ABSTRACT

This book vibrantly demonstrates how the study of music allows for identification and interpretation of the forces that form Taiwanese society, from politics and policy to reactions to and assertions of such policies. 

Contributors to this edited volume explore how music shapes life — and life shapes music — in Taiwan, focusing on subjects ranging from musical life under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) through to the contemporary creations of Indigenous musicians, popular music performance and production, Christian religious music, traditional ritual music and theatre, conceptions about sound and noise, and garbage truck music's role in reducing household waste. The volume’s twelve chapters present diverse approaches to their sounding subjects, some deeply rooted in the methods and concerns explored by Taiwan's first generation of ethnomusicologists. Others employ current social theories.

Presenting a window into the cultural lives of the residents of this multicultural, politically contested island, Resounding Taiwan will appeal to students and scholars of musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology and Asian studies more widely.

 

 

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Sounding and resounding Taiwan

chapter 1|19 pages

Resounding colonial Taiwan through historical recordings

Some methodological reflections

chapter 3|20 pages

Highway Nine musical stories

Musicking of Taiwanese Indigenous people at home and in the National Concert Hall

chapter 4|18 pages

A quest for Taiwan guoyue

The Taipei Chinese Orchestra and the making of Taiwanese musical identity 1

chapter 6|19 pages

The making of Hakka hymns in postwar Taiwan

Negotiating identity conflicts and contextualizing Christian practices

chapter 7|21 pages

Voicing gender in pak-koán theater

Social contexts and singing mechanisms

chapter 8|20 pages

What to preserve and how to preserve it

Taiwan's action plans for safeguarding traditional performing arts

chapter 9|15 pages

Noisy co-existence

Contestations of renao and zaoyin amidst Taiwan's noise control system

chapter 10|17 pages

Listening to Taiwan's musical garbage trucks

Hearing the slow violence of environmental degradation