Taiwan Today

Each September, musicians and performers from across the island gather in Taipei City’s Beitou District for a festival to celebrate and promote an instrument that has had a profound impact on the development of Taiwan’s musical culture. For generations, the guitar-like yueqin has provided an accompaniment to folk singers, Taiwanese opera performers and traditional storytellers. In recent decades, however, it has been falling out of use due to the rise in popularity of the guitar, piano and various Western orchestral instruments. In an effort to revive interest in the yueqin, virtuoso players led by celebrated musician Chen Ming-chang (陳明章) have been engaged in a variety of efforts to highlight the beauty and cultural significance of the Taiwanese instrument, such as organizing the Taiwan Yueqin and Folk Song Festival in Beitou. “This instrument represents the foundation on which our musical culture is based,” Chen stresses.

Yueqin is a broad term used to describe a number of related instruments that originated in mainland China. The Taiwanese version, which has two strings and a long guitar-like neck, grew out of the merging of several such instruments that were introduced by mainland Chinese who began immigrating to Taiwan in large numbers from the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong in the mid-17th century. Over time, a single Taiwanese variety of the instrument emerged and became widely used across the island. “Its popularity was probably due to the fact that it was cheaper and easier to make than other similar stringed instruments,” Chen notes.

Due to its affordability, the yueqin was commonly played in the past by poor street performers, and developed the moniker the “beggar’s guitar.” However, the fact that the yueqin was cheap and simple to produce also meant that it was adopted by numerous ethnic groups. “For centuries, it was commonly played by both Han immigrants and plains-dwelling indigenous peoples,” Chen says. “Each community used it to perform their own unique folk songs and ballads.”

Chen, a renowned songwriter also known for his guitar skills, has been fascinated with the yueqin for virtually his entire adult life. In 2009, he founded the Taiwan Yueqin Folk Song Association (TYFSA) in his hometown of Beitou, and the organization has staged the annual Taiwan Yueqin and Folk Song Festival at the Beitou Hot Spring Museum since 2011. The four-week event is scheduled to coincide with the Moon Festival, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth month on the lunar calendar, due to the instrument’s association with the heavenly body. The yueqin is named for the round, moon-like shape of its sound box—yue is the Mandarin word for moon—and is sometimes called the moon guitar in English.

The Beitou Hot Spring Museum, meanwhile, is an appropriate venue for the festival. Taipei’s northernmost district, which is best known for its hot spring resorts, was previously a major hub of Taiwan’s film and music industries. The museum building was originally constructed in 1913 as a hot spring bath house during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). Over the decades, however, it fell into disrepair. In 1997, following a petition by students and teachers from Beitou Elementary School and local residents, it was designated a historic site and came under the administration of Taipei City Government. After being restored in the late 1990s, the building reopened as a museum and has since become a popular tourist attraction. It has also taken on an important role in the preservation of many aspects of the island’s cultural heritage, including the yueqin.

Last year’s Taiwan Yueqin and Folk Song Festival, which started at the end of August and ran throughout most of September, featured exhibitions and lectures as well as performances by numerous folk bands and musicians. It also highlighted the role that the instrument plays in various traditional forms of theater. For instance, the festival included a Taiwanese opera show by a troupe from the northeastern county of Yilan, where the genre—the only type of traditional drama that originated on the island—emerged in the 19th century. And it featured a performance of an art form known in Holo, which is commonly referred to as Taiwanese and is the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group, as liam kua. This form of storytelling, a precursor to Taiwanese opera, interweaves talking and singing and typically features one or two performers. The liam kua show at the festival starred celebrated yueqin player and 2007 National Award for Arts winner Yang Xiu-qing (楊秀卿).

While the instrument played a vital role in the development of many forms of traditional theater, it also helped influence more recent popular music movements in Taiwan. This was due in large part to the work of one man, Chen Dah (陳達, 1905–1981), perhaps Taiwan’s most revered liam kua master and yueqin player. Chen Dah, who inspired Chen Ming-chang to master the instrument, was discovered by music scholars in the late 1960s. The academics were visiting his hometown of Hengchun in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County to document folk songs, and were so impressed by his musical abilities that they asked Chen to visit Taipei so they could record him. He subsequently became widely known for his virtuoso yueqin playing and Hengchun ballads.

Chen Dah’s music inspired an entire generation of artists in Taiwan. Not long after his passing in 1981, a Mandarin song written in his memory titled Yueqin, which was sung by Jeng Yi (鄭怡), topped the pop chart. The success of this track marked a high point in the “campus songs” folk music movement that began in Taiwan in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the popularity of Western-style pop and rock.

By the early 1980s, a growing number of folk songs were being released in Holo and Hakka, the language of an ethnic group that comprises around one-fifth of the island’s population. In 1990, Chen Ming-chang put out his first album, An Afternoon Drama, which features his yueqin playing and contains some of the most well-known Holo songs ever written. The title track refers to the name of a popular Taiwanese opera, while in another song the artist recalls listening to Chen Dah playing the yueqin and singing at a restaurant in Taipei.

Chen Ming-chang had a significant role in the New Taiwanese Songs movement of the early 1990s—a major surge of cultural creativity that began in the years following the lifting of martial law in 1987 and led to the mainstream popularity of songs sung in non-Mandarin local languages. “After the end of martial law, songwriters naturally started expressing ideas that they’d previously kept to themselves,” Chen says. “The movement was a reflection of the social change occurring at that time.” Landmark works from the period include the Holo-language compilation album Songs of Madness (1989), in which Chen and other performers sang about contemporary social issues.

Though Chen is well known for writing pop songs, he has consistently attempted to promote local cultural and musical traditions, and in particular yueqin playing. The soundtrack he composed for the 2012 film Ripples of Desire, for instance, prominently features the instrument.

Currently, Chen is devoting much of his time to developing greater awareness of and interest in the yueqin. His group, the TYFSA, now offers courses to adult learners and potential instructors in addition to teaching music classes at elementary and junior high schools. Last month, Cai Yue-zhao (蔡月昭) and Li Ming-jie (李明潔) from the TYFSA were invited by the Sacred Heart High School for Girls in New Taipei City to give yueqin classes as part of the school’s music program. This marks the first time that the instrument has been formally included in a music curriculum in Greater Taipei. Other schools such as Taipei Mingde Junior High School have invited members of the TYFSA to offer extracurricular classes, while Cai and Li, who both studied under Chen Ming-chang, are also teaching the instrument at Beitou Community College and local community centers.

The association, together with a dozen other related groups across Taiwan, is currently working to expand the number of festivals celebrating yueqin music. “Similar events to the one in Beitou are likely to take place in other places around the country in the near future,” Chen says. Meanwhile, the TYFSA also conducts regular exchanges with Japanese players of the shamisen, a stringed instrument similar in many respects to the yueqin. These events allow musicians from both nations to share ideas on how to appeal to members of the younger generation, and promote the historical and cultural significance of their respective instruments. “Across the world, a growing number of artists are fusing traditional genres with modern styles,” Chen says. “One of our primary goals is to teach young people about the yueqin and the interesting ways it can be used to enhance contemporary forms of musical expression.”

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