The first lecture is a reprisal of her landmark article, "Flowing Down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination" (Ethnomusicology, 2009). Guy will discuss how her research on the "Tamsui songs" became the basis for the first-ever published scholarly work to employ the term "ecomusicology," and she will look at the road this nascent subfield of music scholarship has travelled in the years since her article was published.
The second lecture examines how the music of Taiwan's famous musical garbage trucks have infiltrated a broad-range of popular music expressions. Together, these lectures frame Guy's interest in human perceptions of the physical environment, the expression of these perceptions in music, and the potential for positive environmental outcomes from these engagements.
12 November 2020, 15:30-17:30,
NTNU GIEM Alois Osterwalder Hall (臺北市大安區師大路31號2樓)
Flowing Down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination
The Tamsui River has captured the imagination of Taiwan's songwriters for decades. Popular songs dating from the first half of the twentieth century portray idyllic scenes of the river and the life along its banks. These images stand in stark contrast to the Tamsui as it has existed in recent times. As Taiwan's "economic miracle" took shape, the Tamsui essentially became a conduit for household and industrial waste. The river's serious degradation became the subject of numerous songs, films, and theatrical pieces beginning in the early 1980s, just as Taiwan grass-roots environmental movement was taking shape. In analyzing these performative works, Guy draws on the theories and concerns of literary ecocriticism which she uses to develop a theoretical framework for the ecocritical study of musical works.
18 November 2020, 13:20 to 15:00
NTNU GIEM Alois Osterwalder Hall (臺北市大安區師大路31號2樓)
Garbage Truck Music and Environmentalism in Taiwan: What Do the Songs Have to Say?
Garbage trucks in Taiwan are musical. Badarzewska's Maiden's Prayer or Beethoven's Für Elise announce the brigade's arrival at designated times and pick up locations. Neighbors stream into the street for a turn at depositing their presorted waste into the proper receptacles. Taiwan's semi-tropical climate combined with a densely situated human population, and the presence of well established rat and cockroach populations, combine to make garbage management a matter of daily urgency. Garbage in Taiwan is at the center of a musical assemblage that resonates beyond the waste collection soundscape. This lecture takes selected songs from Taiwan's pop music—primarily Mandopop from the early 1980s through the mid 2010s—as evidence of the ways in which everyday practices aimed at dealing sustainably with household waste have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities.
Nancy Guy, PhD, is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. Her scholarly interests include the musics of Taiwan, opera (both Chinese and Western), and the ecocritical study of music. Her first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology. Guy's second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015), focuses on the artistry and appeal of the beloved American coloratura soprano and was named a "Highly Recommended Academic Title" by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. Guy's article, "Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination," (Ethnomusicology, 2009) is a foundational text in the field of ecomusicology and was awarded the 2010 Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize. She is currently editing a volume, Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island, which is scheduled for publication by Routledge Press in 2021. Guy currently serves on the editorial board of Ethnomusicology.
