Intervention through School Education and Social Education i. Department of Traditional Music at TNUA

In 1995, the National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts , hereafter TNUA) set up its Department of Traditional Music, which is the first department of music in universities in Taiwan to offer programs for students to major in nanguan, beiguan, guqin (seven-stringed zither), or pipa, instead of the usual western classical musical instru-ments or the guoyue instruinstru-ments as in other department of music.

Run by Lü Chuikuan in its beginning years, the department invited veteran nanguan musicians to teach there, almost all in their 70s or 80s.⁶⁸ These veteran musicians generally followed the tradi-tional method of teaching by rote and were assisted by the junior faculty members of the department.⁶⁹ Most of the students came with a background in guoyue and entered the department with little prior experience in nanguan. Some of them only took nanguan les-sons for a few months (or even weeks) before the entrance exam, and others may have taken nanguan courses offered in school.⁷⁰

67. Beside TCB’s nanguan project, Taipei Municipal Chinese Orchestra, which became one of TCB’s subordinate agencies, formed its nanguan ensemble in 1996 and has frequently presented nanguan concerts in its annual Traditional Arts Festival. At first, the concerts mainly featured its own group with assistance from other groups. Starting in 2000, it has enlarged these single concerts to become a concert series in which each concert features a single nanguan group.

68. These included Wu Kunren and other musicians from Taipei Minnan yuefu, Tainan Nansheng she, and Lukang Yazheng zhai. These musicians are treated as professors both in terms of their titles and their salaries.

69. For more on the department, see TCB 2002c:166 and Lü 2002:168-70, 189, 191.

70. A majority of the students who entered the department took lessons with Zhuang Guozhang either in the courses he offered at several operatic schools wehre he taught (see below) or in his own group, Zhonghua xianguan yuetuan (also known as Shan Yun ). Consequently his group has attracted an increasing number of students and has expanded its space and its number of

teach-Since 1999, the department began to produce its graduates. Several of these graduates went on to pursue their master’s degrees in tradi-tional arts, some entered HTYF and Gang-a-tsui respectively to become professional nanguan musicians, and one joined CCCB’s Nanguan/Beiguan Museum staff. Other graduates simply quit nan-guanafter graduation.

As the first department to offer degrees in nanguan, it has encountered many problems. For example, the old musicians’ tradi-tional way of teaching is difficult to fit into the semester system of the university education, and is hard to be appreciated and absorbed by the students who still knew little about nanguan. Among the teachers, there is a sense of competition regarding who is more pop-ular with the students and who can teach the more difficult reper-toire. As for the students, they mostly came with the purpose of get-ting a university degree, and few of them had the chance to cultivate their interest and appreciation for nanguan in the environment of traditional nanguan clubs, where nanguan is part of the way of life instead of a degree to be acquired through a series of courses and exams. Most importantly, most students cannot see a future in nan-guan after their graduation. After all, despite the existence of the two professional nanguan groups (HTYF and Gang-a-tsui), nan-guan remains largely a hobby for amateur musicians rather than a profession. Consequently, it is difficult for students to devote them-selves to their study.⁷¹

In the summer of 2002, the university found it necessary to reform the department. This resulted in some change in the depart-ment’s curriculum design and the method of examination in order to strengthen the students’ ability to play as an ensemble and to master the more advanced repertory. Despite these changes, however, it seems that some of the fundamental problems still remain unre-solved, such as the incompatibility of nanguan as an amateur

musi-ers to accommodate its growing student body (For more, see TCB 2002c:2-7, 96-98).

71. For criticism on the problems of the department, also see Chou 2002 and Lü 2002: 166.

cian’s hobby and as a professional career to be pursued through a university degree.

ii. Proliferation of Nanguan Training Courses in Schools and in Society

Since 1995, nanguan training courses have proliferated at all school levels. They have become more widespread among elemen-tary and secondary schools than the first half of 1990s.⁷²In addition, several universities and colleges have begun to offer nanguan courses as part of their curriculum.⁷³Beside schools, trainings cours-es are also offered by nanguan groups and by public and private organizations, such as cultural centers, private foundations, and tem-ples.

Among these training courses, it is fortunate that the training courses offered by veteran groups, such as Huasheng she since 1987 and Taipei Minnan yuefu since 1992, have produced a number of new nanguan musicians who have more or less preserved the style of the veteran nanguan musicians. Most of the other state-funded training courses, however, have failed to produce similarly satisfacto-ry results. In order to make nanguan easier to learn in a group set-ting, these training courses resorted to the use of notation, and

72. According to a list compiled by Lü Chuikuan (2002:329-30), there were at least seventeen schools that offered nanguan courses as extracurricular activity in the years of 2001 and 2002. The list, however, has at least left out the training course taught by Cai Qingyuan in Beigang’s Jianguo Junior High School

in Yunlin County (Cai 2002). Thus the actual number of the training courses in those two years should be more than seventeen.

73. For example, Wu Kunren of Huasheng she has taught at the Department of Music at TNUA; Wang Xinxin of HTYF has taught at the Graduate Institute of Theatre at TNUA and the Department of Guoyue at National Taiwan Academy of the Arts (now National Taiwan Univeristy of the Arts), and the Graduate Institute of Musicology at National Taiwan University

; Zhuang Guozhang of Zhonghua xianguan has taught at the National Fuxing Theatre School and the National Guoguang Theatre School , which were combined to become the National Taiwan Junior College of Performing Arts . For details, see TCB 2002c: 38, 96, 165-71.

teachers often can only teach the simplest pieces. By the end of the training courses, in order to fulfill the funding agency’s requirement, concerts are often presented with students singing or playing in group, in contrast to the principle of one instrument per person in traditional nanguan playing. In recent years, it has become fashion-able for teachers to replace nanguan traditional repertory with Tang dynasty poems set to nanguan tunes in order to make the learning easier (since most students are already familiar with these poems and do not have to struggle with the unfamiliar nanguan lyrics). All of these may have increased nanguan’s exposure to the general public, but they may also have created some wrong or bad impres-sions about nanguan.⁷⁴