Music is often said to be the soul of a culture. To sing one's own songs in one's own language is regarded as fundamental to a sense of cultural identity. In Taiwan for many years, however, singing in any languages other than Mandarin Chinese, actually the native tongue only of a relatively small group of immigrants, despite its proclaimed status as the "national language," was frowned upon and often actively suppressed. Even now, when this linguistic chauvinism is a thing of the past, Mandarin songs still dominate commercial music.
For the Hakka, an ethnic minority that constitute about 15 percent of Taiwan's population, and Taiwan's aborigines, perhaps 2 percent of the population divided among 13 different tribes, there are two sets of difficulties. The first is simply to get their music heard. The second is to find melodists or lyricists who can inject new vitality to their music.
With the aim of encouraging minority languages songwriting and singers, the Government Information Office (GIO) established the Taiwan Original Music Awards (TOMAs) three years ago. The awards are divided into three dialect groups--Holo, Hakka and aboriginal. Creative works that are not published are eligible for entry. The first prize is NT$200,000 (US$6,100), and award-winning songs will be published.
If it were not for the inspiration of the TOMAs, Hsieh Hsuan-chi would have never thought of writing a rap in his mother tongue--Hakka. Hsieh had just graduated from college. While in senior high school, he became interested in hip-hop rap and performed underground music in pubs. However, it was not until he was a sophomore that the ethnic element of hip-hop music began to influence him in mother-tongue songwriting. "A classmate told me about the TOMAs competition one day. I thought OK, I'll try a Hakka rap. When I completed the first sentence, I was like stunned, because the flow of the music was far better than that in Mandarin," Hsieh recalls. The competition kicked off his music career.
Use What You Have
Hsieh won a TOMA in the Hakka category for his song Hakka Hip-Hop, in which Hsieh raps about the tiredness and hunger he felt when he helped his old grandmother pick cucumbers, routine work that his family usually begins at 4 am. He also raps about his unhappiness that there are so few Hakka-language TV programs available. "I want to convey that spirit of the Hakka people, known as 'hard-necked,'" Hsieh says. Hard-necked means a spirit of not succumbing to hardships.
Hsieh discovered Hakka was actually a good language to use for rap. "The Hakka language has its unique intonations, a feel of gradation and a flow of emotion. When rhymes are added, they match well," Hsieh says. While electronic music software has made the musical arrangement easy, Hsieh found it somewhat difficult to write lyrics that rhyme. "A rap requires good rhyming, one, two to even three-word rhyming. But my mother tongue is not that good," Hsieh says. It is not uncommon to see the younger generation of minority groups lose facility with their mother tongues. Hsieh solved his problems by asking for help from his parents.
For many Hakka, particularly for the older generation, however, rap is a genre still too new to suit the Hakka language. "I once sang this song at a performance. As I rapped 'you sit down and listen carefully,' an old man suddenly stood up and walked away unhappily," Hsieh recalls. "I was sure he didn't understand what I was rapping about. Yet gradually I started to question myself why I always rapped since no one understood it," Hsieh says. He is now trying to move to a style that combines rap and singing, which is new in Taiwan and which he believes can be more popular.
"I would prefer to listen to Hakka mountain songs than rap," says Chang Jyun-kuo, another Hakka TOMA winner. Mountain song is a traditional music form of the Hakka people. Middle-aged Chang learned to play musical instruments and write songs in Hakka from a very young age. His award-winning song was entitled Swallows and Owls, in which Chang depicts his impressions about the two bird species helping eliminate snakes or mice on the farms. Chang applies many modern musical elements to produce an airy tune and pleasant feeling in this song. His TOMA win convinced him that the judges preferred an environmental conservation-related theme.
"Hakka mountain songs lack variety. We have to make progress and produce something new in order to enhance their popularity," Chang says. For Chang, it seems only certain music styles lend themselves to the characteristics of the Hakka language. Kua ?h?or Taiwanese opera, for example is not suitable to be sung in Hakka because of its polyphonic characteristic.
