Hearing piano being practiced upon is a welcoming sound when one is a stranger in a big city.
In the distance, I can hear someone practising piano. Last night, until about 9:30 PM, it was harmonic minor scales. Maybe it’s a music school. How can someone practice at all hours in a day?
What a joy it was to meet up with my old friend Tina, whom I’ve known since my teenage years. The way we met was in class in the Hakka town of Miao Li Gong Guan. She was accompanying choir – and I noticed she played a wrong note on the piano.
To discover after a lifetime of wedded bliss, motherhood, career, …. she still plays the piano — that’s the joy!
I grew up in a neighborhood where our fathers were colleagues, our mothers volunteered for community activities, and we kids went to school together. We were competitive, and we all learned to play the piano. Every other year, we’d “return” to our native lands (Taiwan, Korea, etc) on “home leave.” Some industrious parents (like mine) would put us through school so we’d progress in our own languages. That’s how I met Tina.
How many of us still play the piano? Few.
My entire family learned to play the piano. First my father — in college — he learned to play the black keys. He bought a new Yamaha upright (a console) in Okinawa. My mother, my 6-year old sister, and I started piano lessons from a Japanese neighbor, the wife of one of my father’s colleagues. Eventually when my brother became of age, he started lessons, too.
As I listened to Tina sightread the Chinese equivalent of “fake book,” that is, jian pu (simplified Chinese music notation) as right hand melody and accompaniment in Western chords, I thought of all the years that had gone by. Suddenly I felt a shake. The ground beneath me trembled on the morning of Wednesday 27th March.
I stopped her. “What is it?” I asked.
Tina stopped playing abruptly.
The IKEA loft bed above the covered upright piano was shaking from side to side.
“It’s an earthquake,” she replied and went back to playing the same piece.
Barely a week has gone by since she came to pick me up at the airport. Today she waited for me at the same airport with presents.
I wish there was more time to play music — we have not even managed a duet together — ever.
“Come visit me,” I said. “You’ve missed out on all those great places I’ve lived.”
A future blog: jian pu — simplified Chinese music notation
Even with the positive effects of globalization, it’s still not possible to get what you want where you are. Sometimes you have to travel elsewhere to be able to choose what you want at a better price than you can get where you live.
In Taiwan, it’s possible to eat very well for less than what it costs to buy a cup of coffee in the USA.
For lunch, we three ordered 4 dishes from an authentic Szechuan restaurant: tofu, greens, clam soup, and 3 bowls of Szechuan wontons (chao shou). The meal came with unlimited self-service white rice and sweet black jelly drink (xian cao, or hsian tsao, or translated literally, fairy grass). The bill was US $12.00.
In the early afternoon, I got a haircut for US $3.50 — just the cut, no shampoo or blow dry.
Later I ordered a small bowl of wonton noodle soup for about US $1.50 from an outdoor, roadside stall (hawker). It was so filling that I barely had room for papaya, pineapple, salt-water goose leg, steamed bamboo leaf parcel, and other small dishes (xiao cai; hsiao tsai) afterwards.
Yet, at the same time, an iPhone 4S costs about US $663 outright. SIM unlocked. It’s better to get such gadgets in the USA. Accessories, such as iPad and iPhone covers, on the other hand, are quite inexpensive and varied. I bought a nice iPhone 5 cover for a mere US$10 at a convenience store in Taipei.
The 2.5 hour coach ride from Taipei to Taichung cost me US $6.00 —- quite hard to believe.
My nondescript hotel in Taichung has all the amenities I need for the week: wireless Internet, shower, TV (though I don’t need this), clean bed & daily change of sheets and towels, shower, toilet, two mirrors. I can get boiling hot water or cold water from a dispenser in the hallway. It’s a 5 minute walk from my father’s home. How much? Less than US$ 25 per night.
The walk to my father’s home meanders through a shopper’s paradise of colorful assortment of shoes, clothes for all seasons, and other material goods. Sales range from 10% to 90% off. Everything is primed for “shop till you drop.”
Unfortunately, all that glitters is not gold for someone who is not here to shop but to maximize the experience of one precious week for another year or more before I see my father again.
Where do you go on holiday if you already live in paradise?
Most people, I daresay, imagine going on holiday as going somewhere to escape the daily routine, somewhere very different from their usual existence.
You can conjure up an image of sipping on an exotic cocktail at sunset in some mosquito-free tropical paradise. Or going on a ski holiday in the Swiss alps. Or a yoga holiday in the Himalayas.
A holiday is a place away from the hustle-bustle, far from the madding crowd.
When you work in a place as beautiful, clean, and uncrowded as the island of Maui, which has been voted the top traveller’s choice for 16 consecutive years by Conde Nast readers, it’s hard to imagine going anywhere for a holiday. Anywhere else would be “suboptimal” so to speak.
Where would I go on holiday if everyday is a holiday?
As I write, I am in an non-descript hotel in Taichung, Taiwan, on holiday. For the past 3 hours, I have been sitting on my single bed, reading articles on my iPad and listening to the heavy drops of rain and downpour.
Never mind the noise pollution, air pollution, and visual pollution (i.e. clutter). Urban traffic prevents a straight path on the sidewalk from the hotel to my destination.
But I am as happy as I can be.
