Listening for Taiwanese Environmental Consciousness in Popular Music

Nancy Guy, Professor of Music, University of California, San Diego

◆時間：2024/11/28 上午10點~

◆地點：國樂系館地下室B112甘美朗教室

An overview of popular music produced in Taiwan since the 1980s evidences a concern with the degradation of the physical environment. Environmentalist tropes in Taiwan pop songs range from brief textual or musical references to entire songs that narrate the details of a polluted land- or waterscape. Issues of social and environmental justice sometimes appear alongside mentions of garbage, polluted landscapes, and degraded bodies of water. This paper concentrates on works that address the pollution and environmental degradation produced by the petrochemical industry, including songs and albums by the New Formosa Band 新寶島康隊, Zhu Yuexin 豬頭皮, Sheng-Xiang & Band 生祥樂隊, and Village Armed Youth Band 農村武裝青年.

Nancy Guy is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, where she also serves at the Co-director of the recently established Center for Taiwan Studies. As an ethnomusicologist, her research has focused on the musics of Taiwan and China, the ecocritical study of music, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese forms), and music and state politics. Guy's first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology. Her second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015) was named a "Highly Recommended Academic Title" by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. Her most recent book is an edited volume, Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island (Routledge, 2022).