UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date:______
I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:
It is entitled:
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: ______
Struggle for Recognition: Wen-Ye Jiang, Chih-Yuen Kuo, and Their Piano Music
A document submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati
In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of
DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS
In the Keyboard Division of the College-Conservatory of Music
by
Shuan-Chen Yang
August 2008
B.M., Tunghai University, 1999 M.M., Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 2001
Project Advisor: Professor Frank Weinstock, M.M. Abstract
Before the twentieth century, Taiwan kept its native music to itself, passing traditions of folk song and Taiwanese opera from generation to generation within the island. Beginning in the
1930s, however, Taiwan attempted to join the growing international stage of art music, sending some of its most talented young musicians to study in Japan. The choice to study in Japan was not only due to the imperial power’s occupation; at the time, Japan was the only country in Asia where Western music was played and taught. Out of this came Taiwan’s two most significant composers of the twentieth century—Wen-Ye Jiang (1910-1983) and Chih-Yuen Kuo (b. 1921).
Upon completing their studies in Japan, Jiang and Kuo had developed methods that freely mixed
Western and Eastern influences, and they wrote in a largely audience- friendly modernist idiom.
Yet beyond Japan, their paths could not be more different. Tragically, their music has not reached as many Western ears as they should have, often falling victim to the cruel political circumstances of their time.
Because many musicians in the West are not familiar with Jiang and Kuo, they are also unaware of the importance of the historical events which affected their lives, careers, and even artistic influences. Although Jiang is eleven years older than Kuo, both composers matured in a period where Eastern and Western music began to exchange a great deal of ideas. Both, too, deserve recognition as composers from Taiwan. This paper will trace the different compositional directions of Jiang and Kuo, discuss how extra-musical events affected their lives, and shed more light on their music. It will then finish with the examination of four major piano works—two of each composer—that are representative of their styles and their times.
1 Copyright 2008 by Shuan-Chen Yang All Rights Reserved
2 Table of Contents
List of Musical Examples 5
I. Introduction and Survey Taiwan: Search for Identity 7 Two Composers 12 Two Careers 17 The Present Day 19 The Music 23
II. Wen-Ye Jiang: Standing Alone Early Success 27 Inspiration and Persecution 33 Death and Rediscovery 36
III. The Piano Music of Wen-Ye Jiang Three Dances, Opus 7 (1935) 39 Sonatina for Piano, Opus 31 (1940) 47
IV. Chih-Yuen Kuo: Taiwan’s Rose Family and Childhood 51 Study in Japan 56 Postwar Taiwan 60 Retirement and Recognition 66
V. The Piano Music of Chih-Yuen Kuo Piano Sonata in C (1961) 70 Children’s Piano Pieces (1974) 78
VI. Final Thoughts 87
Bibliography 88
3 Acknowledgements
Dean Frank Weinstock, my piano professor and mentor, for his advice on this document, and his inspirational teaching that shaped my growth as both a pianist and a musician.
Professors Adawagin Pratt and Michael Chertock, for their generous time in serving as my readers on this document.
Dr. Jeongwon Joe, for her vital pointers that led to the passage of my document proposal.
Patrick Hanudel and Harmony Yang, for their assistance in expressing myself as clearly and as eloquently as possible in the English language.
Cincinnati Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, for their prayers and encouragement, as well as the many beautiful memories which they left me.
My parents, for their support of my chosen field, their understanding of my need to study abroad, and their financial generosity that has allowed me to pursue my dream.
4 List of Musical Examples
Example 1. Jiang: Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 39, Mvt. I, mm.1-2. 42
Example 2. Jiang: Three Dances, Op. 7, Mvt. I, mm. 3-5. 43
Example 3. Jiang: Three Dances, Op. 7, Mvt. II, mm.1-9. 44
Example 4. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. II, mm.14-27. 45
Example 5. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. III, mm.1-4. 46
Example 6. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. III, mm.25-29. 46
Example 7. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.14-19. 48
Example 8. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.1-5. 48
Example 9. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. II, mm.1-12. 49
Example 10. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.37-41. 49
Example 11. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. II, mm.1-6. 50
Example 12. A seven-word tune. 71
Example 13. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. I, mm. 1-8. 72
Example 14. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. I, Second Theme, mm.27-38. 72
Example 15. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. II, mm.1-12. 73
Example 16. Kuo: Piano sonata in C, Mvt. I, mm.159-164. 74
Example 17. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. III, mm.1-10. 75
Example 18. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.25-28. 76
Example 19. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.43-54. 77
Example 20. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.169-174. 77
5 List of Musical Examples (continued)
Example 21. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Jiang Shoei,” mm.1-14. 82
Example 22. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Row Row the Boat,” mm.17-30. 83
Example 23. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Lament,” mm.1-11. 84
Example 24. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Elegie,” mm.1-4. 84
Example 25. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Be on My Way,” mm.1-8. 85
Example 26. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Joke,” mm.23-34. 86
6 I. Introduction and Survey
Taiwan: Search for Identity
History will remember the twentieth century as a time of great upheaval in almost every corner of the world. Rapid technological development made the planet a smaller place, and political ideas and artistic movements crossed borders. Still, many countries saw the twentieth century as an opportunity to promote their cherished cultures and to proclaim themselves unique as they joined the world stage. Sadly, many of the artists in these countries fought against oppression and censorship in their quest for a national identity, and a great deal of artists either made names for themselves in other countries, or tended to their work in secret. Some of these artists and their countries, such as Dmitri Shostakovich and the Soviet Union, have always been on the international radar screen, or at least understood more fully in recent years. But not all artists and their countries have received attention—especially those outside of Europe. One such country whose artists are long overdue for the spotlight is Taiwan.
In the West, Taiwan is sometimes overlooked when it comes to matters of history and international significance. Much of this is due to occupation by outside powers not associated with the Taiwanese people. Japan, for example, set her eyes on Korea and Taiwan as part of imperial plans as early as the seventeenth century, and approached both regions with aggression.
The native Formosans, however, were a tenacious people who did not look kindly on Japanese rule, and in 1616, soundly defeated a Japanese invading force. In 1624, the Dutch East Indies
Company took a different tactic; they came in peace and established a friendly working relationship with the Formosans. As a result, the Formosans allowed the Dutch to build a commercial and military post on the island, and welcomed Dutch efforts to build a Western-style political and educational system and spread Christianity; in fact, the brief period of Dutch rule
7 continues to be influential in Taiwan to this day. In the seventeenth century, though, the Ching dynasty of China viewed the Dutch rule of Taiwan with increasing annoyance. The Dutch often hired laborers from mainland China and brought them to Taiwan; moreover, many Chinese fled to Taiwan to escape criminal prosecution. In 1662, Chinese naval forces defeated the Dutch in battle, threw the Dutch off the island, and ruled Taiwan for themselves. The Formosans, however, proved resistant to complete Chinese rule, and the Ching dynasty, for the sake of convenience, pursued a largely hands-off policy with the island.1
In the nineteenth century, outside powers began to threaten the island again. Due to the failure of their imperial policy two hundred years earlier, Japan had gone into an isolationist sleep, refusing open trade with Western countries. In 1853, United States Navy Commodore
Matthew C. Perry and a squadron of heavily armed ships docked near modern-day Tokyo and forced the Japanese government to sign a trade treaty. Awakened from over two hundred years of isolationist principles, Japan began to adopt Western-style industrialization and flex her imperial muscle once more with regard to Korea and Taiwan.2 In 1871, long exasperated by foreign ships landing on their coast, especially Japanese ships, the aboriginal Paiwan tribe of southern Taiwan brutally murdered fifty-four shipwrecked Japanese fishermen.3 Enraged by this incident, Japan resolved to take control of Taiwan, and in 1894, friction between Imperial Japan and the Ching dynasty of China provoked the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan’s Western-style military proved too much for the outdated Ching dynasty forces, and within a year, Japan took both Korea and
1 Shiou-Fon Li, Taiwan shih ibai chien da chih [One Hundred Events in Taiwan History], vol.1 (Taipei: Yu- Shan Publications, 1999), 12-16.
2 Tien-Jau, Tai. Ming-Chun Li, ed. Taiwan kuochih chengchihshih [Taiwan International Political History] (Taipei: Chienwei Publications, 2002), 78-85.
3 Ibid., 88.
8 Taiwan as the first of its many colonies at the dawn of the twentieth century.4
In order to encourage other potential colonies to submit to Japanese rule, the Japanese decided to make Taiwan a “model colony;” that is, while the Japanese were clearly in charge, the
Taiwanese people were treated well and allowed to enjoy their native culture. The island’s fertile soil turned Taiwan into an agricultural gold mine for the ruling power, and Tokyo rewarded
Taiwanese students with the opportunity to study in Japan, the most advanced nation in Asia in the early twentieth century. The Japanese allowed the growth of Taiwanese musical events, and a number of concert halls and theaters were built. Music stores that sold scores and instruments could be seen everywhere, and many of these businesses provided the public opportunities to take music lessons. In the 1920s, the advent of “talking” films led to an increase in the selling of records; over two hundred record retail stores sold film soundtracks, popular songs, Taiwanese opera, and Taiwanese folk and instrumental music.5
In the late 1930s, however, the friendly relationship between Taiwan and Japan took a turn for the worse. Hungry for increasingly scarce resources, Japan once again pursued dreams of expansion, and in 1937, she launched a full scale invasion of China. To fight this Second Sino-
Japanese War, the Japanese drafted many young Taiwanese men into the army, and evicted all
Christian missionaries from the island, an event that greatly obstructed the spread of music.
In 1939, the Japanese reversed decades of precedent with Taiwan through the promotion of
Japanese culture. Specifically, they pushed all Taiwanese citizens to converse in Japanese, follow the Japanese traditional lifestyle, give children Japanese names, and assimilate into a full-fledged
Japanese state. While many Taiwanese served on the Japanese side in World War II, the
4 Tai, Taiwan kuochih chengchihshih, 97-102.
5 Yu-Shiou Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen: Shamochung de hungchiangwei [Chih-Yuen Kuo: The Red Rose in the Desert] (Taipei: Readingtimes Publications, 2001), 93.
9 Taiwanese rejoiced when a defeated Japan surrendered to the United States in August 1945.6
For the first time in three centuries, the Taiwanese people had dreams of an independent island nation. But these dreams soon fell victim to yet another occupying force—the regime of
Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT). In 1912, the Chinese politician Sun Yat-sen founded the Chinese Nationalist Party, or “Kuomintang” (KMT) to replace the antiquated
Chinese emperor system. Inspired by his study of American history, Sun endeavored to unite the
Chinese provinces under one democratic government. Although his efforts created the modern
Republic of China (ROC), his party could not bring regional warlords under control, nor mount a unified opposition to outside threats. Upon Sun’s death in 1925, the KMT fell under the leadership of the career military soldier Chiang Kai-Shek, who took the party in a more right- wing direction. To counter this, peasant leader Mao Tse-Tung and his growing Chinese
Communist party began military maneuvers against Chiang and the KMT. Over the next two decades, Chiang battled Mao in a bitter civil war, which only halted in 1937 so that they could fight the invading Japanese.7 In August 1945, following Japan’s fall, Chiang moved his KMT soldiers into Taiwan as a postwar occupying force, and enthusiastic Taiwanese filled the streets, greeting the KMT as liberators. Two months later, when Japan officially handed over Taiwan to the KMT, Chiang installed one of his favorite senior administrators, Chen Yi, as governor- general of the island.
Many Taiwanese assumed that KMT occupation was temporary, and that Chiang’s forces would leave within a year. Chiang, however, had no such plans, and in 1946, Governor-General
Chen Yi monopolized all government positions. Corruption ran rampant in the government and
6 Li, Taiwan shih ibai chien da chih, vol.1, 172-181.
7 Hsin-Chu Lin. Taiwan ssupainien fenyunshih [Taiwan Four Hundred Years History] (Hsinchu: Hisakewenhua Publications, 2005), 106.
10 the military, commodity prices skyrocketed, and the Taiwanese began to suffer a drastic downturn in quality of living. In addition, government employers and police treated the
Taiwanese unfairly, and conflicts arose among the island’s various ethnic groups.8 On February
27, 1947, a confrontation between KMT officers and an elderly lady selling supposedly illegal cigarettes resulted in the careless shooting death of a bystander. The event mushroomed the next day—February 28—into a full-scale uprising, and within days, Taiwanese rebels had commandeered the entire island. On March 8, Chen Yi welcomed a military force from mainland
China and ordered them to embark on a ruthless and haphazard killing campaign to restore order.
By the end of the month, KMT control of Taiwan was secure, and 30,000 Taiwanese were dead.
This tragedy referred in Taiwan as the “228 Incident”—named for the month and day of the uprising—embarrassed several countries intent on giving financial aid to Taiwan. Pressured by a series of objections from the United States Congress, Chiang Kai-Shek removed Chen Yi from his post as governor-general. For the next forty years, however, the KMT endeavored to erase the
“228 Incident” from Taiwanese memory, leaving it out of the history books and forbidding any public discussion of the event. Moreover, following the “228 Incident,” a nervous Chiang Kai-
Shek made it a point to persecute the intellectual leaders of Taiwan, a course that, in the years to come, would have great consequences for the arts.9
In October 1949, Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists achieved decisive military victory in China, and occupied nearly every major Chinese city. Mao announced the birth of “The
People’s Republic of China” (PRC) and established its capital in Beijing. In turn, Chiang and the
KMT fled mainland China for their stronghold in Taiwan. Chiang and the KMT proclaimed the island as the provisional home of the “Republic of China” (ROC), and set up her capital in Taipei.
8 Li, Taiwan shih ibai chien da chih, vol. 2, 6-10.
9 Ibid., 17-21.
11 Immediately after arriving in Taiwan, Chiang declared martial law and invited two million loyal soldiers and refugees to join him on the island. Native Taiwanese suffocated under brutal KMT law enforcement with no regard for human rights and a population swell that nearly crashed the economy. This period of martial law went on to become the longest in world history, lasting until
1987. Over these thirty-eight years, 140,000 Taiwanese were criminally prosecuted, 29,000
Taiwanese were imprisoned, and almost 4,000 Taiwanese were executed.10
During his rule in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-Shek went to great lengths to establish his own
Chinese nation over that of the Taiwanese people. On the bureaucratic front, Chiang built a strong military to defend the island, constructed an economy favorable to his Chinese expatriates, and assembled a secret police force to exercise tighter control over the Taiwanese. On the cultural front, Chiang replaced Taiwanese with Mandarin as the official language of the island, required all educators to teach in Mandarin, and discouraged the speaking of Taiwanese in schools, often with severe punishment. Chiang largely ignored the arts, but changed the words of
Taiwanese folk songs to Mandarin, and introduced Chinese folk songs into the elementary schools.11 As their culture suffered, the native Taiwanese began to live in fear and hatred of the national government.
Two Composers
Given this background, it is hardly surprising that many Western musicians and scholars are not aware of Taiwan’s contribution to twentieth-century art music. Before the twentieth century, Taiwan kept its native music to itself, passing traditions of folk song and Taiwanese opera from generation to generation within the island. Even with the arrival of the Japanese in
10 Li, Taiwan shih ibai chien da chih, vol. 2, 38-43.
11 Ibid., 14-16.
12 1895, the Taiwanese were free to enjoy their native music and culture; such freedoms were part of Japan’s plan to turn Taiwan into a “model colony.” Beginning in the 1930s, Taiwan began to send some of its most talented young musicians to study in Japan. The choice to study in Japan was not only due to the imperial power’s occupation; she was the only country in Asia where
Western music was played and taught at a high level.12 Out of this atmosphere came Taiwan’s two most significant composers of the twentieth-century—Wen-Ye Jiang (1910-1983) and
Chih-Yuen Kuo (b. 1921).
