In the 1980s, Holo pop songs made a comeback after a decline in both their creativity and popularity in the 1970s. This downturn was partly caused by the sudden crash of Holo cinema in 1970 after a decade and a half of prosperity, as well as by the government's ban on televised Holo-speaking glove puppetry, which became Taiwan's most popular TV show format in the early 1970s. Both movies and puppet shows were lavishly accompanied by Holo songs. Some were entirely original compositions while others borrowed Japanese or Western melodies, rather like the Holo songs that were written to replace Japanese ones after the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and which became a flourishing entertainment form in postwar society. For example, Bun Ha, a superstar singer and movie actor in the 1950s and 1960s, who has recorded a total of about 1,200 songs, translated hundreds of Japanese songs into Holo. Most of his 11 Holo movies, such as the blockbusters Taipei's Night (1962) and Wandering Angel (1967), were designed chiefly as vehicles for his pop songs.
In the mid-1970s, the release of the album Modern Chinese Folk Songs started a reaction against the Mandarin pop (Mandopop) music then in vogue, with its syrupy melodies, banal lyrics and shameless copying of foreign songs. Many young people began to sing and write their own songs they could play on their acoustic guitars. Their compositions, commonly called "folk songs" or "campus songs," became the big sound in the late 1970s. But this burgeoning local creativity, however, did not extend beyond Mandopop until the early 1980s, when Taiwanese lyricists and composers started putting major creative effort into local-language songs, especially those using Holo, the language spoken by Taiwan's largest ethnic group. Instead of using Mandarin, which had been promoted as the national language since 1945, the new breed of Holo songs took advantage of the language's long-standing connection to grassroots culture and drew inspiration from an old performance art interweaving talking and singing called liam kua.
Holo Song Revival
In 1982, "Who Knows My Heart?," written and composed by Tshua Tsin-lam, became a hit soon after its release and, together with the huge popularity of other songs such as Chiang Huei's "Farewell Coast" (1984) and Iap Khe-tian's "Fighting to Win" (1985), heralded a revival of Holo songs. For music critic Wang Chen-yi, something had changed for the better in the revitalized genre. A liam kua researcher, Wang points out that, in addition to the psychological verisimilitude underlying the popularity of "Who Knows My Heart?"--which depicts a man's endless struggle and subtly alludes to the collective state of mind in an oppressed society--this song actually represented a major shift toward a stronger linkage between melody and lyrics. "In Bun Ha's days," Wang says, "many Holo songs were written in a way that tended to compromise the Holo language's tonal or musical quality, and the results sometimes made your flesh creep."
This skill of finding a more natural fit between Holo words and melodies also contributed significantly to the even greater surge of Holo songs in the early 1990s. Groundbreakers included the compilation album Songs of Madness (1989), featuring rap and rock Holo songs that broke free from the genre's typical slow and sad style. In this album, singers and songwriters such as Chen Ming-chang sing about turbulent political scenes in a rapidly changing, democratizing society. Chen's highly-acclaimed album An Afternoon Drama (1990), in which the title song refers to a typical play in the repertoire of kua a hi or Taiwanese opera, dedicates a song to a major inspiring force of the author's music career, Chen Dah (1905-1981). This liam kua master became a highly acclaimed folk artist after some scholars discovered him while on a field trip in southernmost Taiwan's Hengchun area.
Another landmark work was Lim Giong's bestselling album Marching Forward released in 1990. The following year, partly due to its eager endorsement by Wang Chen-yi who was a judge of the Golden Melody Awards, this album's title song won the Best Pop Song award in the nation's annual music awards. One of the founders of the Association for the Studies of Taiwanese Ballads, Wang says that, despite this song's modern, energetic rock style, its roots lie in an essential aspect of liam kua, a somewhat improvisational way of telling stories or teaching morals to a changing society.
Each local language group has its own form of talking-singing. However, Wang points out that, rather than originating in other places such as southeast China's coastal province of Fujian, where many Han immigrants to Taiwan originally came from, liam kua was by and large developed on Taiwan, combining oral tradition with the Holo language's inherent musicality.
No Easy Task
A tonal language, Holo retains seven of ancient Chinese's eight tones--in contrast to Mandarin's four--with extensive tone sandhi rules that govern how the tones interact with each other. For each utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by tone sandhi. One of the main differences between the two major Holo romanization systems is in indicating each word's original or changed tone. "More often than not, simply uttering a Holo phrase is very much like singing it," says Ang Sui-tin, who is both the creative and business force behind the Ang Sui-tin Liam Kua Troupe. "Liam kua's essence lies in the art of making talking almost equivalent with singing and vice versa." As a rule, each episode of liam kua has four seven-word rhymed lines, hence the Seven Words Tune, one of the common tune forms in liam kua. Except for the first line, the third line must end with falling or low tones and the other two lines with rising or high, level tones.
Kou Chou Ching gives outdoor performances, using the gueh khîm, a traditional banjo-like instrument. (Photo Courtesy of Kou Chou Ching)
Ang's troupe was established in 2002 to promote an art that was even older than the also time-honored arts of glove puppetry and kua a hi (Taiwanese opera), which remains the only indigenous Taiwanese genre of drama. Wang Chen-yi points out that kua a hi which emerged in the 19th century among Han immigrant communities in the northeastern region of Yilan, was largely the natural extension of liam kua by developing different acting parts rather than just having one or two people talking and singing. In the postwar era, liam kua in turn began to absorb dramatic elements from kua a hi such as inventing a signature voice for each character in a story--most of which come from classical novels, historical texts and folklore--and inserting nonmusical voiceovers. Functional words were used to create more freedom from the traditional seven-word pattern. In addition, tune forms were borrowed from kua a hi?
