Music Acting as a Bridge between Ethnic Groups: An Activist Research on the Creation Project of “Crossing Ridges— Appreciating the Bunun Music Story”

Abstract

The Bunun is a Taiwan indigenous group residing extensively in various parts of the Central Mountain Range since ancient times. The Bunun people have been practicing a unique way of polyphonic singing; their genre called pasibutbut became the first Taiwanese indigenous music known to the global academic circles thanks to the IFMC conference in 1952. Carrying this historical significance, pasibutbut was inscribed as the first “National and Important” Intangible Cultural Heritage item, while the Bunun Culture Association, composed mainly of Bunun people from the Ming-Te tribe in Hsin-I Village of Nantou County, was nominated as its transmitting group in 2010. For the Bunun Culture Association, the national inscription brought them honor and responsibility on one hand, but also added invisible weight on the other hand. Furthermore, a controversial issue about the violation of taboos was raised by a cross-domain performance at the awarding ceremony of 2017 Golden Melody Awards in Taiwan. As an ethnomusicologist engaged in the safeguarding and preserving Bunun traditional music, I conducted activist research, observing and evaluating the composing and performing activities. The notions applied in this activist research include “music as performance,” “music improvisation,” and “participatory performance and representational performance”. The results will be examined in my presentation.