On Weikung Street, near the train station in the small town of Yuanli, Miaoli County, a big old house sits on a lot of several thousand square feet. Wilted blooms are all that remain from the rose season. But 70-odd years ago, a child would sit in the garden when it was full of blooming red roses and turn his attention to the tunes his father played on the violin and the music flowing from the phonograph. Those wonderful notes led this little boy down a road of no return to musical creation. The boy's name was Kuo Chih-yuan.

Kuo always felt that he was an "outsider" as a composer. Although it was very difficult to get his works performed early on, he still soldiered on, determined to continue composing.

Endless fun with a harmonica

Kuo was born to Yuanli gentry in 1921, in the era of Japanese rule. When he was six, the family bought a violin. His father, who had wide-ranging knowledge about art, would often play old Taiwanese and Japanese songs. These are Kuo's earliest musical memories. Later, his cousin, a teacher in Taipei, brought home a phonograph, on which they often played Taiwanese folk music--including Taiwanese Opera, luantan ("chaotic playing") and Gaojia Opera--or Japanese folk music, including folksongs in beautiful minor pentatonic scales. These left deep impressions on Kuo.

Apart from the musical edification he received from his family, there were various other musical influences from childhood that left deep imprints on his psyche, including local opera put on to reward the gods at the nearby Tsuhekung Temple, the beiguan music performed during temple processions, the chegu performances at temple fairs, and the nanguan music performed by refined literary types.

In the 1930s cinemas opened in Yuanli that screened Western, Japanese and Shanghai films. Charlie Chaplin, the star of American silent films, always made Kuo laugh. Chen Chang-jui, Kuo's fifth-grade homeroom teacher and a great lover of music and athletics, led students in singing together and specially taught six students, including Kuo, to play the harmonica. Chen counts as Kuo's musical mentor.

Back then harmonicas were all the rage. In comparison to violins and pianos, harmonicas were inexpensive and easy to learn and carry. Almost everyone had one. Kuo immersed himself in their musical world. After testing into Chang Jung Secondary School, Kuo joined the harmonica band, and developed an interest in Western music. The harmonica was the key to his later pursuit of music as a career.

Studying in Japan

Like many of the Taiwanese gentry in the Japanese era, Kuo's father hoped his son would study medicine. To that end, he shipped Chih-yuan off to Japan, where he tested into Tokyo's Kinjo Gakuen High School as a second-year student. His music teacher Tsuneo Fukushima was a famous harmonica player and inventor of minor scale harmonicas. After studying with him for less than a year, Kuo was made first player in the school's harmonica band.

In 1938 Kuo participated in a solo harmonica contest sponsored by the Tokyo municipal government at which he took third place. The next year he took part in a performance at Tsuneo Fukushima's musical academy. At that point he was already skilled enough to play Mozart's Turkish March using five harmonicas. Apart from displaying a startling technical wizardry, he also adapted the Spaniard Pablo de Sarasate's Gypsy Airs for the harmonica, and used harmonicas in nine different keys to play this extremely difficult piece. In 1940 he took first place in a solo harmonica performance contest at Toyo University for students from throughout Japan.

Even as he was attaining a splendid record of achievement with the harmonica, Kuo found himself moved by the passion and skill of violin contestants at a national competition in Tokyo. The instrument had charmed him, and he began to study with Akio Shimizu, a violinist with the NHK symphony orchestra. After he finished high school, his father wrote him, wondering how his preparations for testing into medical school were going. But by then he was heart-set on applying to the Toyo School of Music. His father was very much opposed to the idea, but after his uncle pleaded his case, his father relented to allow him to follow his musical dreams.

Kuo had planned on majoring in violin at Toyo, but because his left pinkie was congenitally bent inward, he found it hard to press the strings. That defect also prevented him from performing as a pianist. But if he wanted to be a musician, playing the piano was essential. He applied medicines, took massages, and had plaster casts put on. He even approached surgeons. But all his efforts were for naught, and he ended up very depressed.

