Sometimes telling the story of something feels like it won’t match the quality of the source material. In my case, its detailing the music and history behind 中國經典名著電影音樂2: 怨女 (otherwise known as the “Rouge Of The North” soundtrack) without falling prey to the trappings of Orientalism. Ambient, mysterious, and wickedly incisive, it’s this work by Taiwanese singer Chyi Yu and the late, great prolific film composer Chang Hung-Yi that touches profoundly on an elusive atmosphere lost somewhere in translation from book to film. It’s a music that feels entirely of a spirit, of an era, that I’d be hard-pressed to decipher (without the cultural background to accurately guide you through its ins/outs).
Behind the music is the story of Taiwanese filmmaker Fred Tan trying to find a way to adapt one of pioneering Chinese-American modernist writer Eileen Lang’s earliest books, The Rouge Of The North into a film that could speak to contemporary audience’s intrigued by its polemic ideas challenging the rote customs and rigid conventions widespread through the early years of the Republic of China. As told through the story of Yingdi, a young woman from a lower middle class forced to go through an arranged marriage, the original book used the intimate common tale of someone like her to describe how generations start out by hating the custom (or customs) they fall into, only to get used to it and do little to spare the next generation from those same trappings. Eileen’s spiritual focus touches on how quiet stoicism creates complete and utter desolation for those trapped in this world.
In a perfect world, Fred could have tried to make a better movie that touches on all the eroticism, satire, and intrigue that others would draw from Eileen’s words like in Lust, Caution. But as noted in some forgotten New York Times review, the way Fred falls back into the contemporary tropes of Chinese melodrama, almost as if directing a stilted play rather than human actors, robbed Eileen’s work of of the very human idea of choosing security over the risks inherited in following one’s true loves.
Where the film failed, composer Chang Hung-Yi found a brilliant gateway for his attempt to actualize aeons of traditional music. His early love of music came from participation in Catholic mass, helping his father in the choir. A native of Kaohsiung City, Chang, much like Cong-Su was part of a young generation of musical students who knew enough of mainland Chinese communist rule to know that Taiwanese small “d” democratic authoritarianism could be equally as oppressive. As much as he’d love to grow within he had to look elsewhere. Both took advantage of loosening restrictions on study abroad to explore styles they could later use to usher in a new wave of Taiwanese music.
Chang took to Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the late ‘70s, studying music composition, jazz, and theatre production. By the early ‘80s, Chang Hung-Yi arrived back in Taiwan and found a country more receptive to his kind of music that pulled from myriad more innovative influences. Working either in commercials, films, or TV, Chang began to write a prolific amount of pieces that fit in nicely with Taiwan’s New Wave scene. As for his own style, it was knowingly influenced by the panoramic compositions of film composer Maurice Jarre and .
For the film Fred Tan directed, Chang would be tasked to write a theme song with huge Mando folk pop artist Chyi Yu and to compose interstitial music that could convey the grim reality of the protagonist. Absconding from nearly all superfluous instrumentation, he’d use hypnotic leitmotifs and minimal electronic instrumentation to make music that sounded as ardently solitary as the lead.
In 1988, when the soundtrack for the Rouge Of The North was released, Chang had a chance to reintroduce listeners to songs like “少女的銀娣” or “深宅的銀娣”, fully fleshed compositions that mixed traditional wind and string instrumentation with decidedly askew electronically-generated percussion and sonorities. Fittingly, each song is introduced with an excerpt of Eileen Lang’s own words from the novel, read by Chyi Yu in such a haunting way, performed with a sonic atmosphere that is positively, deeply intimate. So much so that it renders the movie entirely unnecessary.
When orchestral instruments make their way through on songs like “怨女(演奏)” it appears that even they subsume themselves to the ruminative feelings explored by Chang Hung-Yi. In the end, it all ends with murmurs of music, floating across chasms of ideas, positively demanding much closer future inspection.
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