Upon completing their studies in Japan, Jiang and Kuo developed styles that freely mixed
Western and Eastern influences, and composed in an audience-friendly modernist idiom. Yet beyond Japan, their lives and careers could not have been be more different. Tragically, their music has not reached as many Western ears as it should have, often falling victim to the cruel political circumstances of the time. Because many in the West are not familiar with Jiang and
Kuo they are also unaware of the importance of the historical events which affected their lives, careers, and even compositional influences. Although Jiang is eleven years older than Kuo, both composers, as mentioned above, began on similar career paths in a time period where Eastern and Western music exchanged a great deal of ideas. Both, however, deserve recognition as composers of Taiwan. This paper intends to trace the different compositional paths of Jiang and
Kuo, discuss how extra-musical events affected their careers, and bring the value of their music to light. This document will then finish with the examination of four major piano works—two of each composer—that are representative of their styles and their times.
To begin with, Jiang is a cosmopolitan composer; he was born and raised in the
12 Bi-Juan Chen, Taiwan hsinyinyueshih: hsishih hsinyinyue tsai jihchu shihtai te chancheng yu fachan [Taiwan New History: The Development of Western New Music in the Japanese Occupation Years] (Taipei: Yueyun Publications), 32-42.
13 northwestern part of Taipei, Taiwan, near Tamsui, which, at the time, served as a base for
Western missionaries. There, at the local Presbyterian church, Jiang heard Western music for the first time, and began to absorb it. Jiang immersed himself in Western idioms, and many of his early pieces were works for solo piano, vocal ensemble, or full orchestra. In 1936, the young
Jiang achieved instant recognition and an international award with his orchestral work, Taiwan
Suite, a colorful transcription of his piano work of the same name. The Taiwan Suite, however, has little to do with Jiang’s birth country; while Taiwanese music orients itself to the downbeat,
Jiang writes unpredictable poly-metrical rhythms in the spirit of one of his biggest influences,
Bela Bartok.13 In the late 1930s, drawn by his fascination with ancient Chinese art and literature,
Jiang settled in mainland China. In the late 1940s, during a difficult period in his life, Jiang was encouraged by a friend to attend Mass at a Catholic church. Although Jiang never converted,
Catholic sacred music inspired some of his most moving vocal compositions, including Melodae
Psalmorum, Mass No.1, and Melodies from the Book of Psalms for Children.14
Moreover, beginning at the age of four, Jiang received a comprehensive Japanese education, first at a Japanese school in Shiamen, China, later in Japan itself when he turned thirteen. During his secondary school studies in Japan, Jiang commenced his studies in contemporary composition there, and was swayed by some of the great Western composers of the day—most notably Bartok, Stravinsky, and Debussy. As mentioned previously, Jiang’s early tribute to his birthplace, the much-celebrated Taiwan Suite, not only echoes the rhythmic thrust of Bartok and Stravinsky, but was entirely composed during his stay in Japan. In 1938, as part of his effort to improve his technique and explore his own style of composition, Jiang moved to
13 Chi-Jen Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye (Taipei: Readingtimes, 2002), 62-64.
14 Lu-Fen Yen, ed., Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia [Taiwan Contemporary Composers] (Taipei: Yushanshe, 2006), 22-26.
14 mainland China, where he began to collect Chinese folk tunes and immerse himself in ancient
Chinese philosophy. While Jiang did not compose much specifically for China, his compositional style in the 1950s began to blend Eastern and Western sources more fluidly.15 Sadly, most of
Jiang’s output was lost in the violent upheaval of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Even worse, during the Anti-Rightist Movement of the late 1950s, Jiang’s Japanese education made him an easy target for the vicious Communist Party leaders.16
Kuo, on the other hand, has lived the great majority of his life in rural Taiwan. Born in
Yuen-Li, a country village south of the sprawling capital of Taipei, Kuo was first influenced by the native music coming from the temple across from his house. In the 1920s of rural Taiwan, most musical events were held at the temple, accompanying the worshipping of gods, entertaining of gods, puppet shows, Taiwanese opera, and music for the celebrations of the festivals of gods; all around him, the young Kuo was surrounded by traditional Taiwanese music.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Wei-Der Huang, in his recent doctoral dissertation “Solo Piano and
Chamber Music of Contemporary Taiwanese Composers,” remarks that “Despite Kuo’s use of traditional structure, the lifeblood of the music is in the folk elements.”17 In 1935, Kuo traveled to Japan to attend middle school, where he encountered Western music for the first time. In
December 1941, however, as the United States and its Allies declared war on Japan, spirits were high, and the Japanese were aggressively promoting their own contemporary music. Such violent nationalism caused a reaction in Kuo, and the young composer turned back to Taiwan for guidance. In fact, Kuo maintained his musical allegiance to his native land even as he entered
15 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 96-105.
16 Tzong-Kai Kuo, “Chiang Wen-yeh: the Style of his Selected Piano Works and a Study of Musical Modernization in Japan and China” (D.M.A. diss., Ohio State University, 1987), 23-26.
17 Wei-Der Huang, “Solo Piano and Chamber Music of Contemporary Taiwanese Composers” (D.M.A. diss., University of Maryland, 2001), 64.
15 Tokyo University at the height of the war in 1942 to study composition.18
Over the next twenty-seven years, Kuo traveled back and forth between Taiwan and Japan; in Japan, Kuo found the advice and instruction he deemed important to better his compositional technique; in Taiwan he found financial security and artistic inspiration. In 1969, Kuo returned to
Yuen-Li and spent the rest of his career finding a balance between Western elements and
Taiwanese music. In a 1984 journal article, Kuo states that, “When composing, I must be careful to distinguish my style from others. Taiwanese style represents my style.”19 But Kuo’s use of
Western form has given Taiwanese music a platform which makes his music accessible outside of his home island. Thus, while Jiang and Kuo have made great contributions to Taiwanese music, their methods are markedly different—while Jiang proceeds from an international level to a local level, Kuo proceeds from local to international. These approaches can be easily discerned through their works for voice. While Jiang selects his lyrics from a wide variety of Asian literature, including Tang Dynasty poems and Japanese haiku, Kuo uses solely his mother tongue,
Taiwanese.
Although Kuo’s style may be more consistently Taiwanese than Jiang, many Taiwanese scholars have not given Kuo equal attention. Much of this neglect is due to the fact that today’s
Taiwanese professors grew up under Chiang Kai-Shek, received a Chinese education, and learned to equate Chinese culture with Taiwanese culture. One such scholar with this notion is Dr.
Tzong-kai Kuo, a respected Taiwanese pianist and teacher (no relation to the composer), who is widely recognized as an expert on Jiang’s work. In his 1987 doctoral dissertation at the Ohio
State University, Dr. Kuo hails Jiang as one of the most successful composers in the history of
18 Chih-Yuen Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe: Tsochuchia Kuo Chih-Yuen te Yinyue Shoucha [Red Rose in the Wild: The Composer Chih-Yuen Kuo’s Musical Notes], ed. Ling-Yi Wu (Taipei: Daliu Publications), 40.
19 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 17.
16 China, not Taiwan.20
Two Careers
In the course of this document, the music of Jiang and Kuo will be explored through four major piano works representative of these composers. Analysis of their music will include the sources of their melodies, their use of particular harmonies, and their peculiar rhythmic patterns.
For example, Kuo's Piano Sonata in C (1961) draws much of its influence from the style of the seven-word tune of Taiwanese opera. In contrast, Jiang's early piano piece Three Dances, Opus 7, is suggestive of the Western trends of the time with its constant meter changes and pentatonic melodies, which show surprisingly little relation to Oriental folk music. Still, regardless of their personal inspirations or compositional directions, both Jiang and Kuo figure prominently in
Taiwan’s contribution to twentieth-century art music, and deserve much more recognition than they have received.
The absence of Jiang and Kuo on the international stage in the twentieth century, however, has nothing to do with the quality of their music; rather, both composers succumbed to the tragic political events of the time. When Jiang, for example, moved to China in 1938 to pursue his interests in Chinese culture and broaden his compositional ideas, he ended up spending more than half than his time composing secretly.21 In 1945, at the height of wartime China, Jiang brought his orchestral work Music from the Confucian Temple to KMT leader Chiang Kai-Shek to show his support for the current leadership. Chiang, however, reacted more passionately to
Jiang’s resume; he accused Jiang of being a “Japanese composer,” and jailed the composer for
20 Kuo, “Chiang Wen-yeh,” 1.
21 Ibid., 29.
17 ten months.22
When Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists took over China in December 1949, Jiang’s prospects seemed to brighten. In June 1950, Jiang became Professor of Composition at the new
Central Conservatory of Music at Tianjin, which later moved to Beijing. Over the next seven years, Jiang’s life was peaceful and his compositional output fruitful. In 1957, however, a paranoid Mao began the Anti-Rightist movement to purge the country of alleged dissidents.
Seizing upon Jiang’s education, the Communists labeled Jiang as a “Rightist,” took away his university position, and banned performances of his music. During the Cultural Revolution of the
1960s, many of Jiang’s works were destroyed, and the composer was sent to labor camps where he underwent great physical suffering. In the early 1970s, Jiang literally disappeared from the world stage.23
Chih-Yuen Kuo, too, has spent much of his compositional career also unknown to the world, and while some of it has to do with his personality, much of it has to do, too, with political events. When Kuo returned to Taiwan after World War II, he settled down to a quiet life, and in 1950, he took a simple teaching post at the Taiwan Provincial Hsin-Chu Normal School, where he taught harmonica and trained the wind band. Kuo reacted strongly to the Japanese nationalism he experienced while studying in wartime Japan and he turned to his native country for musical inspiration.24 When Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT began to build their own Chinese nation in Taiwan, however, arts and culture took a back seat to military and economic programs designed to benefit those in power. Chiang replaced Taiwanese with Mandarin as the official language of the island, and almost all native Taiwanese art and culture were ignored or
22 Kuo, “Chiang Wen-yeh,” 23-24.
23 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 47-52.
24 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 140-141.
18 suppressed in favor of Chinese art and culture.25
In this environment, Kuo suffered greatly; he lost his teaching job because he could not speak Mandarin, and had absolutely no way of promoting his works.26 In an interview conducted in the 1990s, Kuo stated that, under the rule of the KMT, “I was not able to adapt to its bureaucratic system. Their character and their habits were very different from mine and therefore made me feel like an outsider, a stranger.”27 As a result, Kuo sought opportunities for personal growth outside of Taiwan; over the next twenty years, he traveled to Japan to broaden his compositional knowledge and technique, and then resigned to live the rest of his life quietly in his birth village of Maoli. But Kuo, as interviewed in several journals in the 1990s, was not just concerned with his own lost opportunities in postwar Taiwan; Kuo lamented that, under KMT rule, “an entire generation lost its voice.”28
The Present Day
Taiwan’s contribution to twentieth-century music may have been lost for a generation, but fortunately, the winds of political change has given scholars a new opportunity to evaluate the music of Jiang and Kuo. While China still persists as a one-party country unfriendly to human rights, its desire for greater economic power in the 1970s opened a dialogue with the
West. Foreigners are freer than before to come and go as they please, although, interestingly enough, Taiwanese citizens who wish to travel in China are required to a sign a form stating that they are Chinese nationals. Thus, while not perfect, this atmosphere has allowed researchers to
25 Yu-Shiou Liu, Taiwan yinyueshih [Taiwan Music History] (Taipei: Wunan Book Co., 2003), 149.
26 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 140-141.
27 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 60-61.
28 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangw, 302.
19 gather information on lost artists and bring their works to international attention.
In 1981, a group of Chinese scholars in New York City rediscovered Jiang, who at the time was slowly dying from illnesses brought about by his cruel treatment under the Communist
Party. Although Jiang passed away two years later, the scholars spent the entire decade of the
1980s collecting Jiang’s compositions. In 1990, the scholars held a conference at Hong Kong
University titled “The Research of Jiang,” where they invited academics from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to discuss this forgotten composer. In 1992, another conference took place in Taipei,
Taiwan, this time with multiple concerts, CD productions, and publications of Jiang’s original manuscripts and summaries of his works; the conference also invited Jiang’s two ex-wives and daughters.29 In 1994, the Communist Chinese government, in an effort to improve its largely intolerant image, allowed seminars about Jiang’s works to be held in Beijing.30
While there is still some confusion in the academic world concerning Jiang’s national identity as a composer, the revival of Jiang’s works in the 1990s sparked a movement to recover the works of Taiwanese composers who were ignored by the KMT government. In this, Asian scholars have received great assistance from Taiwanese President Teng-hui Lee, a Taiwanese native and career KMT bureaucrat whose skillful maneuvers in the late 1980s and early 1990s turned Taiwan from KMT martial law into a healthy three-party democracy. Lee hated the KMT in his youth, even participating in the violent 228 Incident, but after studying agriculture and economics in the United States, he returned to Taiwan for government employment. In 1971, he joined the KMT, who welcomed his charisma and talent. Gaining the chairmanship of the KMT in 1988, Lee slowly placed a majority of native Taiwanese in the legislature and held the
29 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 29-30.
30 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 10.
20 country’s first truly democratic election in 1996, which Lee won with 54 percent of the vote. 31
In 2000, to promote and live up to his democratic philosophy, Lee stepped down from the presidency to allow for new leadership, but has continued to be a force in Taiwanese politics.
Today, Lee regularly supports candidates who favor a Taiwanese nation that will continue to be completely independent of China, and publicly states, much to the mainland’s anger, that Taiwan does not need economic ties with China. Lee has also brought the 228 Incident, which he experienced personally, back into school history books and Taiwanese discourse. In 1995,
President Lee, speaking on behalf of the government, formally apologized to the country for the horrific massacre. A memorial to the uprising was built near the Presidential Office, and a plaque stands at the site where the first shot was fired on February 27, 1947. Most important to the
Taiwanese people, the day of February 28 has been declared Peace Memorial Day, a national holiday where all flags on the island fly at half mast to commemorate the dead. Although the now-smaller KMT party regularly accuses Lee of being a turncoat, Lee remains popular on his native island, and many admirers call him “the Father of Taiwan Democracy.”32
Under Lee’s leadership in the 1990s, the Taiwanese government began to direct funds to revive and support Taiwanese culture. In 1993, with the support of Chairman Lee, Taiwanese senators Yu-Shiou Chen and Shiou-Yi Lu established the Cultural Foundation, a government organization dedicated to gathering as many local written sources of the culture and arts as possible. The work of the Cultural Foundation has led to a “Taiwanese Renaissance” of sorts— events of artistic merit whose objective is the advancement of Taiwanese culture.33 Today, native
31 Mi-Cha Wu, ed., Taiwanshih Shiaushihtien [Taiwan History Timelines and Dictionary] (Taipei: Yuanliu Publications, 2000), 194.
32 Shui-Bian Chen, ShihchiShouhang [Century Maiden Voyage] (Taipei: Yuanshen Publications, 2001), 71.
33 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 8.
21 Taiwanese can enjoy any number of different events—lectures, recitals, photography exhibitions—at any number of different performing venues ranging from concert halls to small parks. Lee also made it a point to demonstrate his personal sponsorship and interest in Taiwanese art, and during his tenure as President of Taiwan from 1996 to 2000, Lee regularly invited musicians and composers to perform at the presidential house. In this environment, Chih-Yuen
Kuo finally began to receive recognition for his lifetime of work. In fact, Kuo was one of the first
Taiwanese artists thrust into the limelight by the Cultural Foundation, and Lee’s emphasis on
Taiwanese music encouraged Kuo to compose patriotic choral works such as Praises of Taiwan and Go Forth, My Fellow Taiwanese. In 2001, for the first time in Taiwan, Kuo’s biography and compositions received full documentation and publication. Such events have served to bring the normally quiet Kuo to the forefront of Taiwanese music and highlight the importance of his contributions to Taiwanese culture even during the difficult years of the KMT government. 34
While a survey of the complete works of Jiang and Kuo and a discussion of the value of their music to Taiwan is long overdue in the West, this paper will focus the remainder of its energy on four major piano works that are representative of each composer’s musical style.
Through an exploration of two of Jiang’s piano works and two of Kuo’s piano works, relevant aspects such as artistic outlook, methods of composition, invocation of native elements, and historical and political context will be evaluated. By the time this document is finished, it is hoped that the reader will have a profound appreciation of these two newly discovered composers, and a deeper knowledge of Taiwanese art music.
34 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 302.