The ethnic consciousness and modern outlook in the nationalistic Eastern European composers Antonin Dvorak and Peter Tchaikovsky, the French impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and the Russian modernists Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky had a big impact on Kuo. They spurred him to think about musical composition. Then, under the influence and encouragement of Japanese modern nationalists Akira Ifukube and Fumio Hayasaka, as well as senior Taiwanese musicians such as Chiang Wen-yeh, Kuo decided to major in composition under Meiro Sugahara.

When Kuo (back row, left) was at the Toyo School of Music he visited senior Taiwanese musician Chiang Wen-yeh (front row, left).

The lost generation

In 1942 Kuo tested into the musical composition program at Nihon University's College of Art, but because war had broken out between Japan and the US, the university's normal curriculum was suspended. It now offered only military training and labor service programs. Two years later, when Taiwanese in Japan began to be conscripted into the Japanese army, he dropped out.

Because sea travel between Japan and Taiwan was very dangerous, Kuo had no choice but to eke out a living in Japan. To make ends meet, he went to work at a munitions factory and a charcoal company office. But as the war ground on and people grew more destitute, Japanese increasingly discriminated against foreigners. At one point, he couldn't pay his rent and was evicted. Fortunately his skill with the harmonica allowed him to tour with the Tokyo Vaudeville Show Theater Company and so keep body and soul together.

In 1946 Kuo returned to Taiwan, where he found a nation at once familiar and strange. Under KMT rule, Mandarin education was being promoted and Taiwanese forbidden in schools. This turned those Taiwanese who had been educated in Japanese into a generation without a voice. Forbidden to use the languages in which they were fluent, they had to start all over again with Mandarin. The waning moments of the Chinese civil war against the communists and the postwar depression, moreover, further turned the Taiwanese musical and cultural world into a desert. Few composers were working, and no one was creating modern music or orchestral works. It was all very frustrating and disappointing.

At school in Japan when he was 14.

Loving music, high and low

By 1950 things had turned slightly for the better, and Kuo began to compose. Not confining himself to classical music, he also created pop tunes and film scores. In 1953 he wrote the Taiwanese song "Red Rose" with Chan Yi-chuan: "Red rose, ah red rose, / A light spring breeze shakes your stem, / The flower is her song / And it sings of the blooming red rose...."

Kuo Chih-yuan submitted this song to the Taiwan Provincial Education Society's New Collected Folk Songs. The collection, designed as an aid for music education, was edited by Lu Chuan-sheng. Lu wrote to Kuo saying that Taiwanese lyrics were "not suitable for music education" and invited Lu Yun-sheng to write Mandarin lyrics. It was thus that "Red Rose," famous at the time as a "Taiwanese serenade," was forced into Mandarin. The incident still rankles with Kuo.

In 1958, when Taiwanese films were in a golden age, Kuo got a job at Jade Peak Film Production as a musical composer, creating scores for Taiwanese dramas. In 1962 he took a job as a musical specialist with Dentsu Asia Network, writing theme songs for radio programs as well as commercial jingles. Although some classically trained musicians are unwilling to cross over to such popular musical forms, Kuo says that, apart from his genuine interest in these genres, he also wanted to raise the level of popular music in Taiwan.

A birth defect that left Kuo's left pinkie bent inward meant that Kuo could not perform as a pianist. Although this realization greatly depressed Kuo, it caused him to turn to composition and create many beautiful melodies.

Music creation squad

Meanwhile, he finished his first orchestral work--Variations on a Taiwanese Folk Symphony--in 1955. Written for an orchestra with two of each of the woodwind instruments, it was the first classical orchestral piece by a native Taiwanese composer. He took a Taiwanese-style melody as the main theme, and added three variations and a finale. It immediately became part of the regular repertoire of the Taiwan Provincial Symphony Orchestra (now the National Taiwan Symphony).

To stimulate creation of modern music, Taiwanese composers Hsu Chang-hui, Ku Hsien-liang and others established a "music-making group" in 1961. At the first concert sponsored by the group, Kuo's three solo piano concertos were very well received. Kuo went on to debut many of his works at concerts sponsored by this group, including concertos and choral works.