Creating a Heritage
Chang writes minority-language songs because he wants the next generation to have something to sing. "The Hakka people in my hometown speak the Tapu dialect, which sounds quite different from other Hakka dialects," Chang says. While the Hakka have had a few popular songs, none of them have been in the Tapu dialect.
Hakka mountain songs are now sung only in performance. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
"Why can't Hakka popular songs be presented in other ways? For example, they can be pleasant as background music played in coffee shops," says Lin Pi-hsia. Lin is a trained nurse, but she quit nursing to follow her musical aspirations several years ago. She is now a graduate student in aerospace medicine. As a singer and songwriter she has tried different music styles, including commercial popular songs, advertising jingles and Hakka language songs.
Lin says she creates music or songs to represent pictures in her mind. She starts by imagining a scene or series of images and writes music to express it.
Most of Lin's songs are about love, a topic from which Mandarin popular songs rarely diverge and songwriters can hardly avoid. But in her two Hakka songs collected in albums of TOMA winners, she has more room to present more of her thoughts or inner struggles. One song, entitled 24 dollars depicts the struggle of a girl who wants to get close to the one she loves but reality stops her from doing so. In the second song, entitled Where Breezes Blow, she depicts places which breezes blow to: a classroom in which sits a little girl who wants to fly, a large tree under which old people sit and talk about their grandchildren, and the many crossroads, literally and figurative, that an adult unavoidably encounters.
Lin hopes Hakka songs can gain more popularity. She plans to add a few Mandarin sentences to Hakka lyrics so that people can understand them better.
Ado Kaliting Pacidal, an Amis aborigine who works as a TV host, grew up in a place filled with the sounds of the sea and of singing. When she was little, she often followed her father, an ethnomusicologist, to collect folk songs among the tribal villages. That experience left with her a familiarity with her culture. "I often fell asleep with the company of the singing of the elderly," she says.
Links to her native culture faded gradually when she entered an environment dominated by Han culture. Similar to other teenagers in the city, Ado listened to popular songs, as well as learning to play the piano. She even learned to sing Western style. But as a teenager at school in Taipei, far from her home in remote Taitung, she began to find something which strengthened her identity. "I looked for something by which I could identify myself and try to find a way to make myself feel proud of my identity. I started to learn modern or traditional songs of the indigenous people and to improve my ability in mother tongue," Ado says. She developed a sense of mission to increase her tribe's visibility among mainstream society and songwriting and singing was an important tool in her raising of awareness of the Amis' culture.
Inspiration
Ado's first song Vanishing, depicted her sense of loss as she saw so much of her tribe's culture had disappeared. The feeling overcame her when she accompanied her aged father to do fieldwork for the last time. "We carried the camera and tape-recorder to the village. We could always tell where the site of an Amis harvest festival was by the sounds of ringing small bells and of the echo of footsteps among the mountains. But that time I found the sounds of small bells were less regular. And the singing had changed. Fewer and fewer young people participated in the tribal festival," Ado says. As she heard the lapping waves on her way home, she was so agitated. "I said to myself that while the sea was still lapping the seashore, our songs should be passed down and sung forever," Ado says. A few years later this song together with the other two songs won her a few TOMAs.
Though Ado was so fascinated with traditional ethnic culture, she found it rather hard to write a song using ancient tunes. "My father, who was immersed in traditional culture for so many years, once said that he could never do anything better than the old music so he never wrote songs. Furthermore, the environment today is so different from the past," Ado says. Realizing how much it takes to become immersed in a culture, she uses a musical style somewhere between folk and pop. Sometimes using her mother tongue to write songs is difficult. "It is really challenging to look after the terseness of each term, the beat and the melody," Ado says.
Two TOMA-winning songs of Ado's were entitled I Yoyo and Being Myself. The former, a combination of an Amis lullaby and her own composition, commemorates an elder, while the latter addresses the identity issue that she continually reflects on. "These songs are a way for me to proclaim my constant dialogue with my tribe," Ado says.