22 The Music
To differentiate between Taiwanese and Chinese music can be difficult. Taiwan and
China are separated by only 112 miles of water, and this geographical proximity has produced obvious parallels in their cultures. The Taiwanese language, for instance, which has been spoken on the island since the late Ming Dynasty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shares common traits with the Amoy and Ming Nan dialects of southern China. When it comes to music, however, Taiwan’s history has produced something of a sonic melting pot—Chinese traditional music, aboriginal Taiwanese music, and even Western music imported during the Japanese colonial times. Moreover, while the sound of Taiwanese traditional music owes its origins to southern China, the forms of Taiwanese music are wholly unique to the island. Taiwanese puppet shows, Taiwanese opera, and the seven-word tune are special genres not found anywhere else.
Since the end of the Qing Dynasty in the early twentieth century, Taiwanese composers have sought to create music that is representative of their native island. In doing so, they often seek to reproduce the sounds of their indigenous tongue, whose various inflections and tonal qualities are naturally suggestive of song.
Like Italian, Taiwanese is a very musical language. In comparison to Western languages, however, whose multiple syllables make room for a variety of different words, Taiwanese features only one syllable per word, and the inflection of each syllable changes accordingly to the context of the sentence. In terms of Western music, the inflection of the Taiwanese language centers around three pitches—C, D, and E. For example, the phrase “taking the plane” in terms of its inflection, can be represented on the keyboard as the notes C-D-E. Likewise, the phrase
“my old father,” in terms of its tonality, approximates the notes E-C-D. As a result, recent
Taiwanese composers are drawn to simple melodies whose intervals consist mostly of seconds
23 and thirds, which imitate the individuality of Taiwanese speech. Thus, while the individual aesthetic for Wen-Ye Jiang and for Chih-Yuen Kuo is understandably different, the influence of native Taiwanese music is an important distinction to make between them.
First, this paper will explore two of Wen-Ye Jiang’s early works for piano—his seventh opus number, the Three Dances, and a somewhat later work, the Sonatina for Piano, opus 31. In both works, the young Jiang skillfully imitates the Western masters of his day, most notably
Bartok, Stravinsky, and Debussy. Like the Taiwan Suite for solo piano or orchestra, there is very little in these works to remind the listener of Jiang’s home island. The Three Dances, in particular, is more heavily influenced by Western techniques than Eastern techniques. To start with, the first dance, “Allegro ritmico,” features a melody that could be mistaken for Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring; instead of imitating the lyrical and free range of Taiwanese folk music,
Jiang writes a dry theme with leaps of thirds and fourths in a very narrow range. The second dance, “Allegro scherzando,” recalls Bartok with European pentatonic melodies; Taiwanese folk music, on the other hand, has different pentatonic scales, and relies much more on minor modes to paint a melancholy picture. Finally, the last dance, “Allegro moderato,” evokes Impressionism with short, shimmering pentatonic runs reminiscent of Debussy; Taiwanese folk music, however, is much simpler in texture and harmony.
Similarly, the Sonatina for Piano, written during Jiang’s first years in China, borrows elements from late European Romanticism, early Western modernism, and Chinese folk music.
In fact, Jiang goes to great lengths to reproduce the sounds of the pipa, an ancient Chinese plucked string instrument, and the Chinese zither, noted for its strange glissandos, on the keyboard. Thus, Jiang’s contribution to Taiwanese music is not replication of Taiwanese folk elements, but masterfully-written works in a cosmopolitan twentieth-century idiom.
24 In contrast, Chih-Yuen Kuo pens works in a truly authentic Taiwanese flavor. A careful examination of two of Kuo’s piano pieces from the middle of the century, the Piano Sonata in C
(1961), and the Children’s Piano Pieces (1974) will reveal the importance of traditional
Taiwanese elements in Kuo’s artistic voice. For example, despite the formal Western structure,
Kuo’s Piano Sonata in C highlights the unique character of Taiwanese folk music. In the first movement, both the primary and secondary themes imitate the seven-word tune style of
Taiwanese opera. In the second movement, the lyrical Adagio melody could easily be mistaken for a true Taiwanese folk song with its brooding minor mode and falling quarter-tone glissandi at the end of phrases. The last two notes of the second movement deserve special attention; the insertion of an E-flat between the E and D cause a sliding effect in the music which mirrors the inflection of speech in the Taiwanese dialect. To be fair, Kuo sometimes likes to branch out; the rhythmic language of the third movement, a scherzo-like minuet, obscures the first beat of some measures, much like late Romantic European composers such as Dvorak. In the fourth movement, however—a running toccata in a Taiwanese pentatonic scale—Kuo returns the strong pulse to its rightful place in Taiwanese folk music—the downbeat.
Kuo’s affection for his home island is even more apparent in his Children’s Piano Pieces, a setting of seventeen folk melodies arranged for young piano students. While Kuo obviously wants to familiarize Taiwanese students with their native folk songs, his settings are far from ordinary. In fact, Kuo’s settings are influenced by Western techniques as much as by Taiwanese music. In the more cheerful songs, Kuo, much like Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, introduces the young student to mixed meters and changing meters, as well as the concept of playing in two different keys simultaneously. Other settings, however, are more traditional; in the more melancholy songs,
Kuo emphasizes the importance of the minor mode and textural simplicity of Taiwanese music.
25 Some songs, too, make use of the elements of Taiwanese opera; a melody presented at the outset in the first voice is often recalled at a later point in the second voice. In summary, Kuo’s contribution to twentieth-century Taiwanese music, while decidedly different than his compatriot
Jiang, is just as significant, and, to be fair, deserves a closer look than has been given by Eastern and Western scholarship.
In fact, perhaps a closer look at the lives and works of Wen-Ye Jiang and Chih-Yuen Kuo will spark an interest in not just the music of Taiwan, but in the music of the entire Oriental culture of the Asian Pacific Rim. Despite the growing prominence of world music and the cross- fertilization of genres, Asian music remains fairly sleepy on the world stage. While many young
Asian students, especially composers, travel to the United States to study, not all of them choose to return to their birth countries and contribute meaningfully to their local cultures. It is time for
Asian nations to become more involved—to promote their native composers past or present, encourage their students to play a role in the development of the arts in their native countries, and make their national music available to everyone to enjoy.
26 II. Wen-Ye Jiang: Standing Alone
Early Success
In recent years, the Council for the Cultural Affairs of Taiwan has published a series of biographies regarding significant Taiwanese composers. The subtitle to Chih-Yuen Kuo’s biography reads “The Wild Rose,” a reference to the tenacity that Kuo displayed throughout his life and career, continuing to write great works of music despite the shifting of political rule that sometimes obstructed the full bloom of his talent. Curiously, when it comes to Wen-Ye Jiang’s biography, a subtitle with similar meaning reads “The Flower Which Stood Alone Among
Thorns.” To be sure, Jiang is a not a figure who falls easily into categorization; the Japanese perceive him as a secondary citizen, and the Chinese perceive him as Japanese, since he had studied and worked in Japan during World War II. Although he is a native composer of Taiwan the Taiwanese do not know him very well.35 One reason may be that, when Taiwan was ruled under martial law during much of the last half of the twentieth century, Jiang’s name, due to his association with Japan, could not be mentioned in public. Another reason may be Jiang’ treatment at the hands of Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communists, who, in their vicious persecution of artist and intellectuals, robbed Jiang of a fruitful late compositional career and arguably brought about Jiang’s painful and premature death.
Wen-Ye Jiang was born on June 11, 1910 in the Dadaocheng district of Taipei. His original name was “Wen-Bin,” but when he began to study abroad in Japan he changed his name to
“Wen-Ye.” Unfortunately, there is no documentation as to when he had made this change, but on his manuscripts, one can occasionally make out the spelling “APINA,” a spelling in Taiwanese equivalent to “Bin.” Jiang’s ancestors originated in Yungting in Fuchien, China; his father was
35 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 10.
27 Chang-Sheng Jiang, and his mother was Kuei Cheng. Jiang was a middle child with two siblings, an older brother Wen-Jiang Jiang, and a younger brother, Wen-Kuang Jiang. In 1916, at the age of five, Wen-Ye Jiang and his family emigrated to Amoy, China, and in 1917, he matriculated at the Hsuying School of Amoy, a Japanese school for students of Taiwanese nationality. In 1923, at the age of thirteen, Jiang lost his mother to illness, and his father sent him to study at the Nagano
Ueda Chiugaku Middle School in Japan. In 1928, after graduating from middle school and in accordance with his father’s wish, Jiang entered the Khoto Khogio Gako Engineering School in
Tokyo, majoring in mechanical engineering. During night classes at Ueno Ongaku Gako, however, Jiang took vocal studies and music theory as his electives. In 1930, his father experienced the failure of his business and a serious illness; with his family in financial peril,
Jiang worked to support himself in order to study both electrical engineering and music.36
In 1932, Jiang graduated from the engineering school, and was hired at Columbia Records in Japan, where he began his music career as a baritone for vocal performances. As a singer,
Jiang won the Japanese National Vocal Competition four times—in 1932, 1933, 1934, and 1936 respectively. The first two awards allowed Jiang to become part of Hujihada Iosie Khagekhi
Dang, one of the most prestigious music theater groups in Japan at the time. Jiang began to hover at the center of attention in Asian music, since he was just beginning to turn from an amateur musician to a professional one. In fact, the world-renowned Russian bass singer, Fyodor
Iranovich Chaliapin (1873-1938), upon hearing Jiang sing, asked him, “Are you a vocalist or a composer? ”37 This was an important question to the young Jiang; in 1932, during an independent research project, he mentioned that, as a vocalist, it was not intentional for him to complicate the matters of art into something esoteric. Rather, Jiang wanted art to encompass the
36 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 14-15.
37 Ibid., 17.
28 sensations of a poet and the passions of a composer-to be, yet be subordinate to the greater distresses of life.
In 1933, Jiang shifted his attention permanently toward composition, admitting that, after he had once again won the Japanese National Vocal Competition, that he did not care too much for the French language. Jiang began piano lessons with Tanaka Kikuji and composition lessons with
Hashimoto Kunihiko. Jiang’s primary composition teacher during this time was Kosaku Yamada
(1886-1965), the most famous composer and conductor in Japan. Jiang, however, did not care for
Yamada’s style, so he decided to teach himself. Jiang remarked, “I have tried my best to search for a myriad of compositions, listened to them repetitively, notated what I have heard, and finally, played it for myself.”38 In her memoirs, Yun-Chen Wu, Jiang’s second wife, recalls her husband saying, “I appreciate the instructions of Kosaku Yamada and Alexander Tcherepnin, yet I have learned the compositional techniques on my own, from the scores of the Japanese publishers. I have memorized most of the Classics in order to learn their harmonic progressions. This has expedited the process of learning the compositional techniques of European music.”39
Yung-Kuen Tsau (1927-2006), a well-known Taiwanese music critic of the twentieth century, opines that Ueno Ongaku Gako did not have a great deal of impact on Jiang’s development as a composer. While Tsau studied at Ueno himself in the late 1940s, he became close friends with his teacher Takajou Sigemi, who attended school at Ueno with Jiang, appearing in the same piano and composition classes. According to Sigemi, Jiang was not accustomed to the pedagogical methods given at the lectures, and was not able to come to a full understanding of the basics tenets being taught. Instead, Jiang developed a strong interest in the
38 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 23.
39 Yun-Chen Wu, “Pansui wenye de huiyi [Memories of Wenye],” ed. Ching-Chih Liu, Mintsuyinyue yenhiu [Ethnomusicology Research] 3, (1992): 7.
29 music of Debussy and Bartok, and later discontinued his studies at Ueno Ongaku Gako.
In place of this instruction, Jiang frequented a local café, known as TAD, filled with numerous contemporary artists. There, Jiang immersed himself in the chamber music of Debussy,
Stravinsky, Ravel, and Bartok. In fact, Jiang treated the café as if he was going to class, taking the bus to the café on a daily basis, ordering two cups of coffee, with five cubes of sugar in each, so that he would not finish his coffee too quickly. Once there with his drinks, Jiang opened his scores and listened with an intense fascination.40
In 1934, Jiang agreed to be a part of the hometown visiting mission arranged by Taiwanese politician Chao-Chia Yang (1892-1976). This group consisted of Taiwanese who had studied abroad in Japan, and was established with the support of the Sinmin News. In August of that year, they toured the Taiwanese cities of Taipei, Hsinchu, Chiayi, Changhua, Tainan, and Kaohsiung, holding concerts in all of them, and doing a great deal to lay the foundations for the growth of
Western art music in Taiwan. Once the mission returned to Japan, Jiang made an outline of a new four-movement orchestral work. Jiang’s A Symphonic Sketch of Southern Isles boasted the colorful titles “Prelude in Madrigal Style,” “Fantasy to a White Egret,” “Listening to the Story of a High Mountain Man,” and “The Song in the City.” Jiang held a special place in his heart for the second movement; it was the earliest idea which he had conceived, and it was the one movement where Jiang placed the most effort, completing it last. According to Chih-Yuen Kuo,
“Fantasy to a White Egret” was inspired by the beautiful countryside of Jiang’s native island.
Jiang recorded the compositional process in the journal, writing, “I felt a cascade of poetry flowing within my body, grinding and twisting …and when the idea develops further, it molds
40 Ling-Yi Wu, Taiwan chienpei yingyuechia chunhsiang [The Older Generation of the Taiwanese Musician] (Taipei: Daliu Publications, 1993), 26.
30 into a great emotion that wrings and twists in the body.” 41 In the fall of 1934, Jiang entered
“Fantasy to a White Egret” into the National Japanese Composition Competition, where the piece won second prize. Sadly, this manuscript of what may be among the best of his works has been lost.42
On December 4, 1934, on the strength of his work, Jiang was nominated to become a member of The League for Contemporary Japanese Composers during a special meeting of the
League. Most members of the League did not have a musical background, and therefore were publicly perceived as an opposition group, whose objective was to stem the influence of
Japanese popular music. With Jiang as its newest member, however, original composition took place more frequently, and with the accumulation of more awards for his work, Jiang secured his place as a composer in Japan.43 Also that same year, the Russian composer, Alexander
Tcherepnin (1899-1977) paid a visit to China and Japan in search of Eastern ideas for his music.
Jiang’s meetings with Tcherepnin in Japan turned into miniature composition lessons courtesy of the older composer, and Tcherepnin profoundly influenced Jiang’s compositional philosophy. As a result, Jiang began to write music with even more Western flair, and Tcherepnin began to play, conduct, promote, and publish Jiang’s works in the West.44
In 1936, the young Jiang received international recognition for the first time. At the Summer
Olympics that year in Berlin, Jiang and his orchestral transcription of his piano work Taiwan
Suite received special distinction. In fact, Jiang was the only “Japanese” composer to have received an honor among the five Japanese participants. Shortly after that, Jiang’s Sixteen
41 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 27.
42 Ibid., 28.
43 Ibid., 30.
44 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 18-19.
31 Bagatelles won first prize at the Fourth Venice Music Festival. Jiang’s works began to appear on programs all over Europe and the Americas, and in June of the same year, Tcherepnin invited
Jiang to visit him in Shanghai and Beijing. In their meetings, Tcherepnin stipulated that music should have the inherent folk aspects of one’s nationality, and told Jiang to pay more attention to
Chinese music. When Chih-Yuen Kuo spoke with Jiang in Tokyo in 1943, he asked Jiang why he had chosen to leave Japan to settle in Beijing. Jiang replied, “I had a thirst for Chinese culture, therefore, I had chosen to dwell in Beijing. Beijing is like ‘the Paris of the East.’ It called to me as a composer, but I knew I could perform my works entirely in Tokyo.”45 Of course, Jiang was more than aware of the difficult conditions when it came to making life as a composer in China, for the KMT did not regard composing as an art; rather, they saw it as a hobby undertaken by instructors and their students in their free time. Jiang, however, could not resist China’s rich heritage and what it might mean for his music.
