Szu-Wei Chen is a musicologist, composer, curator, and internationally acknowledged scholar on how folk songs and folk instruments migrate across continents. But as a kid, this charismatic educator ran into opposition from his family when he said that he wanted to be a professional musician.
“”There is a Chinese or Taiwanese saying,” Chen tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom from his home in Taiwan. “The pettiest, lowest person would be a hairdresser or musician who played the suona.”
Fortunately, his parents still sent him to piano lessons. Then in senior high school, Chen took up the trumpet. But his dad wouldn’t budge regarding Chen’s ambition to become a musician. As a result, Chen ended up studying botany at National Taiwan University.
He soon became tired of laboratory life, so he enrolled at the same university’s Graduate Institute of Accounting.
“Scientists need money, so they need financial experts,” Chen says with a smile.
He landed a job at the now-defunct Arthur Andersen. But once he realized that accounting wasn’t for him, he quit. This was before the Big Five global accounting firm went bankrupt in the wake of the Enron scandal.
“I told my father at the time, ‘Well, I became a scientist; I became an accountant. Probably, it’s the time to be myself.’ So, I went to Scotland,” Chen recalls.
Because he didn’t have any degree in music, he enrolled in the PhD program in the University of Stirling’s Department of Film and Media Studies. After graduating, Chen returned to Taiwan where he became an assistant professor at National Taiwan University. In 2019, he became executive director of an arts centre and joined the Centre for General Education in 2021.
Chen did fieldwork in Shanghai
Last year, Chen spoke to Jade Music Fest musicians in Vancouver about how songwriters can explore ethnicity in original compositions. At this year’s festival, he will deliver a free talk entitled “Mending Generational Gaps Through Music” at 7 p.m. on Saturday (November 8) at Performance Works on Granville Island.
Chen tells the Toronto Spark that Canadian musicians should consider certain things first if they’re going to perform songs from Asia that struck a chord with their immigrant parents or grandparents. For example, if they plan to sing a Teresa Teng hit from the 1980s, they should try to understand how Teng was raised in Taiwan. In addition, it helps to develop empathy for her experiences on-stage and even the food that she ate. According to him, the goal should be to gain insights into how she felt in her environment.
“When I did my fieldwork, I spent half a year in Shanghai,” Chen says. “I talked to elderly people who lived in the 1930s and ’40s—who were even tortured during the Cultural Revolution. I talked to them. I visited their places.”
Chen adds that he wanted to imagine what the city looked like in 1935 so he could feel what might happen if a Frenchman were to bump into a Russian call girl.
“Try to reconstruct the context,” Chen advises Canadian musicians. “I’m not asking them to imitate and to write a song based on that, but rather to feel what it could be if you were there.”
In this regard, he likens it to a blues or jazz musician understanding the roots of their chosen genre.
Chen maintains that by developing these insights, Canadian musicians will better appreciate songs that they might have heard in the cradle from their immigrant parents and grandparents. And he believes that this can help mend generational gaps through music.
Identity and technology rock status quo
There are also important historical currents at play. Chen points out that in the 1950s and ’60s, Mandarin songs were part of the mainstream in mostly Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong. That came about as a result of wealthy Mandarin speakers from Shanghai and other provinces moving to Hong Kong before and after the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
“What were called ‘low-class’ or even ‘no-class’ peasants and labourers in Hong Kong would listen to Cantonese opera and Cantonese ditties,” Chen states. “Wealthy people listened to either American pop songs or English or Mando pop songs.”
However, by the mid 1970s, he notes that Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong were thinking a lot more about their identity and questioned why they had to listen to American rock and pop or high-class Mandopop. And this explains the stunning rise of Cantopop in that era and through the 1980s.
Meanwhile, Taiwan has experienced its own linguistic transformation in popular music. Chen points out that when martial law was lifted in the island nation in 1987, there was only one hour a day of non-Mandarin programming allowed on TV stations. If a station devoted a half-hour to news in Taiwanese Hokkien and another half-hour to a soap opera in Taiwanese Hokkien, there would be no room for any Taiwanese-language singing.
“But after the abolishment of censorship, people got the freedom to express themselves in whatever language they want,” Chen says. “So, people started using their mother tongue.”
After 2000 with the release of iPods and with the rise of many more digital channels, revolutionary changes came to the Taiwanese music business. According to Chen, transnational companies lost control over distribution channels, enabling listeners to focus on whatever they wanted. Performers who previously only sang in Mandarin started adding songs in Taiwanese. There is also a growing number of Hakka-language singer-songwriters.
“Languages are no longer taboo,” Chen declares. “In the past if you were singing in Taiwanese, you had to be very cautious. Nowadays, young musicians would not only have their diversity in language, but also diversity in musical styles.”
Event details
The Jade Music Fest will present Szu-Wei Chen in a free talk called “Mending Generational Gaps Through Music” at Performance Works (1218 Cartwright Street) at 7 p.m. on Saturday (November 8). He will join Dr. Helena Wu, a Canada Research Chair and UBC assistant professor of Hong Kong Studies, in advance of a cross-Pacific collaboration. Taiwanese Hakka singer-songwriter Shu Chan Chiu and the Taiwanese Hakka band HoNi will join Canadian musicians Jacq Teh and Van Lefan. For more information on this show, visit the Jade Music Fest website. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
