Journey to the East with Jiang Wen-Ye’s Symphonies
As the first Asian to win the Olympic Art Competition, Jiang Wen-Ye used melody as his brush and musical notation as his paint to depict the beauty of the places he called home.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Imagine a montage that shows a temple — its courtyard filled with scented smoke emitted from incense burning that carries devotees’ prayer to the higher realm. Then an illustrious palace comes into view — its highly-embellished oriental design summons the peak of a civilisation that’s been forgotten by history. A spectrum of colours dance in kaleidoscopic rhythm, sometimes growing into a crescendo, sometimes dissolving to diminuendo. This sequence of culturalscapes is to be found in Formosan Dance, a symphony written by Taiwan-born composer Jiang Wen-Ye (1910-1983), otherwise known as Bunya Koh.
Formosan Dance marked the opening to the concert “NSO & Lü — Legend & Inheritance, Jiang Wen-Ye” jointly organised by the Taiwan Philharmonic (National Symphony Orchestra, or NSO) and Hakka Affairs Council, in commemoration of the composer’s 40th death anniversary.
“NSO & Lü” was held at the National Concert Hall on a Sunday evening, but it was unlike any other NSO concert before this. Led by Conductor Emeritus Lü Shao-Chia, Taiwan Philharmonic performed three of Jiang Wen-Ye’s most renowned symphonies: Formosan Dance, Sketches of the Old Capital, and Confucian Temple Rites. Prior to each symphony, Lü Shao-Chia would recount the composer’s life story at length, and ask the orchestra to play fragments of the symphony. By deconstructing these orchestral compositions, “NSO & Lü” provided the perfect ground for audience to appreciate the music of Jiang Wen-Ye, whose legacy has almost been forgotten at home.
Jiang Wen-Ye (also known as Bunya Koh)
Courtesy of The Online Database of Taiwanese Musicians
Taiwan: His First Home
Born in Taiwan, and educated in China and Japan, Jiang Wen-Ye’s multicultural upbringing played a crucial role in shaping his music. Jiang’s Opus 1, Formosan Dance, was written out of nostalgia for his place of birth, Formosa (now Taiwan), where he only spent a few years time before moving to Xiamen, China, at the age of six, and was later sent to Japan to study.
In Japan, he was known as Bunya Koh, a Japanese rendition of his Chinese name. Before pursuing his career as a composer, Jiang was a vocalist. “If we all have to suffer in this world, I would be willing to be baptised by arts… to suffer by the emotions of a poet, and the passion of a composer,” Jiang wrote. In 1934, Jiang was accepted into Japan’s Federation of Emerging Composers.
Jiang completed his Opus 1, Formosan Dance, in Tokyo in his early 20s. His talent soon brought him international fame. Adapted from an earlier piano composition “The Night in the City”, Formosan Dance was awarded Honorary Mention in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Jiang Wen-Ye was the first Asian to receive such honour.
What intrigues me the most about Formosan Dance is that it leaves room for our imagination to take flight. Lü Shao-Chia described the experience of listening to Jiang’s first opus as akin to that of viewing a Chinese scroll-painting.
In one scene, I see people gathering in front of a temple for festive celebration. In another, the Formosan coastline is seen lit by hundreds of houses that twinkle like stars in the dark. Before I knew it, the night sky slowly transitions into dawn. The first ray of sunlight falls through the glass window that looks out to a garden, in which the flowers and the plants are found asleep.
The combination of strings and percussion is, according to Lü, contrary to the Austro-German tradition of classical music. At a time when Chinese composers were writing music using classical vocabularies, Jiang adopted techniques of modern music to create “bold and daring musical compositions, lending to it a realistic rendering of his hometown,” Lü commented.
Peking: His Second Home
Sketches of the Old Capital was inspired by Jiang’s trip to Peking (now Beijing) in the summer of 1936. This visit prompted the composer to review the direction of his music while looking for new inspiration. Captivated by the beauty of the old capital, Jiang praised in his poem, “Inscribing Peking”:
The beauty of this place burns me and turns me blind!
With Sketches of the Old Capital, Jiang Wen-Ye takes us on a promenade around this capital that had witnessed the rise and fall of the world’s greatest empires. In the first movement, Street Scenery, a combination of strings, woodwind and percussion evokes the bustling streets of Peking, where we could almost hear the street vendors shouting to attract passersby. In The Atmosphere of a Theatre, we arrive at a traditional tea house where a Chinese opera performance is staged. The audience, while enjoying their hot tea and melon seeds, are entertained by the actors’ virtuoso singing and martial arts.
