Silk Road Bimonthly 088
Good art withstands the test of time. From the recording of LO Leung-Fai’s Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter to the re-staging of CHENG Si-Sum's dance drama Eternal Love across the Magpie Bridge, these Chinese musical works, which were born in the 1980s, are still charming today. With rich melody lines, they create a unique flavor of traditional music and are artistically appealing on multiple levels. Today, 40 years later, we are embracing the classics to help create our future, giving new life to our works with more diverse artistic creative energy. In the final performance of the 2023 Taipei Traditional Arts Festival—Spectacular of TCO: The Traditional Dance Drama 2023—dancer HSU Li-Mei is invited to reconstruct the dance score and conductor CHENG Li-Pin to re-orchestrate Eternal Love across the Magpie Bridge. With new thinking and stage technology, combined with the talents of music, dance, theater, multimedia, and other fields, the audience will be led to experience again the classic love story of the Cowhand and the Weaver Maiden. The TCO’s philosophy of tradition with innovation can also be seen in the performers and repertoire of the concert “Ecstatic on Strings—A Soirée of Erhu Virtuosi”. The jury and winners of the 2023 Taipei Chinese Instrumental Competition will all perform on the same stage, symbolizing the passing down to a new generation. The repertoire also recalls the historical development of the huqin—from LIU Tianhua's Ten Greatest Hits from the early 1920s to SUN Wenming's Flowing Waves from the 1950s, from HE Zhanhao and CHEN Gang's Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai to LIU Wenjin's The Great Wall Capriccio from the 1980s—performers pay tribute to the classics by reproducing them. In terms of new works, the Second Erhu Concerto, composed by Taiwanese composer LIU Shueh-Shuan in the 21st century, is cited as a demonstration of the achievements of Chinese music rooted in Taiwan. The concert will also include the premiere of Taipei Style, commissioned in 2023 from Singaporean composer WANG Chenwei, representing Taipei as an international city and TCO as an orchestra based internationally on the Taiwanese brand, in its tireless efforts to fulfill its vision of making Taiwan hear the world and the world hear Taiwan. Classic works need time to become refined and to become settled, but becoming a classic takes more than just the passage of time. The thread of the humanities weaving through the depths of time produce the classics, but also they define what a classic is. The conferment of cultural capital and the application of discourse’s power have always been taken seriously by intellectuals, and in the same way musicians also have inherent responsibilities. Therefore, in addition to performing the duties of exhibition, TCO also makes efforts to plan a platform for discussion and dialogue. The TCO 2023 International Symposium on the Creation of Chinese Music is a collection of keynote speeches, paper presentations, roundtable discussions, special concerts, music collection, and other activities. Topics of discussion include “Dialogue between Ethnomusicologists and Composers” by LEE Ming-Yen and WANG Chenwei, and international scholar Dr. Donald Reid WOMACK's observations on “The Collision and Integration of East and West—Contemporary Creation of Eastern Instrumental Music”. It seems that through meticulous classification and discussion, as was suggested by next-generation scholar WANG Min-Erh’s groundbreaking hypothesis, we have ushered in the “Taiwan School of Music” of the 21st century, laying a cornerstone for Taiwan's traditional music creation and through well-crafted musical works, we write our own classics. 01 The Route to Innovation : Through Well-Crafted Musical Works, We Write Our Own Classics
![Taiwan.gov.tw [ open a new window]](/images/egov.png)
