Chen Ming-chang Releases Debut Album

Source: Folk Poet Chen Ming-chang — The Moon Lute Sings Taiwan’s Culture
From: Prime Life Magazine
Date: June 2014

Crystal Records released Chen Ming-chang’s debut album Live Works I in January 1990, recorded live on the evening of May 18, 1989 at a performance at Chinese Culture University. Although the sound quality was rough, the album carries a powerful and moving emotional force. It may be Taiwan’s first album to receive high acclaim despite being recorded cheaply at a live performance.

Chen Ming-chang came up through the campus folk song era and, like other songwriters of his generation, began by “singing his own songs” with a guitar. It was not until he was twenty-six, when he decided to commit to music as a vocation, that he began asking himself: “What is Taiwan music? What is my Taiwan music?” The legendary self-taught singer Chen Ta unexpectedly inspired him; he abandoned the Western music he had learned, threw himself into composing songs in his mother tongue, and returned to studying Taiwan’s traditional instruments, including the moon lute (yüeh-ch’in).

Alongside his live recordings, Chen participated early on in Black List Workshop’s Mad Songs album, the first shot fired in the New Taiwanese Song Movement.

In recent years, Chen Ming-chang has devoted himself to the promotion of moon-lute education.

 

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External Links

• Black List Workshop — Mad Songs (Hsu Fang-yüan)
• Board Member Reception Room: From Politics to Culture! Taiwan Folk Music Master Chen Ming-chang (Blow Music)
• Once Called the “Beggar’s Lute” — The Sound Close to the Land: Chen Ming-chang Spent 10 Years Promoting the “King of Taiwan Instruments” (China Times)
• Twenty Years Later and You Still Have to Listen to Mad Songs (Vinyl Cinema Blog)