In a faraway place lives a pretty shepherdess, whom everyone admires….” It’s a song from Jose Carreras’s latest album, titled Passion, and his sublime voice has lost none of its power to tug at the heartstrings. Yet there’s something different. Is Carreras singing in his native tongue, Spanish? Or is Italian, perhaps? Surely that can’t be English spilling out of the speakers?
Assuredly not—Carreras is singing in Mandarin. The song is entitled “A Place Far, Far Away,” which is fitting, because it has traveled a huge distance: from Kazakhstan, to be precise. There it was recorded by a mainland Chinese composer before embarking on the long land and sea journey to Taiwan, where the UFO Group pitched the song to its parent company, Warner Music International. Executives in America liked it. And so eventually, through Warner’s global sales network, the song found its way onto the world’s compact disk players.
This groundbreaking event was actually only one small move in a strategy by Taiwan’s music industry to go global and take Chinese music with it. Michael Chang (張桂明), the director of UFO’s international division, speaks for many when he says: “We want to reshape our roles. Instead of being just local agents echoing the views of some remote overseas principal, we want to be real players, capable of voicing and implementing our own ideas.”
Over the years, the island’s music market has come to be dominated by PolyGram, Warner, BMG, EMI, and Sony. “Taiwan’s following a worldwide trend,” says Roger Lee (李岳奇), senior marketing director of Sony Music Taiwan. “Through a process of amalgamation and acquisition, five multinationals now virtually control the world recording scene.” All these music superpowers have a significant presence in Taiwan. Indeed, it has reached the point where a local music publishing or recording company is unlikely to survive unless it can forge a business relationship with an overseas partner, whether as licensee, subsidiary company, or joint-venture participant.
These compact disks are being manufactured in Taiwan, but until recently the contents were mostly dictated by the foreign-based music giants. Local companies hope to even the scores.
The foreign-based giants are selling huge numbers of foreign-produced CDs on the Taiwanese market, and this has begun to sound warning bells. If Taiwan’s kids insist on humming Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and imitating Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, what is going to happen to local music? “We’re used to singing Western songs,” says Michael Chang, himself a former folk singer. “We often write Chinese lyrics to accompany Western tunes. Why shouldn’t we reverse the process and let Westerners sing Chinese songs?” With this in mind, Taiwan’s music companies believe that they are doing their bit to preserve local culture by pushing Chinese music onto the international stage.
On the face of it, that looks like an uphill struggle, not least because it involves small, on-the-spot branch organizations writing agendas for world music majors. And how can music with strictly local appeal hope to dominate the international scene? Sony’s Roger Lee, for one, is optimistic. He predicts the emergence of a musical “global village” that will boost a new concept—World Music. He points out that ethnic diversity and specifically local cultures are hot topics at present, because people are constantly on the look-out for something different. Disney’s best selling movie The Lion King helped African music sweep the world—proof, according to Lee, that local resources can hit the big time internationally. The music of Taiwan’s indigenous Ami tribe is finding a wide audience through the voices of German-based pop group Enigma. Roger Lee himself persuaded the Grammy Award-winning French group Deep Forest to adapt music from the island’s Yami tribe. “This era has revealed the infinite business potential of indigenous culture,” Lee says. “We shouldn’t just passively go with the flow of the predominant cultural mechanism. Mainstream needs to be countered by non-mainstream, and any non-mainstream influence may turn out to be tomorrow’s mainstream.”
At present, Taiwan is chiefly known to the world for its economic miracle. The island, music companies believe they can create a corresponding cultural miracle. Tu Fang-yueh (杜芳岳) is a director of Chi-Lin Music International, a licensee of more than forty foreign companies, which focuses on classical music. He points to several venerable precedents for the local becomes-international phenomenon. “Tchaikovsky made extensive use of the fugue, which was part of the world language of music during his time, but he still managed to give his work a distinctly Russian flavor,” Tu says. “And Dvorak drew inspiration from folk music to compose Slavic Dances.” He highlights a more recent example. “Ireland is an island, “off the beaten track, rather like Taiwan. But Enya and Sinead O’Connor have combined Celtic folk music with electronic instruments and whipped up a worldwide storm. Why shouldn’t we do the same?”