The GIO outsourced hosting the live competition for the TOMAs to Taiwan Colors Music Co. (Courtesy of Taiwan Colors Music)
Ado hopes she can lead the singing in tribal festivals someday. "The leader's voice must be very penetrating, clear and loud enough to have a dialogue with nature," she says. She has learned the original Amis women's phonetics to make her singing sound more authentic. "I do hope my songs will be widely sung by my tribespeople," Ado says. The TOMAs provide a platform for her work to be heard and published.
Djanav Zengror, another TOMAs winner, works as deputy director at Taiwan Indigenous TV. Djanav belongs to the Paiwan tribe and lived in the tribal mountain areas for many years. Like the Amis, the Paiwan singing is a common way to interact with others. That was the environment he grew up with. Songs often just spring into his mind. "I was deeply immersed in my traditional culture. Every time I sing, people would identify the song as an ancient Paiwan tune. Old people would even guess that my song belonged to another Paiwan village. In fact, they were all my own compositions," Djanav says.
Djanav won first prize for his song The Remains of the Year. In this work, Djanav uses natural sounds such as the sound of wind, water, cicadas and frogs, to present a picture in which an old person sits beside the firewood in a mountain village and reflects on his past. The song entitled Where Are You Going won him another TOMA. This song is a conversation between a young man leaving the tribe and elders telling him not to forget them. "This song is a new departure for me. I want to prove to the young people that I can write in a contemporary idiom," Djanav says.
Medium and Message
Djanav uses a lot of classical vocabulary in his songs. He thinks that the ancient tunes best suit the Paiwan language which cannot be pronounced correctly with the kind of round and wide shape of mouth that other tunes force upon singers. "The language cannot flow perfectly using other forms of music," Djanav says.
Ancient Paiwan songs have their own special lyrical patterns. "Our song lyrics usually have only two sentences. After the two sentences, the listener repeats the second sentence. With a few function words coming after that, the listener carries on to improvise his own lyrics. Accordingly, Paiwan songs are rather like personal statements of the singer," Djanav says. He wants to make people more aware of this formula by writing songs in this way.
Djanav insists on using traditional music for his songs, because he thinks there has been an excess of popular songs. While the use of a song by the elderly Amis couple Kuo Ying-nan and Kuo Hsiu-chu as part of the German group Enigma's hit Return to Innocence, itself used as the theme for the 1996 Olympic Games engendered a bitter legal struggle over who had the rights to the song, Djanav is glad that the Amis couple and their music gained such international exposure.
Djanav thinks that participants in the TOMAs mostly prefer a pop idiom. He thinks this is good and can enrich the original culture. "But, I still think I should allow more room for traditional music arrangements to be heard," Djanav says. He recalls that the government once granted subsidies to aborigines to construct modern houses. The problem was that this resulted in the tearing down of many traditional stone slab houses. "With TOMAs, the GIO has good intentions in encouraging local music. But if the award tilts toward a pop style, then the melodies that best suit a particular language structure will be heard less and less. Will this have a similar effect to the housing renewal project?" Djanav says.
It is almost impossible when writing songs in a mother tongue, to avoid being influenced by the associated culture. The degree to which traditional and modern cultural elements are mixed varies, but the result still enriches the local music scene. Heh Dong-hong, a music critic and the convener for the awards, uses "chemical interaction" to describe the process when music meets with minority language songwriters. In this sense, the TOMAS foster originality. "The indigenous language category in particular has seen tremendous diversity," Heh says.
In the past three years, the competition has seen a large number of entries, from unknowns as well as established professionals. "Originality is the principal criterion to win the award," says Heh. Judges include members from musical academies, representatives of commercial music companies and music critics. "The backgrounds of the judges are diverse because we believe there is more than one standard to evaluate the work," Heh explains.
While the TOMAs offer a platform for independent songwriters and lyricists to be heard, Heh says that more effort needs to be made. "There are a lot of entries but the quality works are usually by the same small group of winners," Heh says. He thinks the process of creating the music should also be taken into account. "In addition to establishing the TOMAS, the government should take the trouble to understand in what condition these creators produced their work," Heh says.
Write to Zoe Cheng at zoecheng@mail.gio.gov.tw