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Attachment: The Acquisition and Production of Notations
Among Taiwanese Taxi Dance Hall Jazz Musicians During 1950-1970
Chu, Meng-Tze (Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology, TNNUA)
This article will discuss how jazz musicians in Taiwan's taxi dance halls from the 1950s to the 1970s used and produced music notations. Western jazz musicians traditionally played music through memory and improvisation, with notations sometimes serving mostly as indicative frameworks. Consequently, jazz notations have rarely been discussed by researchers. However, post-war Taiwanese jazz musicians heavily relied on this visual musical tool. Therefore, this article will explore the attachment relationship between these musicians and their notations: how they used them and how the latter shaped their ways of listening to music and transcribing. This unique attachment particularly occurred in taxi dance halls, where jazz musicians predominantly played cover jazz pieces from Europe and America, as well as Japanese and Taiwanese popular songs without original compositions. These musicians mainly produced and reproduced notations through hand copying or transcription from records, partly because Taiwan lacked systematically published scores suitable for jazz bands, and partly because photocopying technology was not yet widespread.
For these musicians, notations were not only performance indicators and learning materials but also served as currency for exchanging musical labor, and the number of notations a musician possessed reflected their musical reputation. This article will first describe the materiality of notations, discussing how they circulated within musician circles and how musicians acquired and hand-copied them. Then, it will examine how musicians transcribe to produce scores, drawing insights from a 93-year-old jazz musician who was a band leader in several taxi dancing hall bands in southern Taiwan and was responsible for score production for a long time, representing the experience of post-war dance hall musicians.
Through this study, I found that producing notations involved not musicians reproducing auditory musical objects but understanding and imagining heterogeneous actors such as objects used on-site, bodily movements, and spatial habits of professional venues in the past. In other words, their transcription represented a bodily knowledge of specific musical spaces and was a set of choreographed listening and embodied musicking acquired through collective practice.