Kurosawa Takatomo Conducts Island-Wide Field Recordings

Source: Hearing the Colony: Kurosawa Takatomo and the Wartime Survey of Taiwanese Music (1943)   Date: Published February 2008   Author: Wang Ying-fen

In 1943, during World War II, a survey team of three led by Kurosawa Takatomo crossed from Japan to Taiwan for a three-month island-wide expedition of fieldwork, recording, and photography. They completed the largest and most comprehensive survey of Taiwanese music of the Japanese colonial era, preserving the only remaining audio-visual and written records of the music of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples and Han Chinese during the wartime period — a crowning achievement of musical research in colonial Taiwan. In 1953, Kurosawa introduced Bunun music to the International Folk Music Council, becoming the first person to bring Taiwan’s Indigenous music to the international scholarly community. In 1973, he compiled his materials and published them in Japan as Music of Taiwan’s Takasago Peoples (台湾高砂族の音楽). The following year, the recordings of Indigenous music were released as two LP records, Music of the Takasago Peoples (高砂族の音楽), published by Victor Records Japan. After years of effort, scholars Wang Ying-fen and Liu Lin-yu remastered Music of the Takasago Peoples in 2008, adding Han Chinese music tracks found in the British Library, and produced a three-CD set: Wartime Sounds of Taiwan: Remastered Recording of Kurosawa Takatomo’s “Music of the Takasago Peoples” (1943) — with Han Chinese Music.

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External Links

• The Face of Tradition — Transmission of Musical Form and Construction of Traditional Consciousness Among Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples (Zhǐshàn, Issue 2)
• A Sixty-Year Invitation — Tracing the Only Surviving Paiwan Singer in Japanese Documents (Taiwan Indigenous Digital Museum)
• Expert Recommendation: Wartime Sounds of Taiwan (1943) — Remastered Recording of Kurosawa Takatomo’s Music of the Takasago Peoples — with Han Chinese Music (Government Publications Bookstore Blog)