Documentary-Biography of Chang Hao (1913-2003): 1. The Primary Musical Sources

Abstract

Since the first comprehensive conception of modern musicology by Guido Adler in 1885, the positivistic preference for the art products over the producing artists sets the tone for our disciplinary framework for decades, so much so that there is no entry on “biography” until the second editions of the MGG (1994ff.) and the New Grove (2001). Nevertheless, between the hagiographic, cultish or anecdotic biographies before the dawn of musicology, and the latest development towards the mythic and psychological, a broad consensus has been arrived over scholarly vigor and critical acumen. In the tradition of O. E. Deutsch, this project proposes to prepare a documentary biography of Chang Hao, on the one hand to further the earlier research on this distinguished but still not well known enough musician and sinologist, on the other hand to consider how present documentary and archival projects on musicians in Taiwan may conform with international standards. The silence on him in the first comprehensive History of Music in Taiwan in 2003 must be disquietingly noticed. If the “art worlds” (Howard Becker) in the history of Taiwan are to be fully appreciated, there seems to be no valid aesthetic or ideological arguments to neglect the legacy of Chang. He is sui generis as a creative individual and at the same time representative of a whole generation of 20th-century Chinese intelligentsia whose destiny reveals the same trajectory from China via the West to Taiwan. The lacuna in the Music History of 2003 is filled by a monograph on Chang in 2002, but it lacks a full-scale documentation of the primary sources, both the musical and the literary, and a thorough bibliographical control of the secondary literature. The same deficiency is evident in similar documentary projects on musicians in Taiwan. Most of them do not conform to the usual international formats, thus not machine-searchable and sortable, and are not bilingual, thus limiting their accessibility for the international community. This is a pilot project in the documentation and digitization of historical musical sources that aims at comprehensiveness and accessibility for the international academic community.