During the period that Jiang studied abroad in Japan, two women played important roles in his life. One was a missionary by the name of Ms. Scott, who taught at the Sunday school in the town of Ueda in Japan; she became Jiang’s patron when Jiang’s father could no longer support him. The other was Nobu Kho, a member of a Japanese aristocratic family who went to high school with Jiang. When the two classmates met later in Japan in their twenties, they fell in love, married in 1933, and had four children.46 When Jiang settled in China in 1937, the Sino-Japanese
War suddenly erupted, and Kho was left in Japan to raise her four children single-handedly. In
1938, Jiang accepted an offer from Beijing Normal College to teach voice and composition; from then on, Jiang settled in Beijing.47 That same year in Beijing, Jiang met and fell in love with one
45 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 132.
46 Kuo, “Chiang Wen-yeh,”16.
32 of his vocal students, Yun-Chen Wu, a Chinese poetry teacher. Together, they enjoyed mutual lessons—Jiang teaching Wu how to sing, and Wu teaching Jiang the classics of Chinese poetry; they married the following year and had five children.48
Inspiration and Persecution
Jiang’s passion for Chinese culture and ancient relics in the late 1930s and early 1940s brought about the peak of his creativity as a composer. Many of his important works were composed, published, and performed in China and Japan during this time, including Music from the Confucian Temple (1939), The Song of the Earth (1940), Hsiang-Fei Memoir (1942), and The
Praise for the Century Myth (1943). In addition to his activities as a composer, Chiang also penned three collections of poetry, expressing his thoughts and reflections on ancient Chinese history.49 In August 1945, the United States brought about the surrender of the Japanese and the end of World War II. Although a civil war loomed with Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists,
Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT took back China and within two months set up an occupying force in Taiwan. Jiang excitedly mailed the full score of his 1939 work Music from the Confucian
Temple to Chiang Kai-Shek, hoping to receive positive attention from the restored KMT government; instead, irked by Jiang’s association with Japan, Chiang sent Jiang to jail for ten months.50 When he was released the following year, Jiang was given employment at the Beijing
Arts School in 1947. In 1946, Jiang wrote The Hymns of Praises I and II for the Catholic Church of Beijing, with Praise I containing both a Mass and a collection of children’s hymns. Jiang
47 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 35-38.
48 Ibid., 39.
49 Ibid., 39-41.
50 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 26.
33 became the first composer to use Chinese melodies in a Roman Catholic Mass, an accomplishment still unique today.51
In 1949, Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communists successfully wrested control of the country from Chiang and the KMT, sending them into exile in Taiwan. A close friend of Jiang’s urged the composer to flee the country and return to his native island of Taiwan, fearing that the
Communists might be even more brutal than the KMT. At the same time, an offer was made for
Jiang to stay in Hong Kong. In the end, however, Jiang elected to stay in Beijing, and in 1950,
Jiang was appointed as a composition professor at Tienjin Central Conservatory of Music, where he enjoyed a fruitful career.52 In 1957, Mao Tse-Tung, fearful of the recent freedom of expression and government criticism, began the Anti-Rightist Movement to purge suspected enemies of the
Communist regime. The Communists denounced many personalities of the literary arts, including Jiang; as a result, Jiang lost his right to a teaching job, performances of his works, and even publishing rights. The government took away all of Jiang’s extant manuscripts, and when they finally decided to return them, many had been lost.53
Without a steady income from teaching or composing, Jiang suffered great financial difficulties. In 1958, he was relegated to the position of arranger of the academic curriculum of the Central Conservatory of Music, and afterwards, the curator of old books in the Conservatory library. In 1961, Jiang took courses and became a medical therapist for Chinese massage therapy.
Through all this, Jiang continued to compose, and under the constant threat of political persecution, Jiang began to miss his native island. To assuage this, Jiang began to arrange a suite of Taiwanese folk songs that he had collected over thirty years. To avoid clashes with the
51Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 26-27.
52 Ibid., 27.
53 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 47-48.
34 Communist authorities, Jiang used a pen name, “Yi-chih Mao,” and wrote that this collection was in honor of his native people.54
In 1966, Jiang’s troubles took a greater turn for the worse. The failure of Mao Tse-Tung’s ambitious economic programs led to unrest in the Communist Party leadership, and Mao heard rumors about his removal as leader of China. To prevent this move, Mao launched the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976), giving Chinese students and his own Red Guards power to persecute intellectuals whom they considered a threat to the state. As a result, Chinese artists and writers experienced brutal torture and cruel humiliation. The dean of the Conservatory, the renowned violinist Ssu-Tsung Ma, and other professors were forced to shave their heads and kneel to pictures of Mao Tse-Tung in front of their students. Once again, the Communists turned on Jiang, raiding his house, and taking away valuable records, books and music scores. Jiang was removed from any and all teaching jobs and was forced to work as a janitor, where he was required to carry a trash bin and clean the bathrooms of the Central Conservatory of Music.55
In 1970, Jiang was banished to Baoding, Hebei Province for labor and reformation work.
Sadly, the aging Jiang was subject to the same hard labor as the young people, which took an irreparable toll on his body. In addition, soon after Jiang’s deportment, his wife Yun-Chen Wu faced horrific treatment at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards. The Guards burst violently into her home, chopped off her hair, and forced her to kneel in front of them. At that point, they tortured her into explaining why there was a “leather holder for a handgun” in front of her husband’s chest in a random photograph, when in reality, the object was simply a holder for a camera.
After the guards left, Wu experienced great emotional anguish; filled with fear and desperation, and without her husband at her side, Wu twice attempted suicide. Later, she fled to Hunan and
54 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 48-49.
55 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 28.
35 took refuge at the house of her second son, Hsiao-Yeh Jiang.56
Death and Rediscovery
In September 1976, upon the death of Mao Tse-Tung, and the prosecution of the “Gang of
Four”—the inside group blamed by China’s new leaders for carrying out Mao’s destructive policies—the Cultural Revolution came to an end. With his fellow artists and intellectuals, Jiang was freed and allowed to return home, and two years later, Jiang’s label as a “Rightist” was wiped away. For Jiang, however, it was too late; the composer was physically, mentally, and emotionally crippled from the hardships of the preceding decade, and his initiative to write music again was met with great frustration. Jiang’s children, having never heard any of their father’s music, received word for the first time from their mother than their father was not a janitor or a traitor, but rather, a musician. Jiang never fully recovered from what he endured at the hands of
Mao’s soldiers, and while the last seven years of his life were peaceful, his health rapidly declined.57
In 1978, after the removal of the label “Rightist,” Jiang attempted to write music for the first time in several years. In May of that year, Jiang completed the first draft for his five-movement symphonic work The Voices of Mountain Ali, referring to a favorite geographical location on his home island of Taiwan. The onset of a sudden stroke, however, landed Jiang in the hospital, and a medical error caused severe internal bleeding in his stomach and the bloating of his lungs. His body succumbed to paralysis, prohibiting Jiang from ever setting another note to paper; for the last five years of his life, Jiang was bound to a wheelchair and in 1983, he passed away.58 Two
56 Kuo, “Chiang Wen-yeh,” 27-28.
57 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 52.
36 years before his death, however, Jiang began to experience a rediscovery by Chinese scholars.
Led by Chi-Jen Chang, a professor at Soochow University in Taiwan, and today one of the foremost scholars on Jiang’s life and works, this project saved Jiang from the dustbin of history.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Chang assisted Alexander Tcherepnin’s widow in the organization of her late husband’s portfolios and works. Here, he chanced upon Jiang and his some of his music; fascinated by his finding, Chang began to promote Jiang and his works. Chang’s efforts sparked a renewed interest from Chinese academia, and in the past twenty years, Jiang’s music has been performed with increasing frequency. In the early 1990s, a renaissance of Jiang’s music took place in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Beijing, including concerts, seminars, and recoding sessions that produced multiple discs of his music. In June 1992, Feng-Song Liu, the dean of
Cultural Center of Taipei County, Taiwan, succeeded in publishing multiple scores, literature, and digital CD recordings, all in memory of Wen-Ye Jiang. Even the Chinese Communist government, while still holding rigid control over the people of China, has softened their stance toward a formerly persecuted artist and intellectual.59
To some people, Jiang is a tragic figure, an artist whose life, family, and work suffered cruelly and mercilessly at the hands of an evil government. To others, Jiang is a person of controversy; in the same vein as the twentieth-century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich,
Jiang attempted at times to please the government and avoid persecution. Some believe he failed in terms of his legacy, leaving the question open as to whether Jiang’s art was produced from within or from threatening external sources. Dr. Chang, however, believes such talk does a great disservice to Jiang’s prodigious contribution to Asian music. To Jiang’s critics, Chang says, “It is
58 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 56.
59 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 29-30.
37 better to discuss Jiang as a composer than to speak of him in terms of political controversy.”60
60 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 11.
38 III. The Piano Music of Wen-Ye Jiang
Three Dances, Opus 7
Jiang’s oeuvre stretches across a wide variety of genres, including orchestral music, opera,
chamber music, vocal works, and solo piano pieces. Early in his compositional career, Jiang
devoted his creative energy to the orchestra, and by the age of twenty-eight, he had penned ten
orchestral pieces. During the next twenty years, however, Jiang turned to smaller forms—
mostly small vocal works and piano pieces. Jiang was especially prolific with his music for
keyboard—from 1938 to 1953, his works for piano occupied almost a quarter of his entire
oeuvre. As a result, Jiang’s contributions to the piano literature are as significant as his
contributions to the orchestral repertoire, and like his orchestral music, Jiang’s compositional
method in his piano works owes much to the leading composers of modernism in Western
music—Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky. The political circumstances of the time, though, as
well as Jiang’s tragic life, have made a comprehensive catalogue of his works difficult for
scholars; even now, there is no reliable listing of Jiang’s works and their dates of composition.61
For example, Jiang’s early solo piano piece, the Three Dances, opus 7, sparks disagreement
among various editions, which cannot agree whether the date of completion is 1935 or 1936.
Jiang’s music draws heavily on nationalistic elements; Jiang’s nationalist style, however, depends on the time and place of his home during the date of composition. To begin with, Jiang spent his childhood and young adulthood in (awkward) the Japanese culture; he was born in
Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, he went to Japanese schools in China, and he spoke fluent Japanese. As a result, many of Jiang’s first compositions borrow from Japanese tradition.
For example, many of Jiang’s early works make use of the Miyakobushi scale, a pentatonic scale
61 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 11-12.
39 that resembles the Western minor scale, but without the fourth and seventh scale degrees. The intervallic construction of the Miyakobushi scale, which can be represented on the white keys of the piano as A-B-C-E-F, gives the music a noticeably melancholic character.62 In addition,
Alexander Tcherepnin advised Jiang not to be content to copy Western composers; instead, the
Russian master encouraged Jiang to look to the music of his native region. In 1936, Tcherepnin invited Jiang to visit China, where Chinese art and culture made an enormous impression on the young composer.63
After Jiang settled in China in the 1930s, his music took on a more Chinese flavor, especially with regard to the Chinese pentatonic scale. In contrast to the Miyakobushi scale of
Japan, the Chinese pentatonic scale resembles a Western major scale, but again, without the fourth and seventh scale degrees. The intervallic construction, which can be represented as C-D-
E-G-A, evokes a brighter countenance than the Miyakobushi scale. Accordingly, Jiang found that
Western functional harmony no longer fit his aesthetic goals; in place of triads, Jiang employed chords with the intervallic content most often found in folk music, such as the second, the fourth, and the fifth. Jiang loved to be outdoors, and he was very much inspired by natural landscapes; as a result, his textures have a more linear focus, particularly with clear and simple two-voice writing. Thus, even Jiang’s original melodies have little in common with Taiwanese music; rather, most of them are sparked by the beauty of his home country at the time.
Although Jiang held a lifelong passion for the arts, he was never a scholar or a theorist. In the midst of his compositional process, Jiang never employed a great deal of what he calls
“formal techniques.”64 While he was influenced by Western composers, Jiang ultimately
62 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 64.
63 Ibid., 30-31.
40 preferred creativity over accepted models—according to Jiang, “If the music cannot speak to my poor instinct, what is the use of getting acquainted with its history and theory?”65 Still, when he was not writing music, Jiang immersed himself in painting, sculpture, literature, philosophy, and science. He also wrote stories and poetry, learned medicine, and studied foreign languages. All of these outside interests had an enormous impact on his music. Suffice to say,
Jiang’s approach to his works was always artistic first, and technical and theoretical second.
Jiang’s method was assisted greatly by the work of the late Romantic European composers, as well as the modernist movement sweeping Western music at the dawn of his career. For example, in his music, Jiang uses colorful chords not to fulfill harmonic progressions, but to thicken the dynamics or the rhythm. Similarly, Jiang’s employment of polyrhythm, polymeter, and hemiola are not so much out of necessity, but out of curiosity and interest. Like
Brahms, Jiang often writes a 4/4 pattern in 3/4 time, and like Stravinsky, sets a number of voices to different rhythmic patterns. Although Jiang clearly marks changes of articulation and dynamics in his music, he does not mark crescendo and decrescendo, as the Romantics had done; rather, Jiang borrows from Stravinsky, and writes the dynamic changes into the texture with increases and decreases of stratification.
Like many Romantic and modernist composers, Jiang’s passion for literature and nature flowed out of him in the form of program music. Many of Jiang’s works focus on a specific subject and boast colorful titles, and outside of composition, Jiang wrote poetry, music critiques, program notes, and essays on musical aesthetics. Toward this end, once Jiang had settled in
China and was entering the mature period of his career, he endeavored to imitate traditional
Chinese music. Jiang researched native Chinese instruments and their notation, and the sonorities
64 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 149.
65 Chang, Jiang Wen-Ye, 72-73.
41 of these instruments inspired him to reproduce their effects on the piano. In fact, Jiang’s Piano
Sonata No. 3 is notable for its attempt to intone the sounds of the pipa, an ancient Chinese plucked string instrument.
Example 1. Jiang: Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 39, Mvt. I, mm.1-2.
Jiang’s manipulation of color, harmony, rhythm and texture, as well as his passion for
Chinese folk instruments, scarcely has a greater example than in his early solo piano work, the
Three Dances, opus 7. From a harmonic standpoint, the Three Dances is in a large scale A-B-A ternary form whose harmonic plan gives a nod to Bartok; the first and third movements are built with a C scale, and the inner movement journeys a tri-tone away to a G-flat scale. While a tonal center can be heard in each of the three movements, however, the usual Western major or minor modes are not present. Instead, Jiang prefers the pentatonic flavor of Eastern music, manipulating them with chromatic pitches throughout the work.
The first dance, “Allegro ritmico,” possesses a clear A-B-A ternary form with a coda.
Section A journeys from measures 1-15 in 3/2 time; Section B consists of measures 16-56 in 3/4 time with a slowing in tempo and a hemiola effect in the smaller rhythmic units—a (4+4) pattern against the large 3/4 time signature; and the Section A reprise occupies measures 57-68 in 3/2 time again. Although Jiang does not develop the theme of the A section in the B section, the B section borrows certain notes and phrases from the A section. Jiang disguises this little secret through a change in texture—the outer A sections use two-voice harmony, while the inner B
42 section expands to three-voice harmony, even four-voice harmony in measure 37.
Throughout the first dance, Jiang employs the entire keyboard, exploring every register and showcasing a great deal of timbre. Near the middle of the piece, in measure 37, where Jiang uses four-voice harmony in the inner B section, the pianist must play both the highest and the lowest note on the piano. Such sonorities are not strange to Jiang, who sounds many quartal and quintal chords in the piece, especially in the inner B section, where main theme is built upon them.
The first dance also relies upon the pentatonic scale built on C—C-D-E-G-A—but Jiang often wanders through a fair amount of accidentals. For example, in measure five, at the end of the first statement of the theme, Jiang’s placement of an E-flat and F-sharp renders the folk-like melody suddenly dissonant. From a rhythmic standpoint, Jiang offers both a large-scale and small-scale picture. Although Jiang places the first dance in the 3/2 time signature for performing fluency, many of the measures can be divided into smaller note groups. In fact, a few measures have so-called “stitched” measure lines to indicate three groups of four-note units. In these measures, the right hand plays the melody, whose phrase structure consists of nine units (3+4+2), while the left hand repeats a pattern of three small units (3+3+3). As a result, with only two voices, Jiang creates an unusually complex poly-metric effect.
