introduction
Research Projects

Musical Recollection in Formosa: The Legend of Zhou Lan-Ping and Four Seas Records
Project conducted by: Tung Shen, Szu-wei CHEN, Edwin W. Chen, Ai-mei LUO
Publisher: National Taiwan University Press
ISBN/ISSN: 9789860365436
Description
周藍萍先生(1926-1971)是戰後臺灣最重要的國語流行歌曲作曲家。膾炙人口的〈綠島小夜曲〉、賺人熱淚的黃梅調《梁山伯與祝英台》,都是他的作品。四海唱片公司由廖乾元先生(1926- )創立,是民國50年代最具規模的唱片公司。周藍萍與廖乾元合作,開啟了臺灣灌錄原創國語流行歌曲的濫觴,二人合作的唱片每每締造數十萬張的銷售天量。可惜周藍萍英年早逝,四海唱片逐漸淡出巿場,這一段臺灣唱片工業與音樂文化大放異采的歲月已不復為人們記憶。
2012年,廖乾元先生及周藍萍之女周揚明女士將收藏的唱片、照片、流行歌歌本、樂譜、獎座等音樂相關文物資料捐贈臺大圖書館。臺大音樂學研究所沈冬教授帶領研究團隊,包含本所兼任教授陳峙維、陳煒智學者、本所學生羅愛湄等人,完成《寶島回想曲——周藍萍與四海唱片》一書,深入探析了周藍萍(1926-1971)的一生與音樂成就,以及四海唱片公司創辦人廖乾元(1926-)對臺灣唱片工業無悔的付出和耕耘。本書運用了豐富的一手資料,照片、文物、剪報資料、訪談成果,以深入淺出的筆法,娓娓陳述了周藍萍與四海唱片的傳奇。本書分為兩部分,前六章介紹周藍萍的臺灣歲月、香港生涯、電影音樂版圖,並分析他的流行歌曲和武俠電影配樂代表作。第二部分再以六章介紹四海唱片如何崛起、各類唱片出版、唱片產製的流程,並以〈綠島小夜曲〉為例探究四海如何走出國際,成為臺灣外銷輸出的文創軟實力。本書收錄120餘幅珍貴彩色圖片,包括許多從未曝光的照片、周藍萍存世為數不多的作曲手稿,以及四海的唱片封套圖像,如《四海歌曲精華》、《小歌手》、《中國藝術歌曲之夜》、《蔡琴、李建復聯合專輯》等。






The Music of Takasago Tribe in Formosa (Taiwanese Chinese)
Original author: 黑澤隆朝
Editor & interpreter: Yin-Fen Wang, Lin-yu Lin
Publisher: SMC Publishing Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-9576389337
Prof. Yin-Fen Wang and Prof. Lin-yu Lin, a Taiwanese musicologist teaching in Japan, had been leading a team project on Japanese music in colonial Taiwan. In 2019, they published a book entitled “The Music of Takasago Tribe in Formosa (Taiwanese Chinese)” basing on the oringinal one of 黑澤隆朝 .
Description
This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and Asia. Through contributions by both European and Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.
This book is based on the report of the 黑澤隆朝’s participation in the Taiwan National Music Investigation Group in 1943. It extracts the parts related to the aborigines and expands it. It was published in 1973 and became a masterpiece of Taiwan’s aboriginal music research. The main body of the book consists of two chapters. The first chapter is the song and dance chapter, covering the results of field investigation and recording. The second chapter is the musical instrument chapter, which presents the results of the survey of the indigenous people’s musical instruments. In addition to the two major chapters, there are also preface and appendix. The preface first provides an overview of Taiwan’s indigenous people and their music, and then places it in the context of the development of human music and musical instruments. The appendix presents the investigation process in Taiwan in 1943 through the investigation team’s diary. For the first time, this book completely presents the characteristics of Taiwan’s aboriginal music and records the only census of Taiwan’s aboriginal musical instruments in history. It can be said to be an important milestone in the research of Taiwan’s aboriginal music. This translation regards this book as an important historical material, does its best to faithfully reflect the original appearance of the book, and conducts verification and proofreading against the 黑澤隆朝manuscript and the cited literature, hoping to make a complete reproduction of this great work completed by 黑澤隆朝’s lifelong efforts .






Decentering Musical Modernity: Perspectives on East Asian and European Music History
Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)
Project conducted by: Tobias Janz, Chien-Chang Yang and Fumitaka YAMAUCHI
transcript: 2019
ISBN: 9783837646498
A project conducted by Prof. Chien-chang Yang, Prof. Fumitaka YAMAUCHI and Prof. Tobias Janz between NTU and University of Bonn/Kiel is entitled “Cultural Spaces and Global Modernity, Contextualizing Musics in East Asia and Northern Europe,” which later on became a book entitled “Decentering Musical Modernity: Perspectives on East Asian and European Music History”.
Description
This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and Asia. Through contributions by both European and Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.






Sounds of Independence: The Memory of World War II in Taiwan, East Germany, and Denmark, 1945–2015
GIM was also invited by Denmark’s Aarhus University to participate in a project entitlted “Sounds of Independence: The Memory of World War II in Taiwan, East Germany, and Denmark, 1945–2015.” Aarhus University collaborated with GIM to launch a comparative study of music and memory of World War II in several countries, including Taiwan, using the existing database materials in NTU and in other sources in Taiwan.
Description
The Sound Trak researchers analyse how communities in Taiwan, East Germany and Denmark have been using sound as interpretations of World War II – music, language, tones or even noise – to build a collective memory and collective identity during and after the Cold War. Therefore, SoundTrak takes researchers to audio and media files to find out what sounds were key memorial sites in the three countries and whether the sounds supported the countries’ independence.
The research is new and exciting because historians and researchers have been very focused on texts and visual media and not so much on audio, although the human listening sense plays an important role for intellectual and emotional orientation in the world. For example, it could turn out that sound is an important source of memory policy and community formation especially for small states with comparatively limited media industries. Last but not least, as we listen to memories of the Second World War in different countries, we can determine whether a kind of transnational memory has developed over the past 70 years.



78-RPM Records
Project conducted by: Fumitaka Yamauchi and Ying-Fen Wang
One of GIM’s project, the Taiwan Daily News Sonic Culture Database, and NTU Library’s 78-RPM Records Database contain rich materials for studying the musical life in colonial Taiwan and for developing collaborative projects with foreign scholars. Taiwan Daily New Sonic Culture Database with 350,000 entries and over 20 million characters of metadata and a 78-RPM Records database consisting of 6000 records.