Ang's tutor Iunn Siu-khing is the key figure in this development of liam kua. In 2006, Ang won the traditional music award at the Golden Melody Awards by producing her third recording of Iunn and her husband's liam kua work. One part of this winning album is a typical version of moral teaching for sisters, brothers, husband and wife, parents, gamblers or drunken drivers, and the other is a funny piece about mosquitoes battling flies. Born in 1934, Iunn Siu-khing became blind at the age of four due to sickness and was sent to a family in Keelung. There she learned from another blind girl six years her senior the art of liam kua and playing its usual accompanying instrument, the gueh khim, a four-stringed instrument with a sound box shaped like a full moon (gueh), closely resembling the Western banjo. In her teenage years, Iunn started to perform in teahouses, bars and in front of temples. Later on, she and her husband were also hired to promote the sale of medicines in various urban and rural communities. Her performances, peppered with the flavor of kua a hi gradually developed an appreciative audience.
Based on her growing popularity, Iunn and her husband were approached by radio stations in the late 1960s to make liam kua shows that were usually sponsored by pharmaceutical businesses. At that time, radio broadcasting was still a major entertainment medium, despite the advent of local TV in 1962. When the couple's fame on the air reached its peak, audiences could tune to any one of more than 50 radio stations to enjoy their shows. In this period, during which Iunn finally achieved financial stability, her performances helped cement Holo radio shows as an integral part of Taiwan's popular entertainment culture.
Spreading the Word
In the mid-1980s, Iunn started to help the government and schools promote her art by offering classes and giving performances at home and abroad. At around this time, Ang Sui-tin began to study under Iunn, following the old apprenticeship model of singing along line by line. Trained in Western vocal music, Ang had been most impressed by the priority of lyrics over melody. "The melody is based on the lyrics, not vice versa," she says. "So, whereas there are forms for the rhyme, tone and meter or lyrics, there are no fixed melodies." Gradually, she developed understanding of the nuances of Holo tones and got to know how to, within the frame of a certain metrical form, make relatively free use of words without compromising their individual tones. More often than not, for example, a word is sung initially by its original tone and then dragged back to a specific tune form. In 1989, the Ministry of Education (MOE) formally recognized Ang's tutor as an "artistic master" for her efforts to preserve and reinvigorate a cultural tradition.
Wang Chen-yi says that kua a hi is already the mature development of liam kua, which could be referred to by its other common name kua a or the Taiwanese ballad as Wang calls it. Therefore, kua a hi will continue to take the lead in carrying on the traditional dramatic art of singing. Now, in addition to more than 200 private troupes around the country, the MOE is considering setting up a national kua a hi troupe, perhaps starting from a school team in the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts' kua a hi department.
There exists, however, something profound and fundamental for Taiwanese culture in the art of liam kua that needs to be preserved and promoted. "It is essentially the natural integration of vernacular speech, poetry and music," Wang says. "It contains something common to the past, current and future development of Taiwanese folk traditions." He believes that a strong folk culture, working in tandem with high culture, is required for a healthier, truly pluralistic cultural environment.
Tradition and Innovation
Indeed, both paths of stylistic evolution that Holo pop has taken can find their roots in liam kua, which calls attention to the harmonious combination of lyrics and melody on the one hand, and gives voice to observation of everyday social life on the other. The lyrical, melancholy veins of Holo songs are represented by such works as Tshua Tsin-lam's "Who Knows My Heart?," Iap Khe-tian's "Hometown" (1990) and Chiang Huei's "Farewell Coast" as well as Chiang's landmark album Drunken Confession (1992), which sold more than 1 million copies. On the other hand, the avant-garde style has been utilized by Lim Giong and other influential Holo singers and songwriters such as Wu Bai and Ti Thau Phue to produce songs about contemporary life. A song on Lim Giong's Marching Forward, for example, tells of the friendship between an old food-vendor and a young apprentice in an ironworks who becomes successful decades later because of his old friend's encouragement. Its plain storytelling and easily understood lyrics, with each word clearly articulated, produce, knowingly or not, an almost direct tribute to the liam kua tradition.
Lim's latest album, Insects Awaken (2005), continues to tap Taiwanese folk traditions such as Holo poetry chanting and kua a hi Now, the efforts of Lim and other innovators of Holo songs including Chen Ming-chang, Tshua Tsin-lam and Ti Thau Phue, who has released a series of comic liam kua albums, in turn have inspired younger singers, including Fish Lin, Fan Chiang and J. Little Chen. Still under 30, the three formed a band called Kou Chou Ching and describe their music as "traditional liam kua style," or a Taiwanese version of hip-hop music. "Different variants of hip-hop music have been developed in many parts of the world," says Fan Chiang, "as a result of influence from local music traditions."
Fish Lin, a graduate student at the Taipei National University of the Arts, points out that, although his generation has lost the subtle command of language and quick wits of traditional liam kua artists such as Chen Dah and Lu Liu-sian, who were active in the 1940s, these masters' recorded works, which his band continues to collect, have been incorporated into the band's works and are a pool of potential creativity that they always draw from. Nurtured by such folk cultures, including accompaniment by traditional instruments such as the gueh khim, Kou Chou Ching seeks to build a unique Taiwanese style that can win recognition internationally.
Write to Pat Gao at pat@mail.gio.gov.tw