Example 2. Jiang: Three Dances, Op. 7, Mvt. I, mm. 3-5.
43 In the second dance, “Allegro scherzando,” Jiang displays his talent for variation. At each appearance and reappearance of the theme, changes are made in the melody, mode, meter, articulation, texture, accent, and accompaniment. In contrast to the C pentatonic melody in the first dance, Jiang—perhaps borrowing an idea from Bartok—modulates a tri-tone away, employing a G-flat pentatonic scale as the melody—G-flat-A-flat-B-flat-D-flat-E-flat. In the first four measures of the second dance, Jiang writes a steady ostinato to set up the 3/4 meter, and, through stratification, builds an increase in the dynamics.
Example 3. Jiang: Three Dances, Op. 7, Mvt. II, mm.1-9.
The use of ostinato is vitally important in the second dance, as Jiang relies on it as a means of common-tone modulation, especially when he chooses to journey to remote keys, as in his shift from a D-flat pentatonic scale to an A-pentatonic scale. The principal theme of the second dance is a study in rhythmic disorientation—the melody begins in a 3/4 time, but shifts to an irregular 1/4 meter, then a duple 2/4 meter, and then back to the familiar triple 3/4 meter. This alternation in time signature creates both metric instability and melodic flexibility, but throughout its course, Jiang preserves the structure of the theme, changing the meter to the
44 melody, not the other way around.
Example 4. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. II, mm.14-27.
The third dance, “Allegro moderato,” returns from the tri-tone journey of the second dance, reverting to the C pentatonic scale of the first dance, but contains perhaps the most unusual and innovative ideas in the entire piece. Early in the third dance, Jiang reverses the traditional roles of the hands, placing an intense arpeggiated accompaniment in the right hand, while the left hand plays the melody.
45 Example 5. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. III, mm.1-4.
The third dance also employs more Eastern folk-like material than the previous two dances, recalling the sounds of traditional Chinese instruments on the piano. In measure 26, for example, marked fiero a capriccio, Jiang imitates the sound of the pipa in the highest register of the right hand while the left hand imitates the Chinese gong in a very low register.
Example 6. Jiang: Three Dances, Op.7, Mvt. III, mm.25-29.
46 Sonatina for Piano, Opus 31
Jiang’s Sonatina for Piano, opus 31, is one of the composer’s most representative pieces in that few other of his keyboard works reflect the multitude of different influences on the composer in his early career. Written in 1940, but never published, the Sonatina exists only in manuscript, and is one of Jiang’s few piano pieces without a colorful or programmatic title.
Unlike other examples of the sonatina genre, whose small form necessitates only two to three movements, Jiang’s Sonatina boasts a grand total of four movements. Throughout the course of the work, Jiang borrows ideas from late Romantic Western music, early modernist Western music, and traditional Chinese folk music.
The first movement of the Sonatina is set as an Introduction-Allegro, featuring a long prelude section in free form, followed by a sonata form without a development; the three themes in the exposition come back in the recapitulation, and the material in the introduction is subsequently used to form part of the coda. The second movement, an Andante, is one of Jiang’s most thematically economical pieces, as the entire movement lasts only twenty-seven measures.
The third movement, an Allegretto Scherzo, is a traditional high-energy Western dance in 3/4 time, and the fourth movement, an Allegro Vivo, is a quick, jostling dance that brings to a work to a satisfying conclusion.
Throughout the Sonatina, Jiang employs Western form and thematic structure, but creates a distant, otherworldly atmosphere permeated by traditional Chinese music. For example, the first theme of the first movement is a standard three-note motive, somewhat evocative of Chinese music; the thematic sentence, however, is built with three phrases —two short phrases followed by one long phrase. When taken together, the thematic sentence is a standard Western (4+4)
47 structure (mm 16-23).
Example 7: Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.14-19.
In addition, Jiang’s ever-increasing fascination with traditional Chinese instruments is evident from the very first measures of the first movement. Here, in the free-form introduction,
Jiang calls to mind the articulation of the pipa with the continuous repetition of the notes D-G-E.
(mm 1-5).
Example 8: Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.1-5.
48 Later, in the second movement (mm.7-12), Jiang imitates the string plucking of the
Chinese zither, marking arrows to indicate of the direction of the rolling of the broken chords.
The skillful alternation of these gestures approximate the unusual glissandos played by folk musicians on the Chinese zither.
Example 9. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. II, mm.1-12.
In accordance with Jiang’s early style, the Sonatina cannot escape the influence of
Western modernist composers. In the first of many bold modulations, Jiang takes the opening C pentatonic scale of the first movement and switches abruptly a dissonant minor second upward to a D-flat pentatonic scale without the use of a pivot chord
(mm. 37-38).
Example 10. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. I, mm.37-41.
49 Furthermore, the first movement is rife with spontaneous meter changes, jumping from
4/4 to 5/4 to 6/4 to 2/2 and even 1/2 time. Not to be outdone, the second movement features an unusually subtle hemiola which gives an uneasy brooding to the meditative slow music.
Although the movement is in standard 4/4 time, the right hand plays groups of the pattern
(3+2+2+3+2), forming a three-measure sentence against the four-beat accompaniment pattern in the left hand.
Example 11. Jiang: Sonatina for Piano, Op. 31, Mvt. II, mm.1-6.
50 IV. Chih-Yuen Kuo: Taiwan’s Rose
Family and Childhood
Chih-Yuen Kuo was born in the village of Yuen-Li in the Miao-Li district of the province of
Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, on December 5, 1921; currently, he lives in a sixty-year-old house near the train station of Yuen-Li. Situated in the northwest part of the island, but southwest of Taipei, the capital and largest city of Taiwan, Yuen-Li covers roughly 70 square miles at the southwestern tip of present-day Miao-Li County. Yuen-Li was originally populated by the native people, namely the Ping-Pu, whom the Dutch had named as the “Formosans.” Other tribes in this area of the island include the Daukas, and the Wuwanlishe, from whom the village fashioned its first name, “Wanli;” this name eventually became “Yuen-Li.”
Kuo is the fourth generation amongst his family to be living in Taiwan. His great grandfather, Yan Kuo, migrated from the Taushan province of China to Taiwan in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yan Kuo’s grandson, Wan-Tzuei Kuo (1899-1941), is Chih-Yuen Kuo’s father; despite his short life, Wan-Tzuei Kuo established himself very successfully in the financial industry of the island. Wan-Tzuei began his career at the Shinkau Bank of Taipei City, the predecessor of today’s well-known First Bank; he then worked as an accountant at the township office of Yuen-Li, and later as the general manager of the Farmer’s Association in
Yuen-Li. Wan-Tzuei Kuo’s shrewd financial management, combined with his knowledge of agricultural technology and its growing demand, enabled him to accumulate a large amount of wealth. As a result, Wan-Tzuei Kuo and his wife, Tzai-Hsia Chen (1901-1977), enjoyed a comfortable life, raising three boys and two girls; Chih-Yuen was the oldest amongst them.
The young Tzai-Hsia gave birth to Chih-Yuen at her great aunt’s house, and subsequently,
Tzai-Hsia’s great aunt felt a strong affinity for her great-great nephew, regarding the infant Chih-
51 Yuen as one of her own. Due to his family’s affluence, the young Chih-Yuen was able to pursue his dreams in music freely, and without the burden of financial matters. In his prologue to
Symphony in A From Tangshang to Taiwan, Kuo explains that “Since I had first started composing for string instruments, I had a dream that one day I would want to compose a symphony to thank my ancestors, especially Kuo Yan, who built a great economic foundation for the family, and my father, who helped the family business flourish….”66
Both sides of Kuo’s family exerted great influence in guiding him into music, and Kuo’s father, in particular, harbored a great passion for the arts. Wan-Tzuei collected traditional
Chinese paintings and antiques, and when Kuo was six-years-old, the family purchased a violin, a rare event at that time. Wan-Tzuei learned the violin in his spare time and the young Chih-Yuen grew up hearing his father play Japanese popular songs. Still, Kuo was closer to his maternal relatives; there were fewer family members on his father’s side, and more cousins on his mother’s side were closer to Kuo’s age. Tzai-Hsia’s brother, Nan-Yuen Chen—Kuo’s uncle—was a doctor who loved Classical music. Nan-Yuen constantly experimented with acoustic equipment and would always lend a hand to friends who needed advice on how to assemble and design their own equipment. Kuo’s older cousin, Chin-Shan Kuo, the eldest son of his great aunt, taught at
Yuen-Li Elementary School, and made frequent trips to Taipei. Chin-Shan brought back from
Taipei a phonograph, records, and music scores, featuring Taiwanese opera and Japanese folk songs; the Japanese nursery tunes, in particular, influenced Kuo immensely.67
The young Kuo also had a very special relationship with the Matsu temple in Yuen-Li.
The temple not only provided a center for the faithful, but also a venue for outdoor activities for children and entertainment for adults. Upon the arrival of special holidays, especially the
66 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 86.
67 Ibid., 89.
52 birthday of Matsu—which is on the twenty-third of the third month of the lunar calendar—and when the Chinese pay respect to the spirit of the dead—which is in the seventh month of the lunar calendar—the temple would always feature musical performances to celebrate the event.
This traditional folk music later became a large part of Kuo’s compositional material.68
During the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in the early twentieth century, Japanese and
Taiwanese children would attend different schools. The Japanese children would attend junior high schools, and the Taiwanese children would attend public schools. In 1928, Kuo began school at the Yuen-Li Public School; his homeroom teacher was his father’s former classmate, and would constantly pay visits to the Kuo residence during the evenings for idle conversation or playing the violin with Kuo’s father. Even now, Kuo still has a strong impression of the folk tunes that his homeroom teacher brought into his house. In 1930, when Kuo was a third-grader, the town of Yuen-Li built a movie theater and began showing silent films from the West, Japan, and Shanghai.69 Although Kuo’s favorite movies were Charlie Chaplin comedies, the most popular films were products of Shanghai. Because there was not yet a soundtrack to the movies shown in Yuen-Li, the movie theater would employ narrators—known as bianshi—to assist the audience to understanding the plot, and to holler out advertisements and ask for information on missing people in and around the theater. In addition, a small wind band—consisting of clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and drums—would provide the background music. This music drew from a number of diverse sources, from Japanese popular tunes to Cantonese music, to western popular music; all of it became an important become part of Kuo’s childhood musical experience.
In particular, Kuo had a soft spot for the Shanghai Chiaochia play—also known as Gao
68 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 16.
69 Ibid., 16-18.
53 Chiahsi—because he loved the melancholy melodies.70
In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, public school policy in Taiwan began to dictate the teaching of Japanese patriotic songs. Still, Kuo continued to receive exposure to a great variety of music. In 1932, one of Kuo’s teachers, Chang-Rei Chen made it a habit of playing many well-known Western Classical pieces to the class; Kuo found himself drawn to programmatic works, especially those that depicted nature. Chen also taught the class choral singing, and instructed six students in the playing of the harmonica, the most popular instrument in Taiwan. Kuo proved so talented, that at the end of the year, during the school festival, Chen asked Kuo to perform and sing. This event would have a profound impact on Kuo’s life, but curiously, Kuo’s accomplishments and contributions to harmonica playing have not found a place in official Western documentation. Even so, Chang-Rei Chen was most likely Kuo’s first important mentor in music.71
As Japan expanded its military might in East Asia, Japanese films and popular music spread to Taiwan. In the 1920s, Japan’s Columbia Records set up a branch in Taiwan to introduce
Japanese popular music. In 1932, in order to promote the film Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of
Blood, Columbia Records asked for native Taiwanese composers to score it. The result of this endeavor was the birth of the Taiwanese popular song, setting off a trend that swept the island.
The Taiwanese popular song became known as a piece composed with a “Seven-Word Tune” in a ballade-like style. Taken together, Taiwanese popular songs, sound track music, and traditional folk music all had a strong impact on Kuo’s composition style. In 1934, after graduating from elementary school, Kuo, by the way of entrance exams, was accepted at Changjung Middle
School in the city of Tainan. Established by English Presbyterians in 1885, Changjung was the
70 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 93-94.
71 Ibid., 94.
54 first middle school in Taiwan. As a Western school, Changjung boasted a more liberal philosophy than that of Japanese schools; as such, they placed a great emphasis on music education. Kuo became increasingly familiar with Western religious music at Changjung, and he never missed a single concert. In addition, Changjung offered a number of performing ensembles, including ordinary wind bands, and even harmonica bands.72
Although Kuo experienced a variety of diverse musical experiences during his childhood,
Kuo later said that it was the harmonica that convinced him to pursue music as a way of life.
Despite relative stability under Japanese occupation, the Taiwanese economy was weak, and much of the country subsisted on low income. The violin was considered an expensive instrument, and most average people could not afford one; as a result, the harmonica became the instrument of choice. Tainan’s instrument store did great business in selling different types of harmonicas and music scores for harmonica playing. In time, the harmonica’s popularity reached the upper income families as well, and more expensive brands were offered and sold. During
Kuo’s middle school years, the school invited the Japanese harmonica player Sato Suerou to perform, who impressed the audience with his unique minor-scale harmonica. Kuo’s harmonica instructor, Yue-Na Gau (1917-1948), also exerted a strong influence on Kuo. Gau studied abroad in Japan’s Tokyo Arts University, majoring in organ and composition; upon returning to Taiwan, he taught at Taipei Municipal First Girls’ High School, where he continued composing, even writing the school anthem. At the age of thirty-one, Gau passed away due to a sudden illness, and
Kuo grieved the loss of one of most dearly beloved mentors.73
72 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 94-95.
73 Ibid., 95-96.
55 Study in Japan
After a year at Changjung, Kuo’s father wanted his son to study abroad in Japan, which was prestigious in the eyes of the Taiwan’s Ministry of Education; in addition, Kuo’s father hoped that his son would follow in the footsteps of his six uncles, all of whom went into the medical field. In July of 1936, Kuo took a ship to Tokyo with his third uncle, who was then studying in Japan. He matriculated at Kanda Kinjo Senior High School, where his music instructor, Fukushima Tsuneo, gave him his first theory lessons. Kuo’s Japanese classmates teased him that he played the harmonica, and asked how the harmonica could be an instrument when he could not even play a minor triad properly. Motivated by the snide comments of his peers, Kuo decided to construct his own minor-scale harmonica. Kuo studied harmonica performance and basic tonal harmony with Tsuneo, and in less than a year, Kuo became the school’s principal player in the harmonica band. Due to the short list of repertoire available to the harmonica, many pieces needed to be arranged from other existing pieces; Kuo’s constant arranging helped him develop an early skill for composition. In 1938, Kuo entered the Tokyo
Harmonica Competition, placing third, and by 1940, Kuo owned twelve harmonicas, including one that could play in major scales and ones that could play in minor scales.
Kuo became so proficient on the harmonica that, at one concert, with nine different harmonicas, he performed his arrangement of the violin showpiece Gypsy Airs by the Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate.74 After Kuo’s sensational performance, Tsuneo encouraged
Kuo to not just restrict himself to playing pieces that he had arranged, but to write original pieces for himself. As a result, Kuo started using the harmonica to compose, penning pieces for practicing like Sonatina for Harmonica and Scherzo. After graduation, Kuo joined Tsuneo’s
74 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 106.
56 harmonica choir and performed widely around the country, including national broadcasts on the
NHK Radio Station. Still, Kuo understood the limits of the harmonica, and in 1939, he began to take violin lessons from Shimizu Akichika, the principal violinist of the NHK Symphony
Orchestra. He also began to collect a great deal of records that contained violin repertoire, and began studying how to write properly for the violin.
In 1941, over the protestations of his parents who thought that he should enter the medical field, Kuo decided to take the entrance exam for Tokyo Music School, majoring in violin. After entering the School, however, Kuo discovered that a genetic disability in the pinky finger of his left hand made it difficult to press the strings when needed; Kuo’s teachers informed him that while he would always be able to play the instrument on an amateur level, a career as a professional player was unlikely. In the meantime, wartime Japan, especially in Tokyo, surrounded Kuo with a surge of nationalistic music; in response, Kuo found solace in the music of Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Kuo also developed a strong interest in music that was contemporary and had folk flair, and began to take composition lesson from Sugehala Akila.