Michael Chang, UFO Group—“We want to be real players, capable of voicing and implementing our own ideas.”
Not that culture is the only motivating factor; money plays a big part, too. The growing integration and rapid expansion of the Asian market has provided a particularly dramatic stimulus. Most Asian nations have now implemented copyright laws, just as most of them are now embracing market mechanisms. One example: On April 1, Mainland China reduced the tax on imported CDs from 50 percent to 15 percent, causing retail prices to dip by as much as one-third. Factor in the influence of satellite TV networks such as Channel V and MTV Music Channel, with their enormous audiences, and Asia virtually becomes one huge, interdependent market. Given the powerful influence of the mass media, and the existence of millions of Chinese speaking potential consumers, many people perceive Chinese music as virgin soil worth cultivating.
Elite Entertainment Taiwan, a subsidiary of BMG Entertainment, has particularly ambitious plans to promote Chinese music to the world. Elite bought up a mainland recording company that specialized in classical music and is now busy transferring its entire stock onto an estimated three hundred CDs. “Without us, these recordings would have been lost,” says managing director David Jerng (鄭伯秋). “We have the money and Mainland China has the musical resources. We’re going to produce the first comprehensive collection of classical Chinese music. We’re calling it Very China, and there’ll be nothing else like it on the market. All we need is for every music library in the world to buy just one copy, and we stand to make a fortune.”
The irony here is that Elite and Taiwan’s other music companies have been criticized in the past for importing Western culture and values—a criticism that David Jerng shrugs off. “I know that people accuse us of conspiring with Westerners,” he says. “But I’m a businessman, you know. I do whatever sells. I’m not to blame for every cultural invasion since the Opium Wars.”
Elite is only one of many local companies getting ready to invest in this promising field. James Pitman, director of international marketing at Warner Music International, recently visited its Taiwan subsidiary, the UFO Group. Wu Tsu-tsu (吳楚楚), UFO’s managing director, jokingly proposed the idea of Carreras singing in Chinese. To his surprise, Pitman bought it. Carreras personally listened to twenty recommended folksongs that had been drawn from all parts of China, including Taiwan. The end result was that Warner produced two editions of Passion, one with and one without the Chinese song, “A Place Far, Far Away.”
Eric Chang, PolyGram Records Taiwan—“There just isn’t enough good Chinese music, not when you compare it to Western classical music.”
Tu Fang-yueh of Chi-Lin Music is skeptical of UFO’s claim to be at the cutting edge of cultural exchange. “Why two editions?” he queries. “It’s purely commercial, nothing to do with culture. They included a Chinese song because they wanted to sell it to the Chinese, not because they thought Westerners wanted to listen to it. In fact, Westerners won’t hear it at all. I believe the edition with the Chinese song is only going to be sold in the Asian market.” (UFO’s Michael Chang says that Warner offered two editions worldwide, but he confirms that it was the Asian markets that really picked up on the one that included the Chinese song.)
On the Philips-produced CD of Julian Lloyd Webber’s Cradle Song, the world-renowned cellist plays a Taiwanese folk song, “Awaiting Your Early Return.” According to Eric Chang (張力平), marketing manager of Poly Gram Records Taiwan, this track was added to the album only when it hit Asia’s markets. Philips included a Japanese and a Korean folksong at the same time. The copyrights in both Carreras’s “A Place Far, Far Away” and Lloyd Webber’s “Awaiting Your Early Return” are owned by Warner and Philips respectively, not by their Taiwan subsidiaries. “For a recording company, not holding the copyright is like being a tree with no roots,” Tu Fang-yueh says. “We’re still a long way off going international.”
