The composer Lu Ch'uan-sheng was born in 1916 at Shenkang Taichung county. His grandfather Lu Ping-nan owned the historic Hsiao Yun Academy at Shenkang, now listed as a major cultural relic. Here Lu Ch'uan-sheng used to play and take lessons in his childhood.
According to Prof. Hsu Tsang-houei of National Taiwan Normal University, Western music first reached Taiwan in the 1860's largely through the hymns of Presbyterian missionaries. Many of Taiwan's early musicians came from Christian families, including Lu Ch'uan-sheng.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng recounts that as a child he would accompany his mother to church. With his fine voice he soon joined the choir and so began his involvement with music at an exceptionally early age.
While at Taichung First High School he went to Tokyo with some schoolmates, where he heard a violin recital at Hibiya Auditorium. This opened his eyes to the beauty of music and he decided to study this thing "fit only for heaven."
After high school he went to the Toyo Music Academy (now Tokyo Music University) where he studied music, his first choice.
At Toyo Music Academy Lu Ch'uan-sheng originally majored in the piano, but after accidentally injuring his arm during his second year he had to switch to vocal music. After graduation he became a singer in Toho Company's Nihon Theater and a member of the NHK radio chorus. His salary of ￥180 a month was first rate for any young Japanese fresh out of college.
In 1943 he returned to Taiwan to visit his ailing father and intended to go straight back to Tokyo, but ended up staying on because of the danger to shipping at the height of World War Ⅱ.
After the war he served in turn as music director of the China Broadcasting Company, choral conductor of the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, teacher at Ching Hsiu Junior High and music chief of the Taiwan Provincial Cultural Association. When the Rong Shing Choir was founded in 1957 he was appointed its director, which he remains to the present day.
Many consider Lu Ch'uan-sheng to be a "native musician," although he personally disagrees with this term. "After all, what musician is not a native?" he retorts. But Hsu Tsang-houei explains, "I believe the native consciousness his music expresses truly reflects the style of Taiwanese songwriting in the transitional period (between Japanese rule and Taiwan's retrocession to the ROC) in the 1940's and 1950's. His Taiwanese-dialect songs in particular combine appealing lyrics and melodies and are beyond compare in their display of genuine and direct feelings."
His popular lullabies express the tender affection felt by parents the world over as they rock their babies off to sleep. They appeal to the heart at any age.
In addition to composing songs, Lu Ch'uan-sheng also transcribes folk ditties.
"He was the first person to record the folk ditties of Taiwan in Western musical notation, and the first to transform these into songs," confirms Taiwan ethnologist Chuang Yung-ming.
By his own account, Lu Ch'uan-sheng began collecting folk ditties in the Taiwan countryside as a study assignment during his student days in Japan. By the postwar period he had built up a large collection of folk songs, some of the most familiar of which were published in the well-known arts journal Taiwanese Arts in Taiwan.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng's procedure was to collect the types of folk ditties he wanted to use, quickly set them to music and perform them. In this way he gave them back to the people endowed with a new lease of life.
Collecting folk ditties has been a fascinating hobby for Lu Ch'uan-sheng and "a way of showing affection for my own land." As a trained musician he was able to transform Taiwanese folk ditties which were previously only chanted rather than sung and give them a whole new structure and expressive power tantamount to infusing them with new life.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng reacts with a smile to claims that he is the first collector and arranger of Taiwanese folk songs in musical history.
"This is a natural evolutionary process," he retorts. "It's like the way man began by painting pictures, then wrote characters which in due course formed sentences and eventually prose. That led on to the composition of narratives, and so forth. . . ."
Folk songs evolve in the same way, from tuneless rhymes to songs set to a melody. There is a certain process involved, and it was sheer chance that he happened to take the first concrete steps.
The most vital period of Lu Ch'uan-sheng's musical career as a collector and songwriter occurred during the 1940's and 1950's. This is when his best-known songs were written. Since the 1960's, when the first post-war generation of European-trained musicians such as Ma Shui-lung began returning to Taiwan, the local music scene has been transformed. As song-writing became dominated by European-trained composers, Lu Ch'uan-shengdiscovered a new career in the world of children's music by founding the Rong Shing Choir.
