By KHT Staff
PINGTUNG — A 12-track album built around six folk melodies from the Hengchun Peninsula has received seven nominations at Taiwan’s 37th Golden Melody Awards for Traditional Arts.
Sing a Tale of the Spring Town (春城小唱) was produced to mark the 150th anniversary of the construction of Hengchun’s walled town. Released by Wind Music in November 2025, the 44-minute album places traditional performances alongside contemporary reinterpretations of the same six melodies.
The format allows listeners to hear the music first through the unvarnished voices of Hengchun and Manzhou tradition bearers and their students, then through new arrangements performed by musicians including Chen Ming-chang (陳明章), Sangpuy, Tsao Ya-wen (曹雅雯) and local band Fuquitay (浮可泰).
According to the official nomination list, the album is competing for best crossover music album. Producer CinCin Lee (李欣芸) is nominated for best album producer, while Hengchun folk singer Chen Ching-sung (陳慶松) is nominated for best vocal performance.
Chen and Huang Chueh-yin (黃却銀) received separate nominations for best lyrics for “Sū Siang Ki” (思想起) and “Pingpu Folk Tune” (平埔調).
Lee and Chen Yi-han (陳一涵) were nominated for their arrangement of “Niu Mu Pan” (牛母伴), while Lin Yi-cheng (林奕承) was nominated for arranging “Hōng’gǎng Folk Tune” (楓港小調).
The seven nominations therefore span five categories, recognizing the album itself as well as its production, lyrics, arrangements and singing.
Lee said the production team gathered singing and lyric variations from more than 20 tradition bearers. Differences in ornamentation, breathing and improvised passages were studied rather than smoothed into a single standardized version.
She said the team wanted to retain the singers’ natural voices while using contemporary musical language to make the material more approachable to younger listeners.
The songs developed through everyday life on the peninsula. Chen said earlier generations sang while farming, tending livestock and working the land, passing verses from one person to another rather than through written scores.
Their lyrics deal with raising children, marriage, aging, death and other parts of family and community life.
“Folk songs are about our lives and our past,” Chen said.
Chen said he initially found the nominations difficult to believe. Singing the songs, he said, was a way to continue what earlier generations had left behind and to preserve their stories in a form that could still be heard.
Hengchun and Manzhou folk songs have both been registered as intangible cultural heritage. The Pingtung County Government has also established classes at 35 schools, community centers, kindergartens, and senior learning sites, reaching 1,279 participants.
The folk-music hall at the Hengchun Cultural Center has recorded more than 450,000 visits and held over 300 tours and singing programs since opening in June 2024, according to the county.
Pingtung will have another prominent presence at the awards. Veteran Manzhou singer Chang Jih-kuei (張日貴) will receive this year’s special award for music in recognition of her decades of work preserving and teaching the peninsula’s folk traditions. She is also separately nominated for best vocal performance.
The awards ceremony will be held Saturday at the Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center in Taipei. The red carpet begins at 5:30 p.m., followed by the ceremony at 7 p.m.
