Conference Agenda

Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Liberty Plaza is a place that holds room for leisurely activity, political awareness, and intersecting histories. A walk through the plaza will provide the visitor with such sonic and musical experiences as children laughing, marching bands practicing for competition, and jazz drifting from a stage. These experiences are ephemeral moments that represent the shifting, changing landscape of daily life and of Taiwanese identity. Within the statue room of the Memorial Hall however, a militaristic sonic experience held every hour compels the visitor to engage with the reconstructed history of a dictator, a military regime, and a fixed view of Taiwanese identity. This paper discusses how opposing sonic and musical experiences in these two distinct yet adjacent places represent opposing political maneuvers, and how these sonic and musical experiences facilitate not only a government’s dedication to reconstructed history but a starkly contrasting reclaimed collective memory by the Taiwanese community. By utilizing four months of fieldwork including participant observation and interviews, this paper shows how the reclaiming of collective memory regarding Chiang Kai-shek and the space his memorial inhabits is facilitated by musical practice, even while forced historical significance is in turn facilitated by sonic practice. This paper adds to the body of research concerning the importance of music in the making of place, reconstructed history, and collective memory, and provides a case study for how music and sonic experiences continue to be used as tools in the contestation between government authoritarianism and democracy.