Garbage Truck Melodies in the Environmental and Musical Imaginations in Taiwan

UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology presents a lecture on music in Taiwan
Nazir A. Jairazbhoy Colloquium Series

Garbage in Taiwan is at the center of a musical assemblage that resonates beyond the confines of the nightly waste collection soundscape. Garbage trucks traverse the streets broadcasting either Beethoven's Für Elise or Badarzewska's Maiden's Prayer. Their melodies call residents to regular collection points in neighborhoods throughout the island. While Taiwan's musical garbage trucks have gained a good deal of journalistic attention, what hasn't been explored is the ways in which the everyday habits and practices surrounding the garbage pickup, including its signature melodies, have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities in contemporary Taiwan. The island's semi- tropical climate combined with a densely situated human population, and the presence of well-established rat and cockroach populations, combine to make garbage management a matter of daily urgency. As Gay Hawkins argued in her book The Ethics of Waste, "Styles of waste disposal . . . are also styles of self; in managing waste we constitute an ethos and a sensibility. Our waste habits - all those repeated routines - leave their traces on our bodies and our environment." To this I add, that in Taiwan, traces are also left in music. With this study, I explore the presence of such sensibilities in not only the text, but also the music of popular songs dating from the 1980s through to the present.

Nancy Guy specializes in the musics of Taiwan and China. Her first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology; it was also named an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2006" by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. For her second book, The Magic of Beverley Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015) she turned her scholarly interest to Western opera. Guy has an ongoing interest in the ecocritical study of music, including an article titled "Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination," Ethnomusicology (2009). The Association for Chinese Music Research awarded this article the 2010 Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize for the best English-language article on Chinese music published in the previous year.

Sponsor(s): UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology