A native composer runs the gamut from electrical engineering to musical tradition.
The austere harmonies of Computer Sonata reverberated through the theater at National Taiwan University (NTU) in March last year, making frequent and what may now seem pedestrian use of glissando and echo. Composed in 1968 by Lin Erh, the eerie synthesized music was considered the cutting-edge of aural technology back when computers were a rarity and were as yet unable to reproduce the sounds of violins or voices.
The event was a part of the Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology, organized by the NTU Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, and this part of the program paid tribute to the homegrown innovator. In 1965, the 31-year-old became the first person in the world to hold a "computer concert," at the Digital Computer Laboratory of the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Lin trained in electrical engineering at NTU and earned a master's degree in musical theory and composition at Northwestern University in Illinois. While the concert itself was only mildly satisfactory, Lin recalls, the presence of a towering computer with people running around it connecting and unplugging things was an awesome example of the marriage of music and computer science.
Lin's avant-garde music was written with the aid of Illiac II, a pioneering computer built by the University of Illinois. One of the world's first transistorized computers, Illiac II replaced the vacuum-tube Illiac I in 1962, on which Lin's teacher Lejaren Hiller (19241994) composed some of the first pieces of computer music in the 1950s. In addition to composition, the computer could analyze music.
At a time when the computer could handle numbers but not musical notes, there were only a handful of composers in the world who had experience writing music with the help of computers. Lin tried to explain to people that computers saw the process of composing and producing music as a mathematical problem that needed solving. Reservations and doubts among scholars and musicians, however, were not as easily overcome as numerical equations--they had a dim view of the numbers game, fearing that the new machines would falsify and homogenize the art of music. Lin, on the contrary, believed that musical diversity and sophistication could be helped, if not expanded, with the application of computers. "Although I don't use computers in my own work any more," Lin says, "I have witnessed a wonderful new world of music that I enjoyed helping to shape."
Computer music was only one field in which Lin's experimental spirit manifested itself. In the late 1960s, he formed the East West Music Ensemble to promote the preservation of and connection between different musical traditions. Its members were skilled at playing the cello, Japanese koto , flute, Chinese pipa and violin, among other instruments. Taiwanese and Chinese folksongs were a major part of the band's repertoire.
A player of violin and piano during childhood, Lin was torn between music and the study of science at NTU. He regularly set off to see Taiwanese opera in rural communities and traveled to aboriginal villages to hear their time-honored ballads. This ambivalence resulted in him taking seven years to graduate and delaying compulsory military service.
Thor Johnson, music advisor to former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower and director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, recognized Lin's musical talent in 1958 while visiting Taiwan. Amazed by a string ensemble that Lin composed, Johnson organized the piece's debut performance and then took it back to his country to be played by other orchestras. With Johnson's strong recommendation and an exceptional approval from the government, Lin went to the United States to study music without completing military service or passing the requisite examination for overseas study.
The pieces that the American conductor liked so much were extraordinary because they were the first ones to be based on "golden age" Taiwanese ballads. Under Japanese rule in the 1930s, the introduction of musical notation methods and the phonograph led to the emergence of a local record industry, which established the melancholy ballads sung in Holo (Taiwanese) as a unique musical genre. Toward the end of the Japanese period (18951945), Holo ballads were banned as the colonial government forced identification with the fading imperial cause. When the Chinese Nationalists replaced the Japanese after World War II, Holo culture faced continued adversity. The Chinese regime aggressively discouraged the speaking of Holo and required people to learn Mandarin, the official dialect of the Republic of China. The newly arrived ruling class even derided Taiwanese pronunciation of Mandarin.
Lin's adaptation of the then proscribed Holo ballads not only displayed courage, but a taste for exploring the unknown. "I've always known that Taiwan's musical traditions combine skill and diversity," he says. After Lin returned from the United States in 1970 to teach, he started work on the collection and interpretation of the old Holo songs. At least a decade before other research on the genre emerged in academic circles in the late 1980s, he had written numerous magazine and newspaper articles about their composers and lyricists, and in 1978, he published a book on 27 of them. Unlike later research and books on the same subject, most of these authors were personally interviewed by Lin and provided precious first-hand information. "Today's development of Taiwanese music owes much to Lin's contribution," says Johnson Yu, pianist and secretary-general of the ROC Comparative Music Society.
Lin developed a friendship, for example, with Jhou Tian-wang (19101988), who penned such songs as "Sorrow in the Moonlit Night" (1932), "Rainy Night Flowers" (1934) and "Riverside Spring Dreams" (1935). "He often complained to me about his work being badly altered," says Lin. "I'd comfort him by saying that fortunately they rarely put the lyricist's name on rereleased songs, so he wouldn't have to suffer any humiliation." Intellectual property rights were still an unknown concept in Taiwan at the time.
Public interest in Holo songs was not rekindled until the mid-1970s, when a sort of Taiwanese cultural renaissance began. People turned to their native roots for inspiration in art, literature and culture. In the field of pop music, syrupy love songs and servile similes of Western and Japanese hits were rejected as fluff and gave way to the folk song movement. The "campus songs" were written by young people with simple, fresh voices accompanied by acoustic guitars. From 1977 to 1981, the winners of the annual Golden Melody Awards were part of a new breed of modest, young artists quite unlike the heavily made-up and formulaic celebrities of the day. With a view to promoting popular musical education, Lin composed his own music, organized concerts and produced records.
As the Chinese cultural yoke lightened, Lin noticed a growing interest in the work of earlier generations of composers and lyricists. In addition to digging into the backgrounds of the golden oldies and collecting the stories behind their classic songs, he even helped a few stage comebacks. In 1977, for example, Lin talked to the lyric writer Li Lin-ciou (1909-1979) about his 1946 hit "Mending the Broken Net." The song had long been held to describe the broken dreams of the Taiwanese people, a political cri de coeur of the colonized common folk. In his conversations with Li, however, Lin discovered that it was really written in hope of mending the relationship with his girlfriend. The song once more became a popular hit and its lyricist was again in the limelight. Li Lin-ciou also wrote "Longing for the Spring Breezes" (1932), one of the most memorable Holo songs in Taiwan's pop music history. Touched by Lin's efforts to preserve local music, Li gave him "Ocean of Lovesickness" to set to music. The ditty, guarded for more than 30 years against waning popularity, was an immediate hit.
Lin continues reinvigorating Holo classics--he is currently reworking some as synchronous duets--especially for karaoke singing. "It'd be so much more fun to sing together at the same time than taking turns," he says.