Though Kuo had written many musical compositions, he always regretted never having formally studied composition of Western classical music. Once, by chance, he heard an NHK broadcast of an avant-garde Japanese orchestral work, and it hit him hard: "To study composition theory at a more professional level, I resolved to return to Japan and continue my studies." Recalling that decision, Kuo's voice is tinged with remorse: He was a middle-aged man with a home and an established career, and his family would have to make great sacrifices when he left the country to idealistically pursue his musical passion.

In 1966 Kuo went to Japan and enrolled as a graduate composition student at National Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music under professors Tomojiro Ikeuchi and Akio Yashiro. About that period of study in Japan, Kuo talks most about writing the musical score for Girl of the Harbor City, which was selected for the NHK musical program Your Melody. The program openly solicited musical works created by members of the public. In any given week, there could be more than 200 submissions, from which only six would be selected. At the suggestion of some Japanese composers, he submitted a melody evocative of his homeland Taiwan. In 1969 Kuo returned to Taiwan and was employed as the main composer and musical consultant for Taiwan Television (TTV). That same year he wrote "No One Knows What's in My Heart" with Taiwanese songwriter Chou Tien-wang. The song won a Golden Melody Award in 1972.

When Kuo was in elementary school, he began studying the harmonica under his teacher Chen Chang-jui. Kuo immersed himself in the harmonica's musical world, and his great skill with the instrument won him countless awards. This box is filled with all manner of harmonicas, treasures that he has collected over many years.

Cowboy and Weaver Girl

Being able to write music for a living, Kuo, brimming with musical passion, was truly in his element. After Shih Wei-liang took over as the fourth director of the Taiwan Provincial Symphony, he encouraged the creation and performance of works by composers in Taiwan by enlarging its "research group," which comprised Kuo, Lai Te-ho, Shen Chin-tang and others. Until 1986, when he retired, Kuo was continually creating new works.

In 1974, Kuo finished the score of a young people's opera, Cowboy and Weaver Girl. Back then Taiwan's musical community had only a vague idea of what an opera was; the idea that a composer in Taiwan could write one himself seemed like something out of a fairy tale. For starters, the nation was under military rule and there was a lack of musical information from abroad. To stagee of an opera, moreover, required much money and a great variety of musical and dramatic professionals. Taiwan simply lacked the resources. Cowboy and Weaver Girl, with a score by Kuo and a libretto by Chan Yi-chuan, struggled to life in this poor operatic culture.

Beginning in the 1970s, choral groups at schools of every level in Taiwan were all the rage, Kuo recalls, and Cowboy and Weaver Girl was tailored to the needs of school music classes and choral groups as a light opera that was easy to sing and perform. Imagining fans humming melodies and singing passages, people hoped that it would stir up interest in opera and popularize the form, just as light opera had in 19th century Europe and America.

It wasn't until nine years after it was created that Cowboy and Weaver Girl was performed in Taiwan. But because of personnel and financial considerations, only the fourth scene of the second act was performed. Then in 1986 it was finally performed in its entirety in Charenton, a suburb of Paris. This was the first time that a Taiwanese composer's opera had been performed in France, and it earned rave reviews. It was not until 1998, after 24 years and two revisions, that a Taiwanese audience had the good fortune to watch a complete performance.

Kuo has a special love of opera, and in 1975 he again embarked on a collaboration with screenwriter Chan Yi-chuan--this time to write the grand opera Legend of the White Snake Lady. In 1984 they finished the opera and changed its name to Xuxian and the White Lady. It was Taiwan's first grand opera, but it would take another 15 years before it would be performed.

In 1986 Kuo wrote his first and to date only symphony: From Tangshan to Taiwan, a Symphony in the Key of A. It gratefully recalled the life of his ancestors, who struggled to establish themselves in Taiwan and lay the Kuo family's economic foundations, eventually allowing him to pursue his passions free from concerns. The symphony has only three movements, and seven years later it was performed at the National Concert Hall. But Kuo began to feel that the work was a little too short for a symphony, so in 1997 he wrote a new movement "Happy Times, Sad Times." The symphony took musical material from Taiwan's three main ethnic groups--Hoklo (southern Fujianese), Hakka, and Aboriginal--and merged them, thus conveying a harmonious whole. This work also expressed his deeply felt sentiments about each of these ethnic groups.

