Intervention from Local Cultural Centers

i. Changhua County Cultural Bureau’s Projects on Nanguan

After CCCB held the 1994 Nanguan Art Festival, it persisted in its intervention in nanguan despite the many problems it encoun-tered in the festival, as we have seen above. First, it continued to offer the nanguan training course started in the festival. Then it formed its Nanguan Experimental Group in 1996, whose members remain amateur musicians without salary.⁶⁰In 1997, CCCB began to gain support from NCTA’s FAPT Project to carry out a multi-year nanguan/beiguan transmission project in 1997. The project lasted until 2003 and its funding was the largest among the projects funded by the FAPT Project. Each year, three nanguan courses are offered at the same time to accommodate students with different levels of proficiency in nanguan, with different teachers assigned for different courses.⁶¹All the lessons are free. The teachers

58. In 2002, the Center became a part of the NCTA and was renamed Research Institute of Musical Heritage .

59. The former project was carried out by Lin Poji. The latter was by Gang-a-tsui.

60. The group is made up of students from the training courses as well as members of nanguan clubs in Lukang and in the neighboring Taichung County.

They meet once a week to have their three-hour lesson from Wu Suxia, who has been the group’s resident teacher since its inception. The maintenance of the group mainly relies on CCCB’s annual budget. For details, see the group’s webpage at http://alpha2.bocach.gov.tw/n032-z.htm.

61. On average, there are 20 to 30 students in each course. Students of advanced-level course also include half of the members of Nanguan Experimental Group . The students meet twice a week for their lessons, each time for

earn hourly pays for their teachings.⁶²The teachers for the nanguan courses mostly consist of musicians from the three nanguan clubs in Lukang. In 1999, CCCB’s Nanguan/Beiguan Museum

was finally completed and started to operate.⁶³ Since its found-ing, the museum has been holding the annual nanguan gala con-cert, with subsidy from NCTA.⁶⁴ In addition, it published a set of nanguan teaching materials.⁶⁵The museum also promotes nanguan in other ways, such as offering short introductory courses for school teachers, sending CCCB’s Nanguan Experimental Group to perform in local school campuses, holding nanguan concerts in the museum to feature the local nanguan groups, and so on.

Despite all these efforts, however, old problems exposed in the 1994 nanguan art festival still remain or have even worsened, and new problems have arised. First of all, the relationship between CCCB and the three nanguan clubs in Lukang has become a mix-ture of love and hate. On the one hand, the nanguan clubs depend on CCCB to provide them with opportunities to give concerts and to assist them with applying for subsidy from NCTA and other govern-mental agencies. On the other hand, however, they also feel threat-ened that CCCB’s training courses and its Nanguan Experimental Group take away their potential students and demand the time of their existing members. Moreover, the old problem of “who gets to teach” and “who gets to perform” remains a constant source of con-flict.

two hours.

62. Teachers normally get NT$800 per hour, assistant teacher NT$400, but teachers like Wu Suxia who are Heritage Award recipients get NT$1500 per hour.

This rate was set by NCTA for all projects funded by its FAPT Project.

63. This was already twelve years after the museum’s initial planning by Hsu Tsang-houei in 1986-1987.

64. According to Zhang Meiling, a staff of the Museum, the annual subsidy from NCTA ranged from NT$0.5 to 0.8 million (Zhang 2003).

65. The set consists of five books accompanied by five corresponding sets of CDs to demonstrate the pieces contained in the books. The whole project was mas-ter-minded by Wu Suxia, with the books written by her, the pieces chosen by her, and the music in the CD performed by her together with members of CCCB’s Nanguan Experimental Group and those of the three Lukang nanguan clubs.

The transmission project has been less than successful due to several reasons. First of all, despite its nominal goal to “transmit”

nanguan, the project was designed more like a “promotional” activi-ty to offer free lessons for the general public to get a taste of nan-guan. The artistry of the teachers is another basic problem, because many of the veteran musicians in the local area have passed away, and there are insufficient veteran musicians left to meet the need of the large number of training courses offered by CCCB. Moreover, when appointing teachers, CCCB officials also had to be “fair” to the local nanguan groups in order to avoid conflicts. With all these con-straints, CCCB’s transmission project could only achieve limited results, despite the large sum of funding it has received from NCTA since 1997.

The gala concerts held annually by CCCB under the sponsor-ship of NCTA provides us with another good example of how state-run nanguan activities often fail to capture the meaning and mecha-nism of such activities in their original context. As Wu Huohuang

sharply observed (Wu 2000), traditional nanguan gala concerts used to allow for spontaneous interaction among the musicians either when they listened to and commented on other musicians’

playing on stage, or when they themselves played on stage impromptuously with musicians from other groups, or when they chatted freely about nanguan during the banquets as part of such events. In contrast, CCCB’s gala concerts are more like western con-certs, with little interaction among the musicians or among the musi-cians and the officials except for some superficial greetings, and each group mostly sits quietly in the auditorium seats waiting for its turn to get on the stage and perform its pieces according to the pre-determined program. Most musicians leave as soon as the concert is over. Thus, although the event may look more orderly on the sur-face, it lacks the warmth and the spontaneous exchanges of musical knowledge, artistry, and friendship among the musicians, which were the essential elements of such events traditionally.⁶⁶

66. For more information on such gala concerts, see my previous writing (Wang 1999).

ii. Taipei Cultural Bureau’s Nanguan Project

In 2000, Taipei Cultural Bureau (TCB), which was founded in 1999, started a plan to investigate the “endangered traditional arts” (shiwei chuantong yishu ) in Taipei, and nanguan was chosen to be the subject of the first project of this plan. In TCB’s design, the project had to be finished within 10 months and had to accomplish four tasks, including a survey of the history of nanguan groups in Taipei, a bibliography of past research on nanguan, the production of a set of nanguan teaching materials, and that of a set of nanguan appreciation materials, with the last two in the form of books and audio-visual recordings targeted at 4th to 6th graders; the total budget was over NT$4.5 million. TCB com-misioned the head of the Department of Traditional Music at Taipei

National University of the Arts to

carry out the project. This commision, however, was much ques-tioned by the scholarly and nanguan circles mainly because the then head of the Department, You Changfa , was a western-trained composer who had limited knowledge about nanguan.

Under You’s leadership, the actual task of the project was car-ried out by several of his former students who are music teachers in primary and secondary schools. Fortunately, one of them is a nan-guanresearcher and another a beiguan researcher. Hence they were able to produce a useful survey of the history of nanguan groups in Taipei, a comprehensive bibliography, and a report on their field interviews (see TCB 2002a, 2002b, and 2002c).

The teaching materials and appreciation materials, however, were lacking in several aspects. The written introductions were plagued by the authors’ unfamiliarity with nanguan and their misin-terpretation of it from a western-classical-music point of view. The audio-visual materials were also problematic in terms of the quality of performance and the audio-visual production. Beside these prob-lems, the selection of the musicians and the payment for their recordings again caused much conflict among the musicians and among the musicians and the project executors. Thus, despite the sincere efforts of You Changfa and his students as well as the good intention of TCB, TCB’s nanguan project provides us with another

example of the misguided nature and ineffectiveness of state-com-missioned projects.⁶⁷

3) Intervention through School Education and Social Education