Voicing Music: German and Taiwanese
Performers
Viola: Youming Chen
Mezzo-soprano: I-Chiao Shih
Piano: Vera H.P. Hsu
Speaker: Jennifer Kuo
Program
o Johannes Brahms: Two Songs for Voice, Viola and Piano, Op. 91 (Zwei Gesänge für eine Altstimme mit Bratsche und Klavier)
o Ming-Hsiu Yen: Songs of Flowers, for Female Voice, Viola & Piano
o Robert Schumann: Widmung from Myrthen, Op. 25
o Franz Liszt/Robert Schumann: Widmung (Liebeslied) for Piano Solo, S. 566
o Sung-Jen Hsu: Rondo
o The Romance of Lake Dalupalringi (Taiwanese aboriginal folksong, composer unknown)
o Ming-Hsiu Yen: Cina Cuma for Viola and Piano
o Richard Strauss: Morgen! Op. 27, No. 4
Program Notes:
Beyond its practical function as a means of communication, language is like architecture: it carries within it emotion, identity, thought, structure, and countless other inner markers of human experience. A composer’s native language naturally leaves its imprint on the rhythms, inflections, and expressive gestures of their music. This concert explores the intimate relationship between spoken language and musical language, placing Western European and Taiwanese musical traditions in dialogue to reveal both their distinctiveness and their shared humanity.
Brahms and Yen: Two Voices for the Same Ensemble
The first two works on the program highlight and contrast how language shapes music within the same Western tradition — even in the rare instrumentation of mezzo-soprano voice, viola, and piano. Johannes Brahms’s Two Songs for Voice, Viola, and Piano represent some of the most intimate and introspective writing in the chamber vocal repertoire. The addition of the viola creates a texture uniquely suited to the weight and warmth of the German poetic voice. The two songs, Gestillte Sehnsucht (Longing at Rest) and Geistliches Wiegenlied (Sacred Lullaby), set texts by Friedrich Rückert and Emanuel Geibel respectively, and both draw on the natural stresses and lyrically arching phrases of German verse to generate their melodic shapes. The viola remains in dialogue with the mezzo-soprano throughout: at times it responds, and at others it doubles or echoes the vocal line. In the second piece, the viola opens with the melody of an old song. Although its words are never sung, the viola effectively assumes the role of a “second singer.”
Ming-Hsiu Yen’s Songs of Flowers, for Female Voice, Viola, and Piano, similarly weaves together vocal inflections in Hoklo with melodic gestures rooted in distinctly Taiwanese modes of expression. The work was conceived as a companion piece to the Brahms songs, inviting listeners to hear how a contemporary Taiwanese composer reimagines the same intimate chamber vocal medium through a fundamentally different linguistic and cultural lens.
Silvergrass, a plant commonly seen across Taiwan in early autumn, evokes solitude and melancholy as it sways in the wind. The folk song, composed by Yu-hsien Teng with lyrics by Bing-ding Hsu during the Japanese colonial period, uses the white, scentless flower as a metaphor for resignation in the face of life’s hardships. Jasmine in June, a traditional Taiwanese folk tune with lyrics by Bing-ding Hsu, compares the fragrant jasmine to a beautiful young woman whose charms go unnoticed. Its lively rhythms and flowing syncopations express her youthful longing for love.
Schumann and Liszt: Language Transformed
The next pair of works — a German Lied and its piano transcription — explores what happens to musical language when the spoken word is removed. Robert Schumann’s Widmung from the song cycle Myrthen is among the most ardent expressions of devotion in the Romantic canon, its melodic contour shaped by the natural stresses and passions of Friedrich Rückert’s German verse. The soaring vocal line and rich harmonic language capture the fervor of a declaration of love in a way that is inseparable from the German words it carries.
Franz Liszt’s piano transcription of Widmung transforms that vocal intimacy into pianistic virtuosity, demonstrating how a musical idea can be re-expressed in an entirely different instrumental language while retaining its emotional core. The transcription is not a mere arrangement but a reimagining: Liszt elaborates, decorates, and intensifies the original, making the piano sing in its own distinctly keyboard idiom.
Sung-Jen Hsu’s Rondo: The Language That Returns Home
Sung-Jen Hsu’s Rondo offers another example of how Hakka—one of Taiwan’s major languages—can be brought into dialogue with Western classical music. Hsu is ethnically Hakka and spent years studying and composing in Germany before returning to Taiwan. He composed this Rondo based on a traditional Hakka Pingban tune (平板調). Hakka Pingban tune is one of the three major traditional Hakka mountain-song styles. It features a steady 4/4 rhythm and a smooth, lyrical melody, often characterized by a gentle and graceful quality. Compared with the freer Old Mountain Song style, Pingban is more regular in rhythm and is well suited to expressing a wide range of emotions. Hakka Pingban is built on a recurring melodic framework that is continually reshaped by the tones of the text and the style of performance. This feature, in which the main theme repeatedly returns with slight variations, is very similar to the rondo form in Western classical music. Hsu casts the Hakka Pingban melody deeply familiar to him into a comparable Western formal structure — as if viewing Western classical music through his own eyes, filtered through the language, memory, and musical instincts of his own cultural background.
The Romance of Lake Dalupalringi and Yen’s Cina Cuma: Indigenous Voice from Taiwan
The legend of Dalupalringi — the Ghost Lake — a sacred site of the Rukai, one of Taiwan’s sixteen officially recognized indigenous peoples. The Rukai language belongs to the Austronesian family, placing it in the same vast linguistic family as Hawaiian, Māori, Tagalog, and the languages of Madagascar, is entirely distinct from the Sino-Tibetan languages (Mandarin, Hoklo, Hakka).
The legend, as preserved in Rukai oral tradition, tells of a chieftain’s daughter named Baleng who falls in love with a young man named Adalio, who reveals himself to be the Snake King incarnate, guardian of the lake. The lake is understood by the Rukai to be a sacred space — a site of transformation, union, and eternal rest. The Romance of Lake Dalupalringi carries within it the sound world of the Rukai language: its particular vowel colors, melodic contours, and the spiritual gravity of a community’s oral tradition.
Ming-Hsiu Yen’s Cina Cuma for viola and piano draws on the blessing chant “Sacrificial Song: Mother, Father” from the Mikong festival as its source material. This chant is ritual music of the Kanakanavu people, one of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups. Like the Rukai language heard in the preceding work, Kanakanavu belongs to the Austronesian language family. The Mikong is one of the Kanakanavu’s most important ceremonies.
The first movement, “Fire and Smoke,” evokes a forest engulfed in flames and smoke, and the goddess ’usu’s urgent concern for her family and people. The second, “Separation and the Road,” portrays ’usu’s parting from the human world and her uncertainty about the journey ahead. The final movement, “Fish and Peace,” draws on the ritual offerings of food and necklaces to ancestral spirits, seeking tranquility and expressing the connection between the living and their ancestors.
Cina Cuma for viola and piano — a purely instrumental work — transforms and reworks the melodic material of this blessing chant. Through the viola’s dark, resonant, and mysterious timbre, the composer seeks to evoke the many images suggested by the text.