In the summer of 1941, Kuo returned to Taiwan to visit his family and shared his musical experiences in Japan with his father. Upon arriving in Japan for another year of study, Kuo received news that his father was on his deathbed, and he quickly returned to Taiwan. Shortly afterwards, Wen-Tzai Kuo passed away at the age of forty-two.75
In December 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into
World War II, and the fresh wartime fervor forced Kuo to terminate his studies temporarily and stay in Taiwan. The next year, in 1942, he returned to Japan to continue his studies. This time, however, with the encouragement of his great uncle, Kuo returned to major in composition. In
April, he enrolled at Tokyo University, studying tonal harmony and counterpoint with theorists
75 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 37-38.
57 Sugehala Meirou, an expert in Western music, and Tomotsudu Ikeuchi, who had studied in
France. Sadly, the war prevented student composers from seeing their works performed; the school spent a great deal of time conducting martial training or hard labor services, and musical activities rarely occurred. In addition, Kuo did not have the ability to purchase a piano; consequently, he was unable to practice effectively his theoretical studies. Fortunately, there were two cafés near the school that regularly played Western art music, and they both became important sources of learning for Kuo. Kuo also began to teach himself; during times of school closure, he would go to the bookstores and record stores to buy musical journals, records, and scores. Due to war propaganda, Japan banned the performances of English and American music, promoting in their places Japanese contemporary music. For this reason, Kuo, as he mentions in his autobiography, became “a servant to contemporary music.”76
During his stay in wartime Japan, Kuo came to admire the music of Japanese composers
Ihuku Beakira and Hayasaka Fumio, but due to an array of circumstances, Kuo was never able to meet them. Curiously, an up-and-coming Taiwanese expatriate named Wen-Ye Jiang did make time for Kuo, and subsequently became one of the young composer’s greatest influences.
Although Jiang worked and resided in Beijing, he often returned to Tokyo to visit his first wife and gave Kuo opportunities to visit and speak with him. Kuo repeatedly asked Jiang for compositional advice, but Jiang was more interested in talking about European arts and letters. In his meetings with Kuo, Jiang discussed the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the poems of
Charles Pierre Baudelarie, Paul Valery, Stephane Mallarme, and paintings of Marc Chagall and
Paul Gauguin.
In addition, Jiang opined that Western music had reached a bottleneck; if many Western composers felt that they had exhausted their own ideologies, then the Eastern composers who
76 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 42.
58 endeavored to imitate them would eventually share in this crisis. In this vein, Jiang encouraged
Kuo to search within his own ethnicity to create music that belonged to his own people.77
Wen-Chung Chou, a student of the avant-garde French composer Edgard Varése at the time said,
“Asians do have a choice. They can join the globalization process and become assimilated.
Or, they may be partners who have a cultural capital of their own to contribute, so they do not lose their own identity and will be able to assimilate to influence the outcome of the change.”78
Jiang’s words had a great effect on Kuo’s thinking. Kuo turned to his studies at Tokyo University and made friends with a group of Chinese and Taiwanese expatriates who began to share his artistic interests. The first personality Kuo met was Lien-Shan Chien, who ignited Kuo’s passion for literature, and prompted Kuo, in his spare time, to head to the bookstore. Through Chien
Lien-Shan, he made three important friends— Kuo-Min Li, a poet and a student in dentistry,
Huan-Yao Huang, a painter and student in the dentistry professional school, and Yi-Chuan Chan, a music student like Kuo himself. The five called themselves the Lu-Wen Group and met on a weekly basis for musical discussion. Chan later returned to Taiwan with Kuo and collaborated with him on the opera Hsu-Hsien and Pai-Nienm, and the song cycle, The Red Rose.79
In 1944, the war turned against the Japan; desperate for soldiers, the Japanese government began to force Taiwanese students studying in Japan to serve in the military. Kuo, who had no interest in fighting, chose to terminate his studies and return to Taiwan with his close friend Lien-Shan Chien, a decision that took Kuo on a long journey. Upon leaving Tokyo,
Kuo and Chien first resided in Kobe until a Taiwanese boat arrived. When the route from Japan
77 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 130.
78 Wen-Chung Chou, Wenren and Culture: Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 220.
79 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe 116-117.
59 to Taiwan proved too dangerous, Kuo and Chien searched for refuge in Kumamoto. At that time, many Taiwanese studied abroad in Kumamoto, and fellow student Kuo-Min Li had retreated to that city as well. Cut off from his family and sole means of financial support, Kuo, along with
Chien, did some short-term labor at the military site and afterwards at the charcoal office.
Together, they resided in Kumamoto for a year, and as the war worsened, Kuo searched for refuge further northeast.80
In 1945, Kuo arrived at the outskirts of the city of Yamagata and stayed with colleague
Huan-Yao Huang. The suburbs of Yamagata, however, were very conservative, a mindset highlighted by the war, and they showed strong prejudice against foreigners. Fortunately, a group of acrobats from Tokyo were actively recruiting musicians for their performances, and Kuo’s extraordinary ability on the harmonica won them over. During their tour, Kuo even stayed with the president of the group, Takuchi Kenzou. In August, the United States brought about the surrender of the Japanese government, and in October, Chiang Kai-Shek and his KMT forces entered Taiwan and expelled the defeated Japanese. Kuo returned to Kumamoto and celebrated a joyous reunion with his friends.81
Postwar Taiwan
One year later, in October 1946, Kuo finally returned to Taiwan, taking the ship from
Kyushu of Japan to Kee-Lung Harbor of Taiwan. Upon seeing the Japanese soldiers boarding the ship at the dock, and the Chinese soldiers arriving in an unseemly manner, dressed poorly, without the air of a soldier, Kuo had a nervous thought, which he later expressed in his autobiography: “Those of us that had received Japanese education had suddenly become
80 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 118-119.
81 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 60.
60 strangers to this place…we have a rocky start ahead of us.”82 Taiwan had a rocky start as well; the long-term effects of the war and the subsequent martial-law rule of the KMT deprived the country of artistic events, turning it into a cultural desert. There was an extraordinarily small number of composers, and almost no one was composing contemporary music. In addition, while not always at the surface, a rivalry between Chinese KMT musicians and native Taiwanese musicians began to fester. Kuo felt lonely and lost, and cursed the fact that war and politics were standing in the way of what he, as an artist, felt he needed to do. Nevertheless, the founding of a national symphony orchestra in Taipei gave Kuo encouragement and hope.
Kuo went to great lengths to meet two native Taiwanese composers who proved of pivotal importance to his postwar development—Su-Chih Chen (1911-1999) and Chuan-Shen Lu
(b. 1916), the leading music educators of their day. Chen had studied abroad in Japan and
Canada, served as a missionary at the Taipei Presbyterian church and principal at the Tan-Chiang
Senior High School, and was later ordained as a minister. His compositions included works for solo piano and a great deal of sacred music. Kuo constantly brought his own works to Chen for advice, and while Chen was a missionary in Taipei, he regularly invited Kuo to Shi-Lin
Presbyterian Church to play the harmonica. In addition, Chen recommended Kuo for a performance on a concert directed by the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC).83
Lu, however, was a lot like Kuo; Lu studied in Japan and changed his major to composition when an inherent disability in his hand forced him to abandon his plans to become a professional pianist. In his works, Lu preferred choral and Taiwanese folk music, a passion that
Kuo began to share as well. But the seemingly small stature of the harmonica among serious musicians frustrated Kuo, and Lu had to constantly encourage Kuo to keep playing the
82 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 57.
83 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 134-136.
61 harmonica. Similarly, While hosting a program at a radio broadcasting program, Lu remarked,
“If one sees the harmonica as a toy, he would be completely wrong. This tiny instrument has much artistic value to it. If one is suspicious, then you must hear the harmonica player Kuo, who lures his listeners into his music, arouses the passion for music within his listener…”84 Through the BCC broadcasts, the reputation of Kuo’s playing spread, and BCC began to make recordings of Kuo’s playing. Kuo then was invited to perform regularly live, on air, at the radio station.
In addition to performing on the harmonica, Kuo and his cousin Feng-Chi Dai and his uncle Nan-Tu Chen gathered some war veterans, who had stayed in Yuan-Li since the Japanese colonial period, and established the Taiwan Shin-Chu Uan-Li Band, or “TSU Band.” In 1950,
Miao-Li separated from the Hsin-Chu province and became a fully independent county. As a result, this small ensemble became Miao-Li’s first Western music ensemble. Because some of its members were unfamiliar with Western musical notation, Kuo assumed the duties as chief composer and arranger of the group, and took the time to rearrange scores and transfer the
Western notation into Taiwanese numerical notation. Due to the lack of public entertainment in the economically lean postwar period, the TSU Band was welcomed everywhere they toured on the island. Despite their simple wish to play good music for their fellow Taiwanese, however,
Kuo and the TSU Band could not always escape a pressing rivalry with Chinese expatriate musicians.85
In his autobiography, Kuo recalls that, at one particular venue, the TSU Band had been asked to leave by an incoming Chinese harmonica band led by Ching-Hsun Wang of the
Chunghua Harmonica Association. Wang prided himself on his brave establishment of the
Chunghua Harmonica Association while he was in Shanghai during the war with Japan, earning
84 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 136-137.
85 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 61.
62 the title “Chinese Father of the Harmonica.” With the KMT now in control of Taiwan, Wang established a branch of the association in Taiwan in 1950, and permanently settled on the island in 1952. Kuo speculates that the TSU Band’s increasingly fine reputation, along with the advertisement “Japanese professional harmonica player Kuo performs,” considerably irritated
Wang. Nevertheless, the TSU Band continued to play, and the disgruntled Harmonica
Association proved to be a noisy and disruptive audience. At one point, Wang requested a performance contest between Kuo and the members of the Harmonica Association. Kuo agreed, and after the members of the Chinese Harmonica Association had played, Kuo blew away the audience with an exciting performance of Rossini’s Overture to the opera William Tell and an arrangement of the popular Japanese folk song The Moon of the Dead City. As the audience roared with applause, the members of the Chinese Harmonica Association silently left.86
In 1947, Kuo married one of his maternal cousins Hsiu-Chu Tang (1922-1995). Together,
Kuo and Tang shared a special connection with music; like Kuo, Tang studied music in Japan, majoring in piano. Although Kuo wished to compose for a living, Kuo and Tang’s family grew quickly with five sons and a daughter, and to support his wife and children, Kuo sought steady employment. In 1949, Kuo was hired as a music teacher at the Taiwan Provincial Hsinchu
Normal School, where he directed the harmonica band and wind band. Kuo, however, felt uncomfortable speaking in Mandarin as decreed by the KMT, and with a yearning for more time to compose, he quit the job a year later. Afterward, Kuo no longer held any full-time teaching jobs at any institution, appearing only part-time as a lecturer and a harmonica instructor at Yuan-
Li Junior High School and Chu-Nan Junior High School between 1954 and 1956.
In the 1950s, with a need for money, Kuo shifted his priorities from serious composition to popular music and film scores. Although he still wrote serious Western art music, he spent most
86 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 139.
63 of his energy penning light music for small ensembles, and on the side, he found time to establish the Hsin-Chu Yuan-Li Harmonica Band.87 In 1950, he entered a composition competition, and a received a high distinction for his piano work The Jasmine Flower, and his choral work The Fisherman. In 1951, he placed second for his piano work Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and his choral work The End of Spring. In 1952, Chuan-Sheng Lu founded Taiwan’s first musical monthly journal, which published newly-composed folksongs. Kuo submitted many of his pieces, including what would become one of his best known, the song cycle The Red Rose.
The lyrics of the work were written in Taiwanese by his close friend from his days in wartime
Japan, Yi-Chuan Chan, who became fascinated with a red rose while paying a visit to Kuo in his garden. After a successful recording, The Red Rose became very popular in Taiwan, especially for pedagogical purposes. Fearful of retribution from the KMT government, however, Kuo asked that the lyrics be translated and printed in Mandarin, and in 1971, he arranged The Red Rose as a choral work.88
In May 1955, Kuo completed his first symphonic composition, Symphonic Variations Based on a Taiwanese Ballad, and in July, courtesy of the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, became the first Taiwanese composer to give a world premiere of a Taiwanese-composed symphonic work in Taiwan. The United Daily News in Taipei raved about the work, writing that
“Symphonic Variations Based on a Taiwanese Ballad contains various colors of Taiwan and is worthy of praise.”89 In 1957, Kuo expanded his solo piano work Rhapsody—A Native’s Fantasy into a piano concerto, and his second symphonic composition. In 1960, Kuo penned his third symphonic composition, Two Movements on a Taiwanese Theme, whose melodies are derived
87 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 140-141.
88 Ibid., 142-145.
89 Ibid., 147.
64 from the seven-word tunes of Taiwanese opera.90
In 1959, the composer Chang-Hui Hsu, who had returned to Taiwan after studying in France, began a new trend in Taiwanese contemporary music. Because Hsu wanted to nurture a new generation of composers in Taiwan, he regularly performed works by native Taiwanese musicians to encourage the composition of new music, a movement also known as “Gatherers of
Music Creation.”91 Hsu introduced many new compositions to Kuo, influencing Kuo, and Kuo’s music received even more opportunities to be heard. In 1961, Kuo’s three piano concertos were performed for the first time; each piano concerto had a different subtitle—the Fantasy of Ancient
Taiwan Music, Village Dance, and Dances of the East. In 1965, his Piano Sonata in C, completed four years earlier, was premiered, and in 1967, his works for solo voice—May, Rose
Mallow, Music, and When The Gates of Heaven Open—received their first performances. At the same time, Kuo continued to write more casual and popular works. In 1958, he became the music producer for Yu-Feng Film Industry and was appointed the film composer for theater and films; in 1962, he wrote songs for Kuo-Hwa Advertisements.92
Although his compositions were highly praised and well-received, Kuo was not yet happy with the evolution of his technique. In his autobiography, Kuo writes “Although I was able to premiere many of my works after returning to Taiwan, I am still not satisfied, because I feel that my compositional techniques are not up to par…. I need to enrich myself even further to meet my ideals, so I have decided to return to Japan to pursue my studies again.”93
In 1966, Kuo headed to Japan for the second time, first to study at a private International
90 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 62.
91 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 61.
92 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 149-154.
93 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 62.
65 Music School, and then in 1967, at the National Tokyo Fine Arts University’s College of Music, where he studied tonal harmony and counterpoint with Uchitomojiro Ikeno and Akio Yasiro. In his spare time, Kuo paid visits to composers such as Akira Misyoshi, Kuma Dannchi, Satou
Masaru, and Saitou Ichirou. He also enjoyed meaningful discussions regarding music and composition with Kuma Dannchi, so much so that Kuo gave him a copy of his music scores to the Piano Sonata in C and Fantasy of Ancient Taiwan Music. At the same time, however, Kuo found it difficult to secure performances of his song cycle The Red Rose. Curious, Kuo decided to enter a competition for music for television, and wrote his entry for the competition completely in the Japanese folk style, which he, of course, knew very well. To Kuo’s mild astonishment, his piece for the competition, Daughter of the Governor, won first prize. This event led Kuo to believe that the Japanese preferred their style of music; as a result, Kuo was more determined to compose a Taiwanese work of high quality, and in 1969, he returned to
Taiwan, settling in his birth village of Yuen-Li.94
Recognition and Retirement
Upon his return to Taiwan, Kuo found that his opportunities to have his works performed without affiliation with any kind of public, educational, or political institution were very rare. In
1969, Kuo was hired at the Taiwan Television Enterprise as a music composition consultant. In
1970, the television company performed Kuo’s works Meeting the God and Folk Suite. In addition, Kuo wrote several nursery tunes for children, collected and published as World Nursery
Tunes. Between 1972 and 1977, many of Kuo’s popular songs spread throughout Taiwan; by the end of the 1970s, however, Kuo decided to cease writing popular music. In 1972, he completed
94 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 155-160.
