The 20th Golden Melody Awards’ (金曲獎) ceremony handed out honors in artistic and traditional music categories at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館) on June 6 with 72 works selected from 1,508 entries competing in 14 categories.
One of the surprise winners was sax player Tung Shun-wen (董舜文). The first-time nominee beat veterans Matthew Lien and Gerald Shih (史擷詠) to pick up the Best Arrangement Award for his jazz album One Day (歡日記).
First-time winner Li Ching-fang (李靜芳) welled up when her independently produced Taiwanese opera album was announced as the Best Traditional Opera Album Award.
Highly esteemed for his modern compositions, composer and educator Lu Yan (盧炎), who died of cancer last year aged 78, was honored for his contribution to Moving Sound (聲動), produced by Music Forum (十方樂集). A compilation of works by contemporary composers in Taiwan, the album was also awarded top honors in the Best Classical Album category.
With seven accomplished musicians and music groups vying for the award, the hotly contested Best Performance gong went to guzheng (古箏) player Ren Jie (任潔). China’s renowned kunqu (崑曲) artist Wen Yu-hang (溫宇航) received the Best Traditional Interpretation Award, while Taiwanese erhu (二胡) player Mia Wang (王明華) took home the Best Crossover Music Album Award for her mold-breaking renditions of jazz numbers.
The Lifetime Contribution Award went to Wu Jau-nan (吳兆南), the revered maestro of Chinese stand-up comedy, or cross talk (相聲), who promotes and studies the ancient folk art.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
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It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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