Li Taixiang

Li Taixiang, also transliterated as Li Tai-hsiung, is a Taiwanese composer, violinist and conductor born in 1941 in Malan, in Taidong County. He belongs to the Amis indigenous community, and his work is distinguished by an attempt to create a new music that remains Chinese. His figure is significant for understanding the renewal of contemporary music in Taiwan from the late 1960s onwards.

He was raised in Taipei, where he studied violin at the National Institute of the Arts between 1954 and 1962. After graduating, he directed the Taipei Symphony Orchestra. In 1964 he spent a period teaching among the Amis. Towards the end of the 1960s, when contemporary music was beginning to flourish on the island, many of his early compositions were performed. In 1973 he obtained a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work at the Center for Experimental Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Alongside the composer Xu Boyun and the choreographer Lin Huaimin, he organised festivals in which he introduced Taiwanese audiences to the prepared piano, electronic music, laser and other multimedia stage resources. Between 1978 and 1983 he directed an annual festival of his works, entitled Chuantong yu zhanwang ('Tradition and Future'), which ranged from classical pastiches and experimental music to film music and pop.

His work combines rhythms and vocal techniques of traditional Chinese opera, such as microtonal glides, with features proper to Amis music, among them a fondness for minimalism and free counterpoint in polyphonic and antiphonal singing. These traits appear in pieces such as Dashenji (1975) and Taixuyin (1979).

His catalogue includes ballets, operas, orchestral works with Chinese instruments and chamber music, as well as numerous film scores. His handwritten scores are preserved in the C. C. Liu Collection at the Institute of Chinese Studies of Heidelberg University.