“Beginnings are always difficult.” Michael Chang says. “But at least we’ve exposed internationally famous artists to something Chinese, and they like it.” One consequence became apparent in May last year, when MIDEM (Marche international du disque et de l’edition musicale), the most important international annual exhibition of recorded music, staged an offshoot in Hong Kong—the first time the event had been mounted, even partially, outside of Cannes. Music industry representatives flocked to Taiwan’s stand to applaud a UFO-produced album featuring a young mainland Chinese female singer popularly known as Dadawa (朱哲琴). The album was Sister Drum.
The notes released with Sister Drum describe it as a fine example of the kind of music that celebrates the dignity of the Chinese spirit. This album, inspired by Tibetan chants, strikes the listener as having mystical and spiritual elements. In the album notes, Dadawa describes how when she sang “Sky Burial,” she experienced the sensation of seeing another self float out of her body and fly up into the heavens. Some people are already calling her the Chinese Enya, and the world is waking up to the fact that Chinese music can have a soothing effect on the modern mind.
Sister Drum was first produced by a company in Mainland China. Taiwan’s UFO Group then bought the copyright and proposed that Warner International should market the album globally. “We thought the music was so different from what anyone was used to,” Michael Chang says, “that we expected either a huge success or a total flop. Actually, it’s sold well in over forty countries, ranging from America to Europe.”
On the heels of Sister Drum came a Sony album of music even more traditional in nature—A Night at the Chinese Opera, showcasing the famous mainland Peking opera singer Li Bao Chun (李寶春). This selection of arias and tunes from traditional Peking opera was aimed at overseas music lovers, hungry for the Chinese equivalents of Il Trovatore and Die Zauberflote. But Li also wanted young Chinese, both overseas and at home, to listen to it. With this in mind, he personally oversaw the selection of songs, choosing rhythmical tunes with strong beats that bore little resemblance to stereotypical impressions of Peking opera. The video that Sony Music Taiwan produced to accompany the album features young people performing the traditional operatic songs and dances in an updated, even avant-garde style. The accompanying notes will be translated into several languages. This album is released under the AMP label, which Sony Music Taiwan uses to promote such non-mainstream material as indigenous tribal music and Hakka music.
Tu Fang-yueh, Chi-Lin Music International—“Russia has Stravinski. Finland has Sibelius. Who do we have?”
Roger Lee, Sony Music Entertainment Taiwan—“This era has revealed the infinite business potential of indigenous culture.”
Elite Entertainment’s David Jerng—“I’m not to blame for every cultural invasion since the Opium Wars.”
As long as Taiwan’s recording companies are willing to help pick up the tab for promotion, and settle for lower profits, the international market is more than willing to lend us an ear,” says Chi-Lin Music’s Tu Fang-yueh. “The real difficulties [with internationalization] come not from outsiders, but from within.” Eric Chang of PolyGram, Taiwan, echoes that sentiment: “There just isn’t enough good Chinese music, not when you compare it to the long-standing tradition of Western classical music.”
Some complex issues lurk behind these statements, however. In the past, Taiwan’s authorities, predominantly made up of mainlanders, tended to perceive local music in much the same way that they saw Taiwanese literature—politically sensitive, to be censored and controlled. The advent of a more open political environment has resulted in growing awareness of a separate Taiwanese identity. But even as that identity achieves definition, its advocates are discovering that, after decades of suppression, many of the island’s most precious musical resources have been lost. Nowadays, even such basic melodies as cradlesongs and marches are heavily influenced by Western music: a young mother is more likely to sing Brahms’ Lullaby to her sleepy child than a Taiwan folksong, and great formal occasions frequently resound to the strains of Johann Strauss.
“The real problem is this,” Tu Fangyueh says. “Russia has Stravinski. Finland has Sibelius. Denmark has Nielsen. Who do we have? And did you know that a French company, Disques Arion, has issued CDs of Taiwan’s indigenous and Hakka music, with detailed album notes? What have we done to match that?” These are questions Taiwan must address, if it is not to remain just another musical “faraway place.”