Taiwanese films enjoyed a golden age in the late 1950s, when Kuo was a music producer at Dentsu Asia Network. Kuo wrote the score for Ahsanke to the Rescue

A series of big awards

As a composer, Kuo's biggest regret is that performers in Taiwan don't like to perform works by Taiwanese composers. One reason is that new works are often not published, and performers must copy, check and distribute the scores themselves. Moreover many harbor a prejudice against Taiwanese musical works, believing they are not of a high enough standard. And Taiwanese composers lack the name recognition of many European or American composers with bankable names.

Lacking fluent Mandarin and never teaching at a university, Kuo has always felt that he was an "outsider" as a composer. Early on there were always great hurdles to overcome to get his music performed. Every time he heard all the mistakes being made at a performance of his music, he would get up and leave before the performance ended. After a few unhappy experiences with performances being more like rehearsals, he completely lost interest in having his works performed.

In the mid-1980s, Taiwanese ethnic consciousness began to raise its profile, and native culture received greater emphasis. Kuo's works began to get noticed and earn countless awards. In 1987 he won a Golden Cauldron for composition for his "Concerto for Piano and Strings"; in 1993 he won a Wu San-lien Award; and the following year he won an award for The Legend of Sakyamuni--Heavenly Teacher at the 19th National Awards for Arts (the only music award granted). Recently, he won a Golden Melody Lifetime Achievement Award and this very year a Cultural Award from the Executive Yuan and a National Arts Award from the National Culture and Arts Foundation.

At Kuo's home, Professor Juan Wen-chih (first left, front row) of Providence University leads the Kuo Chih-yuan Chamber Choir, which practices every Friday, giving voice to the sounds of this old man's heart.

Taiwan's Sibelius

At 85 years old, Kuo still brims with creative vitality. His hearing has declined in recent years, so he needs a hearing aid, but he still works hard creating Taiwanese choral works. Last year he also revised Greater Taipei, an orchestral march that he wrote more than 30 years ago.

"After I graduated in Japan in 1969, I hoped to use what I had learned to write a popular orchestral work in commemoration of my return to Taiwan, so I imitated the 19th-century British composer Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March and wrote Greater Taipei."

Why did he wait to create or revise these works until he was so advanced in age? Therein lies a deeper level of meaning.

Kuo recalls that in high school in Tokyo he heard Jean Sibelius' orchestral work Finlandia, and it moved him deeply. In the late 19th century, Finland was ruled by Russia. Finlandia stirred up Finnish ethnic sentiment, and eventually Finland took a path toward independence and democracy.

In Taiwan's current political situation, under pressure in the international arena and with all sorts of problems connected to national identity, Kuo decided to revise the lyrics to Greater Taipei and rename it Taiwan Hymn. His first major patriotic work, it had its debut when it was performed in Taiwanese by the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra in May 2006.

A prolific composer in variety of musical genres, 85-year-old Kuo Chih-yuan was both the first Taiwanese to write a symphony and the first to write a grand opera. Living in his old family house in Yuanli, Miaoli County, he is still composing.

A rose in the desert

"I firmly believe that what I create should be innovative, modern, musical, and rooted in my ethnic heritage." Kuo's words reveal his musical idealism.

In her book Kuo Chih-yuan: A Rose Blooms in the Desert, pianist Tchen Yu-chiou, the secretary-general of the National Cultural Association, wrote this of Kuo: "Traversing the tracks of hundreds of years of Taiwanese history, he invokes beautiful music and various styles to record the voice of the people, from common folk to intellectuals, from temples to concert halls."

The citizens and cultural groups of Kuo's hometown Yuanli were so moved by his musical creations and determination that five years ago they called for Weikung Road, which runs past his family home, to be renamed "Chih-yuan Road." The cultural community has echoed its support.

Birdsong accompanies Kuo in his large house at sunset, as it has countless times before. Although he rarely gets out, he is still hard at work, creating musical melodies for this land that he loves so much.