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Spotlights

Duo Recital Delivers Echoes of Traditional Tea Harvest Chants

Date: 2017/6/23

Image1:“Sio-Po-Kua: Music from Taiwan's Lush Tea Gardens” concert.Image2:Performers and guests of the concert.Image3:Promotional brochures of the concert.

“Sio-Po-Kua: Music from Taiwan's Lush Tea Gardens” concert.

Performers and guests of the concert.

Promotional brochures of the concert.

The organizers of the course "Music Design and Innovative Application" offered at the Stanley Wang D-School@NTU teamed up with the Dixon Foundation for Arts and Culture to put on the concert, "Sio-Po-Kua: Music from Taiwan's Lush Tea Gardens," on May 28.

Held at KHS Hall in Luzhou, the duo recital featured Taiwanese flutist Chia-Fen Tsai (蔡佳芬), a graduate of the Yale School of Music, and virtuoso Cuban classical guitarist Rene Izquierdo.

Unique to Taiwan, sio-po-kua are traditional mountain songs that were chanted among the tea farmers of Pinglin, a mountainous area in southeastern New Taipei City famous for its pouchong tea, while they picked tea leaves during the harvest season. Although the melodies of sio-po-kua are composed of simple three-note scales, they are still rich in expression.

The songs presented in Tsai and Izquierdo's performance were the work of composer Chun-Da Huang (黃俊達), who reinterpreted the traditional songs compiled by ethnomusicologist Chin-Cheng Lin (林金城) in his book, Pinglin's Sio-Po-Kua. Huang's fresh reinterpretations merge a bygone soundscape of Taiwan with Western musical instruments, enabling a fading echo from the past to reach the ears of contemporary listeners.

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