Taiwan Today

On April 12 this year, Taiwan suffered the loss of one of its most creative musicians with the passing of Kuo Chih-yuan (郭芝苑, 1921–2013). Two weeks later, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) issued a commendation that honored Kuo’s achievements as Taiwan’s first composer of opera seria, orchestral and piano concerto pieces and celebrated his crucial, pioneering role in the localization of such musical traditions. Further recognition of Kuo’s impact on Taiwan’s music came at two concerts organized by the Kuo Chih-yuan Music Association and held in the composer’s memory in June and July this year. The first took place at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), while the second was held at the Northern Miaoli Art Center in Miaoli County, northern Taiwan.

Pianist Lina Yeh (葉綠娜), a teacher in the Department of Music at Taipei’s National Taiwan Normal University, played at both memorial concerts. In 2012, Yeh performed and co-produced Red Baby Rose, an album of Kuo’s piano solo works that received a best producer award at this year’s Golden Melody Awards, which honor Taiwan’s top singers and musicians. Several of the pieces on the album—including Ancient Taiwan Music Fantasia and Four Traditional Taiwanese Tunes—draw from local dramatic music traditions such as kua á hì, or Taiwanese opera. In fact, in a comment about recording the album under Kuo’s instruction, Yeh recalled that the composer had urged her to listen to more kua á hì music in order to gain familiarity with a specific tempo.

Kuo was born in Miaoli County’s Yuanli Township during the era of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). In 1936, he left Taiwan to study at a high school in Tokyo, where he began learning to play the harmonica. In 1938, he took third place in a national solo harmonica competition for students in Japan, then went on to win a similar event in 1940. As a high school student, he was more interested in enjoying the works of masters like Beethoven and Schubert than he was in composing. “I didn’t really consider composing music then because there were already so many brilliant works in the classical Western tradition,” Kuo recalled in an acceptance speech for Taiwan’s prestigious National Award for Arts in 2006. “I thought we Easterners could absorb and appreciate their works, but I wasn’t sure we could create our own.”

In 1941, Kuo entered a music college in Tokyo to study violin, but soon had to abandon that pursuit due to a congenital disorder of the fingers. Meanwhile, he began to find inspiration in diverse sources including the works of The Five, a group of Russian nationalist composers, impressionists such as Ravel and innovators like Stravinsky. “Their works have a quite Eastern feel that made me want to compose,” he said in the 2006 acceptance speech. The music of such composers also showed Kuo that classical music could be at once clearly modern and strongly nationalistic in character.

In 1942, Kuo entered Tokyo’s Nihon University, where he majored in music composition. His university days turned out to be less than ideal, however, due to the frequent interruptions and scarcity of resources caused by World War II. “I had no piano and could buy few music materials,” he recalled. “It wasn’t an environment for learning music at all.”

Kuo’s stay in Tokyo proved beneficial, however, when he was introduced to composer Jiang Wen-ye (江文也, 1910–1983), who became an important influence on Kuo’s pursuit of a unique ethnic musical style. Born in what is today’s Tamsui District in New Taipei City, Jiang left to attend high school in Japan in 1923 and became one of the most popular composers in that country from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II. In 1943, Kuo paid several visits to the residence Jiang shared with his Japanese wife, as the composer was then on his summer vacation from teaching at Beijing Normal University in mainland China. In a 1991 magazine article in which Kuo recalled these visits and reviewed Jiang’s life and works, Kuo wrote that he considered Jiang to be a key figure who inspired him to create “modern Taiwanese ethnic music.” In the article, Kuo recalled visiting the couple’s home and listening to recordings of Jiang’s orchestral piece Formosan Dance (1934), which won a major music award in 1936 in Germany. “It has clear low and high-pitched notes, rich colors and splendid structure, sounding like a utopian Taiwan,” Kuo wrote.

Kuo returned to Taiwan in 1946, only to find the country mired in “nearly two decades of cultural aridity,” as he put it. At the time, Taiwan had just a handful of composers, and none were creating modern music or orchestral pieces. Such bleak cultural conditions led the composer to describe his generation as “victims of war.”

In the late 1940s, Kuo took a teaching position at what is today’s National Hsinchu University of Education in northern Taiwan. He lasted only a year at the university, however, as he never grew comfortable with teaching. Instead, he returned home to Yuanli to compose and assist in the management of the family farm.

In the 1950s, Kuo composed for and won awards in several major music contests as well as wrote compositions that appeared in music magazines. His big breakthrough came in 1955, when his Taiwan Folk Symphonic Variations was performed in Taipei by the Taiwan Provincial Symphony Orchestra, today’s National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. That concert marked the first locally created orchestral piece ever to be performed in Taiwan.

Impressive Versatility

As the 1950s drew on, Kuo displayed impressive versatility by composing everything from choral music, orchestral works and piano pieces to film scores and pop songs. In the late 1950s, Kuo worked as a music producer for a film company and created scores for several Taiwanese-language movies that were among the first locally made films to feature original soundtracks. Taiwanese-language movie production peaked from the mid-1950s to late 1960s before declining as the government intensified its efforts in promoting Mandarin as the national language. Kuo continued writing scores for Taiwanese-language films until they largely disappeared in the 1970s.

