsu-wei (Tony Lan) to introduce the historical background and special features of the compositions to the audience. Though One Song has only been in existence for five years, it has already won support from many businesspeople who are aficionados of classical music and who serve as advisors providing management advice. The orchestra is determined to spread knowledge about Taiwanese culture, and the most remarkable characteristic of their brand is that they perform only works by Taiwanese composers or with Taiwanese elements.

The ten piano pieces known collectively as Taiwan Sketches, some of Chen Su-ti’s most representative works, depict the sights and scenery he saw on a railway journey from Tainan to Taipei.

The Taiwan nativist play Yanji (“Capon”) from the era of Japanese rule incorporated Taiwanese folk music adapted by Lu Chuan-sheng.

Interpreting literature through music

There is an international trend of transforming literature into musical performances. One example is the performance of the work Wintry Night Trilogy, a Hakka musical epic, performed by the Miaoli Chinese Orchestra and a number of additional musicians. The novels in Hakka writer Li Qiao’s Wintry Night Trilogy depict the sorrowful lives of three generations of the Peng and Liu families in the era of Japanese rule, and their resistance to the colonial government. The trilogy was adapted into a musical work by MCO music director Lee Chun-ping. Besides using traditional Chinese instruments, Lee also invited performers of Western classical music (including piano, cello, and vocals) to participate.

Lee states that in order to give the music a Hakka flavor, he drew on the special characteristics of Hakka mountain songs: “When picking tea in the mountains, if you want to call across to a fellow tea-picker on another hilltop, you have to stretch out your voice and extend it, and when I wrote the music I arranged for the piano to express these kinds of microtonal fluctuations.” Rueibin Chen, who premiered Wintry Night Trilogy, recalls: “When I performed this work I used every one of the 88 keys on my piano.” From this you can see the variety and range of the tones in Hakka mountain songs.

For the composition based on Volume 1 of Wintry Night Trilogy, the solid and staunch tone of the piano is used to represent the tough and unyielding spirit of Hakka people. Lee recalls that when he read this literary work, “At the time I felt the deep attachment of the people for the land. In the novel it talks about how every individual’s navel is connected to the black soil, and even if the umbilical cord is cut they are still linked to the land. The piano has the widest range of any instrument, which made it the only instrument that could express and build this kind of mood.” For the composition based on Volume 2 of the trilogy, which describes how sugar-cane farmers were bullied and oppressed under Japanese rule, Lee elected to go with vocalists, including a male tenor and baritone and children’s voices, to express the tragic situation of the farmers.

Appreciating music is like appreciating paintings. Looking back over time, we can see the first generation of Taiwanese composers in the Japanese colonial period, the focus on nativist composers following the rise of democratization movements in the Japanese era and from the 1970s onward, and the situation today with groups performing music drawing on Taiwanese themes and elements. Through their works and performances, Taiwan’s history is organized into a series of stories told through the arrangement of musical notes, through which it flows into our hearts and minds.

The internationally renowned Taiwanese-born pianist Chen Rueibin is endeavoring to promote works with Taiwanese elements to the world. He has also formed an ensemble that combines traditional Chinese with Western musical instruments.

(photo by Kent Chuang)