66 his large chamber work Small Concerto: For Piano and Strings, which became a milestone in his career. In 1973, Taiwan Television invited conductor Wei-Liang Shih of Taiwan’s National
Symphony Orchestra to become part of the Taiwan Television’s Musical Research Department, responsible for music editing and composing. Shih placed a strong emphasis upon academic research and concerned himself with elevating the level of musical performance, encouraging
Taiwanese composers to keep writing and playing. Kuo has stated that much of the success and honors that he enjoyed in his later career are due to Shih’s advocacy, philosophy, connections, and persistence.95
Upon the death of Chiang Kai-Shek in 1975, the KMT government began to relax its control over the people and institutions of Taiwan, and Kuo responded by penning more works of increasingly cultural relevance to the Taiwanese people. One of Kuo’s most important works from this later period is a small operatic work for youth written in 1974 called Niulang and
Chihnu. In his autobiography Kuo remarks that, “I hope that this work can be like a musical in the nineteenth century, well-loved by the audience; I hope that the audience can hum the tune after the concert….”96 In a similar vein, Kuo’s Symphony Suite: Memoirs (1977) is a work in four movements filled with nationalistic themes. In 1984, the Council for Cultural Affairs commissioned Kuo for a symphonic work, inspiring the Three Symphonic Etudes—From Hubei
Folksongs (1985). Finally, Kuo’s landmark Symphony in A major (1986) is dedicated to the ancestors that had migrated to Taiwan, using themes of various locals, representing unity among all the Taiwanese people. In 1987, Kuo was awarded an artist’s highest honor by the Taiwan
Government Information Office in Taipei. Moreover, Kuo received the sixth Wu San-Lian Artist
Award in 1993 and the 19th National Literary and Artistic Creation Award by his orchesteal work
95 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 194-196.
96 Ibid., 202.
67 “Tian Ren Shih” in 1994.97
In the 1990s, as KMT chairman Teng-hui Lee began to transition Taiwan from a one-party country into a three-party country and recover some of Taiwan’s lost history, Kuo penned several pieces that took on both personal and national meaning. The first one, deals with an extremely sensitive chapter in modern Taiwanese history. In 1992, two books appeared, recounting the tragic February 1947 “228 Incident,” in which thousands of Taiwanese were killed by KMT soldiers. First, Me-Shu Ran wrote Suffering the Cruel Solitude for Forty-Five Years, telling of her father’s life, following his being arrested, to being lost, and then to being found. The other book, Sounds of Sobbing from the Dark Corner, is a historical narrative work that recounts the tragic “228 Incident,” containing interviews with the family members of the victims. Upon reading both volumes, Kuo was inspired to write Ah! My Father!, a collection of Taiwanese songs using the Japanese haiku in Ms. Ran’s book as his lyrics, which he translated into
Taiwanese. With the second book in mind, Kuo added a second and third stanza to mourn the other lives lost and families ruined in the violence of that fateful event.98
With Taiwan asserting itself as a fully independent island nation in the twenty-first century,
Kuo has continued to write and represent Taiwan on the world art music stage. In 1998, following the passing of Democratic Progressive Party legislator, Hsiou-Yi Lu, Lu’s wife, Yu-
Hsiu Chen, the former head of the Council for Cultural Affairs, and also a pianist, supplied Kuo with three poems written by Lu to Kuo. Kuo subsequently wrote three lieder on these poems—
The Blue Dream, The Depth of Wondrous Love, You are the Bride of My Life, all collected and published in 1999 in Egret Arts Songs Collections, and recorded in the compact disc titled
Song of the White Egret. In 1999, Kuo completed the prelude to Taiwan’s Music Department of
97 Yen, Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia, 66.
98 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 211-212.
68 Shihchien University’s thirtieth anniversary, called Shihchien Prelude at first, and then changed the simple title Taiwan Prelude.99
In 1987, Kuo retired from official employment, but has continued to compose regularly.
One of the his most significant pieces in his retirement period is his hour-long orchestral work
Orchestra Suite Sakya Story Two Collections (1988), a sacred symphonic piece in eleven movements that reflects upon the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the ancient spiritual teacher of ancient India who founded Buddhism. In 1999, Kuo’s other significant post-retirement work, the opera Hsuhsien and the White Snake, borrows its theme from the Chinese folk tale and was the first opera in Taiwan to be fully staged. Despite his age, Kuo remains in good health and good spirits, and while he is too modest to acknowledge it, he continues to be an influential figure in twenty-first century Taiwan.
99 Chen, Kuo Chih-Yuen, 213-214.
69 V. The Piano Music of Chih-Yuen Kuo
Piano Sonata in C
Although Wen-Ye Jiang was the first to write serious piano works as a Taiwanese composer, these pieces are mostly unavailable or difficult to find. Many of Jiang’s piano works are unfinished or destroyed, or, like the Sonatina for Piano, Opus 31, simply unpublished, existing only in manuscript, with no record available for their any of their premieres or performances. As a result, when it comes to the cataloguing and assessment of Taiwanese music in the solo piano repertoire, Kuo’s works become increasingly more significant. While it is difficult to say which of Kuo’s piano works are the most important, the Piano Sonata in C occupies a unique place in Taiwanese music. Finished in 1963, Kuo’s Piano Sonata in C is the first large-scale piano work published in Taiwan. It was premiered by Taiwanese pianist Tze-Jen
Hsu in 1965, and recorded by the Japanese pianist Azusa Fujita on Four Seas Records in 1968.
Due to Taiwan’s slow economic development after World War II, serious Taiwanese music almost never made it to the West. This is unfortunate, for Kuo’s Piano Sonata in C is a curious and refreshing blend of East and West.
To begin with, the forms of the four movements of Kuo’s Piano Sonata in C are deeply entrenched in Western tradition. The first movement is in conventional sonata form, complete with the customary contrasting themes, development of motives, and a crystal-clear recapitulation. In contrast, the second movement is a singing adagio, which, despite its well- delineated ternary form, assumes the character of a nineteenth century romantic fantasy. The last two movements, however, almost harken back to eighteenth century Vienna; the third movement is a minuet and trio, and the last movement is a seven-part rondo. Inside these Western-like movements, however, Kuo explores a variety of Eastern harmonic techniques. In the use of
70 melodic lines, for example, Kuo employs pentatonic scales, which, according to the composer himself, is the defining feature of Oriental folk style.100 In terms of phrase structure, though, Kuo is heavily influenced by the Taiwanese opera of his native island. A unique product of the island,
Taiwanese opera was at one time the most common musical entertainment in the agricultural community. This genre was often performed outdoors, used both sung lyrics and spoken words, and featured a great variety of percussion instruments.
The most distinguishing feature of Taiwanese opera is the seven-word tune. The seven-word tune is a folk-like song in which the lyrics are grouped by seven words per phrase. Specifically, each tune consists of seven Chinese characters per phrase and four phrases per set, each one separated by an orchestral interlude. The music is more ornamental than melodic—the frequent changes in contour disguise the song’s simple and static nature, and the short fast notes and small intervals give it internal motion. Due to the stress of the rhyme, the singer often places a slight accent in the last word of the poem.
Example 12. A seven-word tune from a Taiwanese opera.
In many of Kuo’s melodies, seven words are implied and spread throughout seven metric units. In Example 13, the first theme of the sonata’s first movement, there are seven units per phrase, and four phrases total; the accent at the end of the first and third phrases gives the
100 Kuo, Tsaiye te Hungchiangwe, 267.
71 necessary inflection to the rhyme. The same principle also takes place in Example 14, the second theme of the first movement (mm.29-38), where two seven words phrases (mm. 29-32 and mm.
35-38) are separated by interlude-like passages.
Example 13. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. I, mm. 1-8.
Example 14. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. I, Second Theme, mm. 27-38.
72 The distinct style of Taiwanese vocal music also makes an appearance in Kuo’s Piano
Sonata. Taiwanese melodic lines almost always begin on the downbeat of the measure, as opposed to the custom of the anacrusis in Western music. When singing, Taiwanese vocalists usually end phrases with sliding notes and a slight slowing of the rhythm, which is an inflection of the local dialects. Likewise, Kuo attempts to mimic this feature in his Piano Sonata. In
Example 15, the principal tune in the second movement, Kuo takes a melody in the C pentatonic scale and adds an E-flat semitone to the end of the phrase. Although the E-flat cannot occur naturally in the C pentatonic scale, Kuo inserts the E-flat to create the effect of sliding singing sound. In addition, Kuo uses accents to mimic the theater of Taiwanese opera.
Example 15. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. II, mm.1-12.
73 In this outdoor form of folk art, the spoken lyrics are often punctuated by a staccato crash of brass cymbals to emphasize the importance of the preceding action. In Example 16, therefore, it is no surprise that Kuo uses this same “staccato crash” followed by short rests at the end of important phrases.
Example 16. Kuo: Piano sonata in C, Mvt. I, mm.159-164.
In terms of harmonic language, Kuo’s melodies, as mentioned earlier, feature pentatonic scales in the Oriental folk tradition. The pentatonic scale, however, still lends itself to Western functional harmony. Some composers, such as Frederic Chopin, allow a pentatonic melody to imply the larger scale. Other composers, such as Claude Debussy, make great efforts to avoid such implications in his pentatonic tunes. Like Debussy, Kuo goes to great lengths in his pentatonic lines to emphasize color over Western harmonic progression. His chords are often built in seconds, fourths and fifths, and throughout the entire Sonata, there is not one single dominant-to-tonic cadence. Given his preference for color rather than functional tonality, Kuo employs Western whole-tone scales, augmented triads, seventh chords—especially half diminished sevenths—none of which refer to a specific key.
74 In addition, Kuo plays with the listener’s expectation of tonal order by juxtaposing
Western and Eastern modes. In Example 17, the opening of the third movement, Kuo employs two dissonant harmonic blocks separated by the most popular modulation interval in all of
Western music—the perfect fifth.In the first measure, Kuo overruns his E-flat major V7-I progression in the left hand with F pentatonic in the right hand. After a two-measure interruption of a whole tone scale, Kuo resumes the minuet tune in the fourth measure in B-flat major in the left hand, while C pentatonic asserts itself in the right hand. In the end, however, the F pentatonic scale wins out; by the end of the first strain, both hands secure the listener’s ear in F.
Example 17. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. III, mm.1-10.
It may be fair to say that Kuo’s non-traditional use of the major-minor system leaves the listener with nothing to grasp. But Kuo’s method of formal structure fools the listener into thinking that the music is in a standard western key. This technique is displayed in the fourth and final movement of the Piano Sonata. Utilizing a perfectly symmetrical A-B-A-C-A-B-A form, this movement fits the definition of a Western seven-part rondo. In fact, at the beginning of the movement, Kuo’s compositional style is completely Western. From the first downbeat, the right
75 hand outlines a four-note toccata-like motive from the C pentatonic scale. This head motive—A-
G-E-D—serves as the binding force for the entire movement, and is developed not only in inversion and diminution, but also in parallel and contrary motion.
Kuo, however, cannot resist playing tricks on the listener. For example, Western audiences always expect a dominant-to-tonic cadence at the end of the first section in a standard rondo.
Example 18 is the end of section A, where the right hand is in E pentatonic, while the left hand plays the E major scale. Although no actual V-I progression ever takes place, Kuo creates this illusion when both hands come to rest on a dominant seventh build on A (A, C#, E, G).
Example 18. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.25-28.
Also in traditional rondo form, Western audiences anticipate a return to the home key when section B gives way to section A. In Kuo’s rondo, however, the identity of the home key remains a mystery. For instance, in Example 19, the music just before the second A section changes to F# pentatonic, whose second tone is a G sharp which, in turn, functions as the leading tone to A minor.
76 Example 19. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.43-54.
The listener may remember, too, that Kuo hinted at A minor at the end of the first A section.
As the movement rolls on, Kuo makes numerous similar hints at A minor, but never comes around to establishing this key for the comfort of the listener. Fortunately, Kuo solves the mystery of the home key on the thundering last chord; one can almost see Kuo smiling through it, asking the listener why he or she ever had any doubt that the movement would not be in the key stated in the title of the piece—C major.
Example 20. Kuo: Piano Sonata in C, Mvt. IV, mm.169-174.
77 Children’s Piano Pieces
Kuo’s Children’s Piano Pieces (1974) is a composition spanning three suites of native
Taiwanese folk songs. Written to address the pedagogical needs of beginning piano students,
Kuo endeavors to reach the young generations of Taiwanese students and pass on the tradition of
Taiwanese folk song to them. But the Children’s Piano Pieces are much more than a delightful teaching tool—they are some of the best examples of the subtle permeation of Western modernism and Taiwanese opera into Kuo’s keyboard music. In fact, it is impossible to discuss or appreciate the Children’s Piano Pieces without a brief study of Taiwanese opera and its importance to the people of Taiwan.
Taiwanese opera, also known as Kauka opera, is the largest and most significant genre of
Taiwanese traditional music. It is one of the few art forms indigenous to Taiwan; not only is it a reflection of local Taiwanese cultures, it gives voice to the thoughts and feelings of many
Taiwanese. As a result, during the twentieth century—a very difficult time for the Taiwanese people—Taiwanese opera surpassed all other local traditions in popularity. Because the opera places a great deal of emphasis upon the content of its arias, the genre is also known as Kua-a-hi; the word Kua means “song.” In addition, Taiwanese opera always features a great deal of folk tunes popular at any one time, and often preserves folk songs that have fallen out of style or into disuse. As a result, Taiwanese opera can be seen as a mirror for the past four centuries of
Taiwanese history, and many of its songs, such as the “seven word tune”—mentioned earlier in reference to Kuo’s Piano Sonata in C—the khau-diao, and “narrative arias,” are still vital to the genre today.
78 Of the three songs, the most important is the khau-diao, or “lament.” The name khau-diao is a reference to the performance practice of the song—a display of pain and sorrow, with singing as an expressive way of crying. A great number of Taiwanese opera fans were, and continue to be, women. Many of their families, for whom they preside over and care deeply, go through great hardship, subsisting on low income; moreover, the status of women is, and sometimes continues to be, quite low in the social hierarchy. Thus, many women identify fully with the characters in
Taiwanese opera.101
Beginning in rural Yilan County in the early seventeenth century, Taiwanese opera owes its origins to Chinese opera. The concept for Kauka opera was borrowed from China during the early days of the Ching dynasty in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Over the past four centuries, however, the Taiwanese people have cultivated their own individual operatic style and character, and today, Taiwanese opera is very different from traditional Chinese opera. In its early days in the seventeenth century, Taiwanese opera was carried and propagated by amateurs in the rural parts of the island. When farmers were not out tending the field and growing crops, they would gather in the courtyard of the local temple and improvise a musical-dramatic work with lyrical solo song and homemade percussion instruments. The purpose behind the opera was to entertain the gods or celebrate an important occasion; unlike European opera, there was no fixed form, nor even stage sets or costumes for the performers. Today, in many rural areas, such as Yilan County, authentic Taiwanese opera is still being performed.102
The Kauka opera relies heavily on two traditional instrumental ensembles—the nanguan and the beiguan. The nanguan ensemble is vocal in conception; thus, Kauka opera is sometimes
101 He-Yi Lin. Taiwan Ketsaihsi [Taiwan Opera] (Taipei: Government Information Office, 2000), 19-20.
102 Liu, Taiwan yinyue shih, 472-473.
79 called nanguan opera. As such, the nanguan consists of voice, Chinese strings and woodwinds, and light percussion, such as the pipa and a wooden clapper. Kauka opera constructs many of its songs with the nanguan, featuring melodies that are repetitive, but easy to remember. Born in the
Fujian province on the southeastern coast of China, the beiguan employs more traditional
Chinese instruments and louder percussion instruments, with prominent parts for drums and gongs. Over time, the beiguan became very popular in rural Taiwanese life as music for weddings, ceremonies, and temple festivals. Later, the genre’s flair for the dramatic led to its integration with Taiwanese puppet theater and Taiwanese opera. Thus, through the course of its evolution on the island, Kauka opera uses the nanguan to accompany dance, and the beiguan to enhance the dramatic aspects of the opera. The kind of music produced between the nanguan and the beiguan further emphasize the meaning of “Kau-Ka,” which is an amalgamation of the sounds of the two ensembles. In the twentieth century, many of Taiwan’s poets and composers felt that Kauka opera was ripe for innovation, and many of them collaborated to create new plots and new tunes based on the variations of local color. As ideas crossed from county to county, much of Kauka opera became something of a Taiwanese melting pot—a synthesis of several different local traditions.103
In the 1950s, Taiwanese opera reached its peak; at this time approximately two hundred groups of Taiwanese theater groups were active in the genre. Prominent Kauka theater groups hired nanguan musicians and poets to compose the libretto for the opera, giving birth to many of the favorite tunes still sung on the island. Many theater groups began to employ stage sets, and with the emerging popularity of radios in rural Taiwanese homes, radio stations began regular broadcasts of opera performances. In time, many radio stations formed their own Taiwanese opera groups, recorded their own performances in a studio, and played them over the air.