In Lu Ch'uan-sheng's opinion those who have sung in this choir have a better trained feel for music than even music department students do. "That I can guarantee with my hand on my heart," he proudly says. This is part of his lifelong philosophy of music.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng explains that while sounds have scientific properties of pitch, length, speed and volume, music involves quite different qualities of artistry and expression. But without a correct grasp of musical pitch and melodic structure it is impossible to achieve musical artistry.
Liao Chih-hui, the Rong Shing Choir's choral director, profoundly agrees.
She stresses that the choir members are subjected to rigorous musical demands bordering on perfectionism. "We react directly to every note of the score, even the tempo markings, almost without being reminded." In Liao Chih-hui's view this has a lot to do with rigorous training in childhood.
Very few of the child choristers have escaped a scolding from the director.
"When I was small I was simply terrified of him," confesses Kuo Yueh-ju. As a teacher Lu Ch'uan-sheng adopts a strict attitude towards the joy of learning, and children may be scolded for arriving late, singing wrong and ignoring expression markings. Even walking out of step on stage means a black mark. "I don't know how many times he told me 'Go home and never come back,' Liao Chih-hui ruefully recalls.
Even so, no one would deny that he gave them so much more.
Liao Chih-hui remembers how he would explain that singing was not so much like gymnastics, hard and tough, than like dancing, soft and gentle. Such comparisons hold an important place in her heart and have helped her to feel that musical life is really something special and worthwhile.
"Sometimes he seemed to speak in riddles, but after singing it through a couple of times you saw what he meant," says Ch'en Ying-ling, another choral instructor. Now she follows his teaching method and explains music to the choir in metaphorical terms.
His pupils have complex feelings of love and respect for their teacher. "He looks so stern and forbidding but sometimes he speaks in such a lively, simple and effective way, hitting the nail right on the head," describes Liao Chih-hui.
Lien Hsien-sheng, a graduate of the NTNU Institute of Music who knows Lu Ch'uan-sheng well, considers that he belongs to the classical type of artist rather than the romantic type.
He has a very simple and honest nature, and his entire life as a composer and musician is marked by a transparent dedication to his art.
When he injured his hand he turned to vocal music, and when the musical mainstream left him isolated he threw himself into his children's choir. His compositions show no trace of conflict or displeasure, and the main themes of his work are optimism, dedication and encouraging others. Lien Hsien-sheng thinks this may actually be his sole weakness, for human life is not perfectly satisfactory, so why should music be unfailingly optimistic?
The German poet Schiller once wrote: "Life is serious, but art is serene." Surely this is a view to which Lu Ch'uan-sheng would subscribe.
[Picture Caption]
Lu Ch'uan-sheng's musical life has been a stream of delightful melodies.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng as a teacher at Shih Chien College in 1965. Later he abandoned vocal performance in favor of orchestral and choral music. (photo courtesy of Lu Ch'uan-sheng)
The Rong Shing Choir in the standard line-up it has held to for the past 34 years.
During Rong Shing choir practice any child who sang off-key, walked out of step or failed to pay attention was strictly dealt with by the choirmaster.
From youth to hoary old age, his expression has remained unaltered.
So many moving songs have been composed at this table in Mr. Lu's living room.
Smiling students, majestic music, scores strewn everywhere; Mr. Lu's living room is never a dull place.
For several decades Mr. Lu has regularly spent six days a week with the Rong Shing choir.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng chats over his childhood days with relatives at the historic Hsiao Yun Academy.
One afternoon last February Lu Ch'uan-sheng paid a visit to his old school, the An-li Elementary School at Shenkang, Taichung county.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng's musical life has been a stream of delightful melodies.
From youth to hoary old age, his expression has remained unaltered.
The Rong Shing Choir in the standard line-up it has held to for the past 34 years.
During Rong Shing choir practice any child who sang off-key, walked out of step or failed to pay attention was strictly dealt with by the choirmaster.
So many moving songs have been composed at this table in Mr. Lu's living room.
Smiling students, majestic music, scores strewn everywhere; Mr. Lu's living room is never a dull place.
For several decades Mr. Lu has regularly spent six days a week with the Rong Shing choir.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng chats over his childhood days with relatives at the historic Hsiao Yun Academy.
Lu Ch'uan-sheng chats over his childhood days with relatives at the historic Hsiao Yun Academy.
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