In the third movement, Ruins, we’re taken to a huge complex of palaces and garden where the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) was once found. This imperial residence, now in ruins, extends to the remnants of the Great Wall nearby. While immersed in thoughts, a butterfly comes into view, kissing on the wreckage to breathe new life into them.
In the final movement, we’re taken back to the same street where we started. But what was once a lively street seems to have been ruthlessly abandoned by time. One museum showcases a selection of photographs that details the memories of this old capital in gelatin silver prints. It feels as if these images were magical, acting as a portal for viewers to travel through time.
Accompanied by the flute’s light-hearted melody, we return to contemporary times. That same street is now filled with tourists from all corners of the world. Sketches of the Old Capital comes to an end with the strings, percussion and woodwind all coming together for a grand reiteration of the main theme. This theme, inspired by Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, is Jiang Wen-Ye’s version of the Promenade, which recurs throughout the symphony like a guide on this excursion.
The Antique Dealer's Show Windows, Beijing, 1965 by Marc Riboud
Sketches of the Old Capital was one of the pieces that the composer wrote after he accepted the offer to teach at the Music Department of Peiping Normal University in Beijing in 1938. While nurturing new talents, Jiang devoted his time to studying ancient music and poetry, and he started composing with Chinese pentatonic scale.
In Confucian Temple Rites, Jiang turned towards ancient compositions such as Yayue, a ritualised form of music performed at royal and religious ceremonies in ancient China, whose origin can be traced back to as early as the Western Zhou dynasty (1047-772 BC), brining the aesthetic experience of his symphony to a new height.
Jiang Wen-Ye was a prolific composer who wrote music by intuition, and tapped into various genres, from symphony to piano solo, piano concerto to chamber music, sonata for multiple musical instruments to opera. According to his mentor, Russian composer and pianist Alexander Tcherepnin, Jiang would show him a newly composed piano piece everyday. Unfortunately, most of Jiang’s manuscripts were either lost or destroyed.
Life wasn’t always smooth sailing for this gifted composer. Jiang Wen-Ye belonged to a generation of Taiwanese who struggled with their identities as he was born at a time when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. This explains why, after winning the Olympics, Jiang’s achievement was downplayed by the Japanese who saw him as a second-class citizen and colonial subject.
In mid-20th century, Jiang was caught up in the whirlpool of political conflicts; he ended up losing his teaching job, the opportunities to perform, as well as the rights to publish his works. His songs were banned by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan. When musicians wanted to perform Jiang’s music, they had to use his Japanese name, Bunya Koh, in order to evade censorship.
Jiang’s last work was The Song of Ali Mountain, which was inspired by the folksong that his mother sang to him when he was a child. Jiang died of illness in Beijing in 1983, leaving his final opus unfinished. But his legacy lives on. Today, the hymns composed by Jiang are still sung by Catholics in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.
Despite upheavals in life, Jiang never ceased to express his sentiments for the places he called home. It’s important to note that, while Jiang’s music was inspired by Eastern culture, they don’t sound very Eastern. Liu Lin-Yu and Shen Tiao-Lung — researchers in Jiang Wen-Ye and his music — described his music as imbued with “imagery of Taiwan, style of Japan, and lingering charm of China.”
In my view, Jiang Wen-Ye’s symphonies restore the impression of what the Far East looked like in the 20th century. To a certain extent, Jiang Wen-Ye was like a professional Orientalist whose job was to, in the words of Edward Said, “piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental.” But rather than working with fragments of ceramics, textiles and artefacts alike, Jiang depicted his homes using melody as his brush and musical notation as his paint.
Reference:
Liu, Mei-lien, 2006, 'Gone and almost forgotten', Taipei Times.
Liu, Lin-Yu and Shen, Tiao-Lung, 2022, “Renshi Jiang Wen-Ye”, NSO & Lü — Legend & Inheritance, Jiang Wen-Ye (playbill)
Said, Edward W., 1978, Orientalism
“NSO & Lü — Legend & Inheritance, Jiang Wen-Ye” was performed at the National Concert Hall in Taipei on October 16, 2022.