103 Lin, Taiwan Ketsaihsi, 9-10.
80 Taiwanese opera became easily accessible to all parts of the island, attracting a large number of fans and influenced serious Taiwanese composers. Public demand expanded the length of a typical performance and led to a marked increase in new plays and melodies. In October 1962,
Taiwanese opera was performed on state television for the first time.104
As a result, when Kuo resolved to set Taiwanese folk tunes in his Children’s Piano Pieces in the early 1970s, the influence of Taiwanese opera was impossible to escape. Moreover, Kuo’s manipulation of these well-known tunes is not without the addition of Western and modernist compositional techniques, and it is these techniques which put the Children’s Piano Pieces on par with Kuo’s best work. What follows is a brief discussion of a handful of the songs in the
Children’s Piano Pieces, with reference to Kuo’s subtle assimilation of modernist touches and
Kauka opera. The Children’s Piano Pieces consist of three suites: Six Taiwanese Kauka Tunes
(1973), consisting of the songs “Joke,” “Jiang Shoei,” “Jewei,” “Legend,” “To see My Brother
Off,” and “Be On My Way;” Seven Taiwanese Gau Tunes (1974), settings of the songs “Row,
Row the Boat,” “Visiting Uncle,” “With an Umbrella,” “Lament,” “Anxiety,” “Elegie,” and
“Departure;” and Four Chinese Szechuan Folk Tunes (1974), featuring the colorful titles “The
Moon Sets in the West,” “Rose,” “Frog Jumps Into the Water,” and “The Sun.”
To begin with, Kuo places a great deal of emphasis on the independence of both hands in a beginning student’s piano playing. In the piece “Jiang-Shoei,” an arrangement of a well-known
Nanguan tune by the same name, Kuo colors the melody with slightly dissonant polytonality— the right hand plays a B-flat pentatonic scale: B-flat-C-D-F-G, while the left hand plays a C- pentatonic scale: C-D-E-G-A.
104 Lin, Taiwan Ketsaihsi, 13-16.
81 Example 21. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Jiang Shoei,” mm.1-14.
Furthermore, in many of the songs, Kuo places the melody in each hand at some point in the tune, or breaks up the melody between the hands, such as in “The Moon Sets in the West.” In
“Lament,” however, Kuo does not accompany the tune with the usual arpeggiated or broken- chord accompaniment found in Western music; instead, he writes a melodic counterpoint to it.
Many of the piano pieces are drawn from tunes in traditional Taiwanese opera. The form of
“Row Row the Boat,” is reminiscent of the dialogue between a man and a woman crossing a river in a bamboo raft; since there used to be few bridges over rivers in rural Taiwan, these trips across a river were often inspiration— real-life or otherwise—for romance stories.
82 Example 22. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Row Row the Boat,” mm.17-30.
In “Lament,” Kuo displays the sense of yearning and nostalgia through the “khau-diao,” an aria in Taiwanese opera that is sung when the characters in the drama are crying. Each singing section of the aria is separated from the next one through an intermezzo, in which the instruments play to enhance the sorrowful ambiance, and at the ends of phrases, a decrescendo will end with a fermata on a long note. Kuo imitates both the singing and the intermezzi of this aria form beautifully on the keyboard.
83 Example 23. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Lament,” mm.1-11.
Another example of “khau-diao” in the Children’s Piano Pieces is “Elegie,” where Kuo draws attention to the contrasting dynamics that express the subtle emotional changes in a character of the opera. In “Elegie,” Kuo is particularly careful with his dynamics, placing accent markings in strategic places in the phrases, and writing quintal chords in the left hand to bring out the piercing pain and sorrow experienced by that character.
Example 24. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Elegie,” mm.1-4.
84 In contrast, the song “Be On My Way,” is an upbeat tune drawn from the beiguan in
Kauka opera. Here, Kuo adds accents to sustained chords to imitate the sound of the gong.
Example 25. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Be on My Way,” mm.1-8.
Finally, “Joke,” a tea-harvesting folk tune, is an improvisatory piece with its origins in rural Taiwan, often done during the act of gathering tea leaves. Although the form of the song is free, the structure is set as a teasing and lighthearted dialogue between a man and woman. Here,
Kuo assigns each hand a character, imitating each other back and forth like the man and the woman in the song.
85 Example 26. Kuo: Children’s Piano Pieces, “Joke,” mm.23-34.
Curiously, the last four songs of the Children’s Piano Pieces, are, as the title suggests, four traditional Chinese songs. Kuo’s decision to include four Chinese songs in his suite of traditional Taiwanese songs brings up the question of whether Kuo, still writing under Chiang kai-Shek and the KMT government, bowed to some form of pressure or unwritten rules regarding the publication of Taiwanese music. While this may be true, Kuo’s inclusion of the
Chinese tunes may be more subtle. That is, Kuo may have set the Chinese tunes to remind young
Taiwanese students of the difference between Chinese folk songs and native Taiwanese folk songs. In other words, Kuo’s message may be more pointed than the KMT government realized or had the time to realize—that the next generation of Taiwanese must not forget their heritage even under the difficult political circumstances of the time.
86 VI. Final Thoughts
In the twenty-first century, as technology makes the world smaller, an even greater exchange of ideas between West and East will take place. Moreover, with her rising population and burgeoning economy, China is poised to become a superpower. In this atmosphere, it is vital to remember the contributions of those Asian cultures that have not made it into the standard textbooks. Just as German music and musicology has dominated the teaching of European music, one must be careful not to let countries in the Asian Pacific Rim with a higher profile, such as
China or Japan, dictate the entire international discourse on Asian art. In the context of the political upheaval of the twentieth century, this endeavor is made even more difficult, as many artists suffered at the hands of cruel governments.
To this end, this document aims to foster greater appreciation of the work of Wen-Ye
Jiang and Chih-Yuen Kuo, to give flesh and blood to otherwise forgettable names in a Western encyclopedia. In addition, this document hopes that interested readers, especially in the West, will pursue their music, create performances, and allow new audiences an opportunity to judge their artistic merit and enjoy their work. The easiest place to begin, of course, is with their keyboard works, where their Western influences, nationalistic tendencies, and personal aesthetic are magnified for both the casual listener and the curious student. But whatever form a journey through their music might take, one must caution against declaring one more “Taiwanese” than the other. In reality, both Jiang and Kuo are descendants of a proud tradition that has fought for cultural distinction since the seventeenth century. Most importantly each composer speaks a language that every culture understands, regardless of his method of expressing it.
87 Bibliography
I. Books
Chang, Chi-Jen. Jiang Wen-Ye. Taipei: Readingtimes, 2002.
Chang, Shiuan-Wen. Taiwan kotsaisi yinyue [Taiwanese Opera]. Taipei: Encyclopedia Culture Publications, 1982.
Chen, Bi-Juan. Taiwan hsinyinyueshih: hsishih hsinyinyue tsai jihchu shihtai te chancheng yu fachan [Taiwan New History: The Development of Western New Music in the Japanese Occupation Years]. Taipei: Yueyun Publications, 1995.
______. Taiwan kangchin chih chansheng yu fachan yenchiu [The Development of Taiwanese Piano Music]. Chayi: Hungdou Publications, 1994.
Chen Shui-Bian, ShihchiShouhang [Century Maiden Voyage]. Taipei: Yuanshen Publications, 2001.
Chen, Yu-Shiou. Kuo Chih-Yuen: Shamochung de hungchiangwei [Chih-Yuen Kuo: The Red Rose in the Desert] . Taipei: Readingtimes Publications, 2001.
Chou, Wen-Chung. Wenren and Culture: Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. Ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau. Middletown:Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Davison, Gary Marvin and Barbara E. Reed. Culture and Customs of Taiwan. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Han, Kuo-Huang. Life and Works of Jiang Wen-Ye. Monterey Park, California: Taiwan Publications, 1984.
Hsian, Hsingfu. Taiwan sibainian de gushih [Taiwan Four Hundred Years of Stories]. Taipei: Haihsin Books, 2006.
Hu, Shi-Min, ed. Chinese Outstanding Musician: Jiang Wen-Ye. Hong Kong: Shanghai Book Co., Ltd., 1985.
Kuo, Chih-Yuen. Tsaiye de hunchiangwe: Tsochuchia kuo Chih-Yuen te yinyue shoucha [Red Rose in the Wild: The Composer Chih-Yuen Kuo’s Musical Notes]. Edited by Ling-Yi Wu. Taipei: Daliu Publications, 1998.
Li, Shiou-Fon. Taiwanshih ibaichien da chih [One Hundred Events in Taiwan History]. Taipei: Yu-Shan Publications, 1999.
88 Lin, He-Yi. Taiwan Ketsaihsi [Taiwan Opera]. Taipei: Government Information Office, 2000.
Lin, Hsin-Chu. Taiwan ssupainien fenyunshih [Taiwan Four Hundred Years History]. Hsinchu: Hisakewenhua Publications, 2005.
Liu, Chuei-Kuan. Taiwan de Lam-guan [Taiwanese Lam-Guan]. Taipei: Yueyun Publications, 1986.
______. Taiwan chuantung yinyue [Taiwan Traditional Music]. Taipei: Dunghua Books, 1996.
Liu,Yu-Shiou. Taiwan yinyue shih [Taiwan Music History]. Taipei: Wunan Book Co., 2003.
Radel, Don Michael, ed. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1986.
Ran, Me-Shu, Gujijianau ssushihwunien [Suffering the Cruel Solitude for Forty-Five Years]. Taipei: Chienwei Publications, 1992.
______. Yuanchiaolo de chisheng [Sounds of Sobbing from the Dark Corner]. Taipei: Chienwei Publications, 1992.
Rubinstein, Murray A. Taiwan: A New History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.
Shiou, Liu-Yu. Taiwan yinyue shih [Taiwan Music History]. Taipei: Wunan Book Co., 2003.
Shiu, Chang-Huei. Taiwan yinyueshih chukao [First Draft of Taiwan Music History]. Taipei: Chiuanyin Music Publications, 1991.
______. Chungjuo hsin yinyue shihhua [History of Chinese New Music]. Taipei: Yueyun Publications, 1986.
Tai, Tien-Jau. Taiwan kuochih chengchihshih [Taiwan International Political History]. Edited by Ming-Chun Li. Taipei: Chienwei Publications, 2002.
Tzeng, Yung-Yi. Taiwan kitsaisi de fachan yu pienchien [The Development of Taiwanese Opera]. Taipei: Lianjing Publications, 1988.
Wu, Ling-Yi. Taiwan chienpei yinyuechia chunhsiang [The Older Generation of the TaiwaneseMusician]. Taipei: Daliu Publications, 1993.
Wu, Mi-Cha, ed. Taiwanshih shiaushihtien [Taiwan History Timelines and Dictionary]. Taipei: Yuanliu Publications, 2000.
Yang, Lu-Fen, ed. Taiwan dangdai zuochuchia [Taiwan Contemporary Composers]. Taipei: Yushanshe, 2006.
89 II. Dissertations
Chang, Fei-Wen. “Hsiyang yensu yenyue tsai Taiwan Lichuan kaikuang yenchiu” [“A Study of Western Serious Music in Taiwan”]. M.M. diss., National Taiwan Normal University, 2000.
Huang, Ling-Yu. “Taiwan chengunong shih yenchiu.” [“A Study of Taiwanese Che-gu-nong”]. M.M. diss., National Taiwan Normal University, 1990.
Huang, Wei-Der. “Solo Piano and Chamber Music of Contemporary Taiwanese Composers.” D.M.A. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2001.
Hung, Ching-Wen. “A Search of Kuo Chih-Yuen’s Taiwanese Songs.” M.M. diss., Taiwan Soochow University, 2007.
Kuo, Tzong-Kai. “Chiang Wen-Ye: The Style of his Selected Piano Works and A Study of Music Modernization in Japan and China.” D.M.A. Diss., The Ohio State University, 1987.
Liu, Shao-Shan. “Chiang Wen-Yeh: An Overture With an In-Depth Analysis of his Masterwork Folk Festival Poem.” D.M.A. Diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 1998.
Wu, Mei-Ying. “Lun Taiwan tsochuchia yinyue changtsochung de chuantung wenhau hsili.” [“A Study of the Traditional Cultural Influence on Taiwanese Composers”]. M.M. diss., University of Taiwan, 1999.
Yang, Tzi-Ming. “Selected Solo Piano Works of Taiwanese Composers.” D.M.A. Diss., University of Maryland College Park, 2002.
III. Articles
Chang, Chi-Jen. “Alexander Tcherepnin and Chinese Music.” Min Bao Monthly 165 (Sept 1979): 46-50.
______. “Jiang Wenye and Chinese Modern Music.” Tang Dai 171 (Nov 2001): 174-179
Chen, Fu-Yen. “A Hypothesis Concerning the Taiwanese His Chu of the Past.” Asian Music 5, no.1 (1973): 40-55.
Jiang, Wen-Ye. “The Story of Fantasy to a White Egret.” Yinyue Shihchieh 6 (Nov 1934): 107-111.
Kuo, Chih-Yuen. “Renewal of Jiang Wenye.” Reading Times (June 1985): 62-67.
90 ______. “Symphony-Tanshan to Taiwan.” Tianyuanyuanfu 4 (1984): 8-10.
______. “My Three Symphonic Etudes.” Music Digest 12 (Dec 1985): 56-57.
______. “My Music Experiences after the War.” Music Digest 8 (Jan 1979): 40-41.
Liu, Yu-Shiou. “Two Music Meetings in Hong Kong: Scholars Discuss the Music of Jiang Wen- Ye,” CHIME: Newsletters of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research 3, (1991): 38.
Wu, Yun-Chen. “Pansui wenye de huiyi” [“Memories of Wenye”]. Edited by Ching-Chih Liu. Mintsuyinyue yenhiu [Ethnomusicology Research] 3, (1992): 7.
IV. Music Scores
Jiang, Wen-Ye. Jiang wenye shougao tsopinchi [Jiang Wenye Manuscript Collection]. Edited by Chang Chih-Jen. Taipei County Cultural Center, 1992.
______. Three Dances, Op. 7. Collection A. Tcherepnin. Tokyo: Pyuginsha, 1936.
Kuo, Chih-Yuen. Piano Sonata in C. Taipei: Yueyun Publications, 1993.
______. Children’s Piano Pieces. Taipei: Yueyun Publications, 1996.
V. Other Sources
Chen, Tzuo-Chuang. Liner Notes: Tien jen shih [The Master]. Tzuo-Chuang Chen, conductor. Jungyang Orchestra. Taiwan: New People Music, Inc., 1994. Taipei, PH11-1006. Compact Disc.
Mittler, Barbara, “Kuo Chih-Yuen,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. Online. www.grovemusic.com.
Paking Myriorama. Liner Notes to Jiang Wenye. Tasi Chia-Hsio, Piano. West Germany: Thorofon Capella, 1985.
Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.. Laura
91 Macy. Online at www.grovemusic.com.
Tsai, Chai-Hsio. Chinesische Klavierkonzerte. Liner Notes to Kuo Chih-Yuen. Chai-Hsio Tsai, Piano. West Germany:Thorofon Capella, 1988. CTH 2024. Compact Disc.
______. Children’s Suite. Liner Notes to Kuo Chih-Yuen. Germany: Thorofon Capella, 1988. CTH 2034. Compact Disc.
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