The "Folk" in My Bond with Folk Music: My Parents, Teresa Teng, and Béla Bartók
The term ‘folk music’ can encapsulate a multitude of genres, so what does it mean to Nancy Zhou? The violinist outlines numerous folk music influences that provide a cross-fertilisation of music, culture, and social justice.
On the way to school during elementary and middle school years, my mother would regularly play the same album of ballads by the Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng. The signature tender croon of the 1900s ’eternal queen of Mandopop’ enveloped these quotidian trips in melodic warmth and more - velvet articulation, a soothing, variegated vibrato, and glissandi so sorrowfully sweet that it made me think of the erhu, a traditional Chinese bowed instrument which my uncle played professionally for decades.
Young me didn’t think much about the backstory of either these songs or Teresa herself. At that point, she was simply an idol who happened to convene all of my memories and thoughts related to folk music - my mother is a former professional folk minority dancer, and my father, who was my violin teacher throughout my youth, hails from a family of traditional Chinese musicians.
It was only some years later that I learnt that Teresa Teng was as much a cultural icon as she was a musical one - a peacemaker and superstar by any estimation. Her music allowed individuals to be seen during turbulent times, subverting the collectivist and censorship mould prescribed by the Cultural Revolution and symbolising unity, compassion, and ideals of the romantic spirit.
She had the gift of capturing that plaintive longing permeating the hearts of the estranged people of Taiwan and China, to whom I felt so distant yet so close. So close because throughout my childhood as an American-born Chinese, I experienced China firsthand during summer trips to my mother’s hometown village in Guizhou (a province located in southwestern China), as well as vicariously through the stories my parents would recount.
These vignettes were shadowed by not only the Cultural Revolution but also their own childhoods - sentimental in its delivery and evocative in its content. Some images and feelings are still tucked away in the deepest folds of my memory. My mother’s nostalgia for the verdant mountains and gorges where her home was ensconced, her lovable interpretation of the rhythms of glutinous rice pounding, my father’s sombre retelling of living by the bootstrap during his studies at the Shanghai Conservatory (at one point he subsisted on a loaf of bread over a week).
What a juxtaposition, one may think. Yes indeed, but it was precisely these disparate elements - a spiritual bond with nature and severely modest social circumstances - that defined the ’folk music’ experience for me.
Music treads on the delicate line between the communal and individual experience; the primal and artful ways of expression; and, the simplicity and complexity of human understanding. Trained as a classical musician, I’ve devoted countless hours to these latter elements of written Western art music and deconstructing the formal techniques creating the magic of this art form.
But I must say the single biggest breakthrough moment in my musical studies came when my ears landed upon the sound world of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. Honest, angular, at times uncompromisingly violent in its expression, at other times utterly and beautifully haunting: these thoughts come to mind when I listen to Bartók’s music. His fifth string quartet, Concerto for Orchestra, and Sonata for Solo Violin (the latter two works written during the last three years of his life) formed my entryway into discovering the composer’s forensic studies of the musical language of Eastern Europe’s peasant folk.
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