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Listening for Environmental Consciousness in Taiwan's Popular Music

The French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Taipei Office organise the following conference:

Abstract:

An overview of popular music produced in Taiwan since the 1980s evidences a concern with the degradation of the physical environment. Environmentalist tropes in Taiwan pop songs range from brief textual or musical references to entire songs that narrate the details of a polluted land- or waterscape. Issues of social and environmental justice sometimes appear alongside mentions of garbage, polluted landscapes, and degraded bodies of water. This paper concentrates on works that address the pollution and environmental degradation produced by the petrochemical industry, including songs and albums by the New Formosa Band 新寶島康隊, Zhu Yuexin 豬頭皮, Sheng-Xiang & Band 生祥樂隊, and Village Armed Youth Band 農村武裝青年.

Building on literary scholar Lawrence Buell's work, Guy asserts that the cultural messages found in popular songs are "acts of the environmental imagination" and as such, they may "energize" at least four kinds of engagement. Songs with environmentalist subjects connect listeners "vicariously with others' experience, suffering, pain: that of nonhumans as well as humans." They may reconnect listeners "with places they have been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go." Such songs "may direct thought toward alternative futures" (Buell 2001:2), And, importantly, they may affect one's caring for the physical world. Through this brief historical overview and analysis of green themes in Taiwan's popular music, this paper suggests that such musical narrations have contributed to a sense of environmental consciousness in Taiwan.

Speaker: Nancy Guy (University of California, San Diego)

Nancy Guy is a Professor of Music and the inaugural holder of the Chiu-Shan and Rufina Chen Chancellor's Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, San Diego. As an ethnomusicologist, her research has focused on the musics of Taiwan and China, the ecocritical study of music, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese forms), and music and state politics. Her current book project centers on music and environmentalism in Taiwan. Guy's first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan(University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology. Her second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015) was named a "Highly Recommended Academic Title" by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. Her most recent book is an edited volume, Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island (Routledge, 2022). This seminar will be held in English. Corrado Neri, Director of the CEFC Taipei, will chair the session.