In the early 1960s, Kuo participated in a movement focusing on the local creation of modern music. That campaign was led by Taiwanese musicians including Paris-trained composer Hsu Tsang-houei (許常惠, 1929–2001), a major promoter and preservationist of native musical and dramatic traditions. Kuo’s works released during this period included well-known piano pieces such as Ancient Taiwan Music Fantasia and Piano Sonata.

As the 1960s progressed, Kuo was repeatedly impressed by radio broadcasts he heard of orchestral works by emerging Japanese composers. He therefore ventured to Japan once more in 1966, this time to study composition at Tokyo University of the Arts. He returned to Taiwan three years later to take a job as a composer and music consultant for Taiwan Television Enterprise, which became Taiwan’s first television station when it began broadcasting from Taipei in 1962. He continued writing pop songs and in 1969 penned No One Understands What Is on My Mind. Singer Fong Fei-fei’s (鳳飛飛, 1953–2012) performance of the song on a 1977 album of Taiwanese ballads made it one of Kuo’s best-known works, while Fong went on to become one of the most memorable pop culture icons in Taiwan’s history.

In 1973, Kuo was invited to work as a composer for the Taiwan Provincial Symphony Orchestra by its then head Shi Wei-liang (史惟亮, 1925–1977), another major promoter of Taiwanese music. After accepting that position, Kuo entered the most prolific and fruitful phase of his musical career. Major works from this period included Concertino for Piano and String Orchestra, which became the first locally created piano and string sonata ever performed in the country when it premiered in 1974 in Taichung City, central Taiwan. In 1984, Kuo composed music for the script of Xu Xian and Madame Bai, which is based on a classical Chinese story associated with the Dragon Boat Festival, an important traditional holiday falling on the fifth month of the lunar calendar. Kuo’s Xu Xian and Madame Bai was notable because it was the first original opera seria written by a Taiwanese composer.

In 1985, Kuo completed Symphony in A—From Tangshan to Taiwan, a larger-scale piece in which “Tangshan” was used as a synonym for mainland China, the ancestral home of many Han immigrants to Taiwan. “Kuo composed this work in memory of his forebears who ventured across the sea to lead a hard life in Taiwan,” TNUA music professor Yen Lu-fen (顏綠芬) stated in a brief biography she wrote for Kuo. “Through their pains and diligence, Kuo’s family built a solid economic foundation that he could rely on as he pursued his music career and ideals, indifferent to fame and wealth.”

Kuo retired from the Taiwan Provincial Symphony Orchestra in 1987. He received a special contribution award at the Golden Melody Awards in 2002 as well as the 2006 National Award for Arts in music, a lifetime achievement accolade from the National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taipei. The selection committee for the latter award praised Kuo for integrating Western classical and native music traditions and thereby enriching Taiwanese culture.

Yen’s biography of Kuo, which was written for the National Award for Arts, compared the composer’s works to those of famed contemporaries George Gershwin (1898–1937) of the United States, Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) of Britain, Isang Yun (1917–1995) of South Korea and Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996) of Japan. Like those 20th-century masters, Kuo and Jiang composed “music that was adored by their compatriots and won international recognition,” Yen wrote. “They have been nurtured by the land of Taiwan.”

Local Influences

Kuo gained further recognition in 2006 when he received the Executive Yuan’s National Cultural Award, another major lifetime achievement honor, for creating and promoting music with local influences including songs in Taiwanese, his mother tongue and the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group.

Kuo’s pop pieces will be heard once again at a memorial concert held in his hometown toward the end of this year. The Kuo Chih-yuan Music Association, the organizer of the concert, plans to develop the event into an annual festival featuring the composer’s works. “Kuo created very Taiwanese music that has a deep connection to our everyday life,” says Wang Tsai-chan (王綵嬋), a retired high school teacher and head of the association, which was established in 2000. The group works closely with a choir led by Ryan Wen-chih (阮文池), a professor at Taichung’s Providence University, to stage performances of Kuo’s music. “The native aspect of Kuo’s music would remain just an abstract concept if his works weren’t regularly performed in front of audiences,” Wang says. “We want people in Taiwan to know more about their own musician and take pride in him.”

Kuo offered perhaps the best summary of his approach to music in his acceptance speech for the National Award for Arts. “Traditional Taiwanese folk music has become the major material I work with,” he said. “It has shaped the style of my modern Taiwanese ethnic musical works. I want to write modern, Taiwanese-style works that can be enjoyed by audiences. It’s all that I live for.”

Kuo’s commitment to his native land continues to impress and inspire younger Taiwanese musicians like Grace Lin (林慈音), a soprano singer and operatic performer who was shortlisted for a Golden Melody Award this year. “Kuo concentrated on creating Taiwan’s own music and making it classic,” Lin says. “He never stopped insisting on including ‘our own things’ in compositions.” Through the efforts of Wang’s foundation and younger musicians such as Lin, Kuo’s works will continue to strengthen and enrich Taiwanese music for years to come.

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw