Create uniqueness from tradition

Tainan City Traditional Orchestra was established in millennium, indicating a new century and a new beginning.  Mr. Jing-Huei Lee was the first art director of the orchestra.  Tainan City Traditional Orchestra has always been a chamber orchestra with a variety of performing styles and liaison with indigenous culture, which makes a great innovation for orchestras performing traditional music in Taiwan.

In addition to having concerts and touring performances at university campuses on a regular basis, the orchestra devotes itself to the archive of traditional folk music and precious oriental early music as well.  It progressively participates all sorts of art festivals around Taiwan, local cultural exhibitions, and events of international city communication.  These performances include promotion of art, campus touring performances, troops, overseas compatriot visits, disadvantaged groups care, and temple fairs in local communities and so on.  The performances of the orchestra are all over Taiwan, and have become one of the art representatives of Tainan.

The orchestra plays the leading role of the preservation of Taiwan local music, the innovation of performing art and the promotion of Tainan local folk music.  In addition, in order to get people’s attention to the equal right of people with mental and physical disabilities participating in art and culture activities, the orchestra did touring performances of 28 public and private schools of special education around Taiwan from 2018 to 2020, which truly realizes the spirit of art inclusion and cultural equality.

This small and sophisticated orchestra creates a stunning cultural value.  It accumulates a great energy of performance, teaching, and creativity, and develops its own uniqueness from tradition.  It has paid more attention to the “leverage of profession” and “crossover hybridization” in recent years under the leadership of the director, Wen-Siang Liu, to work on broadening the diversity of music vision for both performers and audiences.  There are successful self-production crossover shows, such as “Pirouette—When Ballet Meets Chinese Music” in 2015, “Legends of Temple

Parades” in 2016, which is the combination of temple parade music and dance, and “Taiwan First Street” musical series which is based upon the literature of Tainan. All these works are expected to add the unique appeal of Tainan city with a wide range of music style, and transform Tainan as a “portable” cultural asset.

The orchestra plans to fuse both east and west music genres to build a refreshing local manner and spirit of creativity.  Kwan-Yo Huang, the current director of the orchestra, expects to use folk music to achieve global communication, and deliver the diversity of culture by different forms of art collaboration.  Tainan City Traditional Orchestra hopes to provide a spiritual haven to people and express the formidable art and culture strength of Tainan.