Music, Love, and Taiwan's Great Garbage Assemblage
Garbage in Taiwan is at the center of a musical assemblage that resonates beyond the confines of the nightly waste collection soundscape. Garbage trucks in Taiwan are musical: Beethoven's Für Elise or T. Badarzewska's Maiden's Prayer announce the garbage truck brigade's arrival at designated times and places throughout urban Taipei. Neighbors stream into the street for a turn at depositing their presorted waste into the proper receptacles. Taiwan's semi-tropical climate, combined with a densely situated human population and the presence of well established rat and cockroach populations, make garbage management a matter of daily urgency. In this paper, I take Taiwan's pop music from the early 1980s through to the present as evidence of ways in which everyday habits and practices of reckoning with waste have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities.
Nancy Guy is an ethnomusicologist whose broad interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese operas), music and politics, and the ecocritical study of music. Her first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and was also named an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2006" by Choice. Guy's second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills, focuses on the artistry and appeal of the beloved American coloratura soprano, and was published by University of Illinois Press in 2015. Guy is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.