Just yesterday, my friend in Taipei introduced me to the best eateries in her neighborhood. I was sad I couldn’t stay longer to sample them all. Before I left, we took photos of piano sheet music she’s collected over the years. [Bookmark this for a future blog post!]
In Taichung, the sunset market carried my favorite Chinese delicacies: pickled boneless chicken feet, pickled fish skin, green seaweed, steamed Shanghainese dumplings, home-made soya milk, and pearl bubble milk tea. Tomorrow we will feast on stir-fried eel. I count the number of meals I have left and hope I have enough time to digest each one before the next and that I won’t waste a meal opportunity on a bad choice.
It’s the contrast that we want between work and holiday. It’s also getting a distance from work to reflect upon life in a different environment, one in which you’re a temporary visitor.
Bekkers Piano Guitar Duo’s concertblog on wordpress.com began 2 years ago. Time to categorise the topics.
Hard to believe that it has been exactly 2 years since we launched the Concert Blog on WordPress.com to document our adventures and discoveries in music. Since our first blog on 24th March 2009, we have evolved from writing about our duo to reviewing concerts and sharing insights into cultural economics of concertizing.
The two-year journey has taken us from the Netherlands to England, Crete, Belgium, Spain, Finland, Denmark, Italy, France, Taiwan, and the USA. In addition to the musicians and composers who have actively contributed to our concertizing and exploration in the world of live and recorded music, we have worked with artists, photographers, film makers, and other interesting people from all walks of life to make concerts happen. What we learned, we shared. We are grateful to all the feedback from readers and audiences everywhere.
It is now time to categorise the different topics and make it easier for readers to access from our Blog Page.
Time to celebrate! But Robert flies to Phoenix tonight and Anne to San Francisco in mid-May.
Bekkers Piano Guitar Duo traveled and performed in three continents: Europe, Asia, and North America in 2010. Among the highlights were house concerts, concerts in churches, collaboration with other artists, and showing others how to produce concerts.
As the last blog post in 2010, we would like to thank all readers for reading, referring, commenting, and supporting this blog. 2010 has been an incredible year for our piano guitar duo. We have never traveled as extensively in any year as this one. We have never collaborated with so many people as this year. We have never had such a variety of gigs.
We began the year in the Netherlands with our usual concerts.
In February, we made a weekend trip to Belgium to open a new exhibition with a selection of solo, duo, and improvisation in beautiful historic Brugge. It was one of several collaborations with other artists.
In April, we made a whirlwind tour of Taiwan, introducing ourselves to the Taipei Rotary Club and a string quartet in Taipei.
From January to April, we coached new house concert hosts on how to produce concerts from their homes, culminating in our debut of the 30-minute long Grand Potpourri National to open a new concert series and the release of our first CD Summer in the home of an artist.
In May, we organised our biggest house concert yet: a dozen musicians in 4 different concerts in one day! The Glass Vase Concert was free entry with cover art commissioned for auction. The bonus was the chef-catered Egyptian dinner for 50 people, who queued for seconds.
All the insights from our experience of producing house concerts and interviews with others were presented in a paper to economists at an international conference in Copenhagen in June.
Besides performing as a duo, we also worked with other musicians such as French horn player Emile Kaper and American cellist Stephanie Hunt. We found that piano and guitar worked well with other instruments and the audiences love the idea. We programmed one house concert in Amsterdam with our duo, Robert’s solo guitar of Bach Chaconne, piano and cello, and finally piano, guitar, and cello.
In September, we traveled to Zeeland in the southwest coast of the Netherlands to give 5 concerts in 3 days. It was a busy month, made busier by our reluctance to cancel any concerts including those that took us by surprise and decided upon last minute (impromptu).
The highlight of the year was undoubtedly the coast-to-coast America Tour, from Boston to Sacramento in 5.5 weeks. We thank our hosts, guests, and everyone who made this tour happen. We had no idea it would be so empowering and fantastic.
What next? Who knows? We bought ourselves one way tickets to paradise and started a new blog to lure our friends to come visit us. We look forward to seeing our friends from Davis, Houston, Seattle, and Nebraska in the first few months of 2011.
Hope you have enjoyed these blog posts. 2011 promises to be an entirely different year.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
BEST WISHES TO ALL!!!
Skype chats or skyping allows a two-way conversation online, for free, and the chance to catch up during the holidays.
The friend, who told me about skype as early as its beta version release, has also given me great advice about other things. Little did I know how essential this “typing in the sky” has become, especially nowadays on the portable iphone.
Skype is one of those must-haves if you’re traveling a lot. It’s a free application that is more versatile and powerful than MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and other online chats (including Facebook chat). It’s also possible to see each other via a Webcam and also talk to each other via microphone and headphones.
Our first concert on this tour was confirmed on skype. The producer of the North Meadow House Concert Series in Connecticut showed me his 18th century farm house on webcam. It was that concert booking of 23 October 2010 confirmed in mid-August 2010 that determined our first destination for the America Tour. We booked our first plane ticket about a month later for Boston.
Skype was also instrumental in finet-uning and concluding our travel arrangements for our trip to Taiwan in April 2010. Once again, we chatted with someone we’ve not yet met but who was to become a very important part of our musical journey.
This morning, as I multi-tasked in eating my daily breakfast of freshly cut tropical fruit and checking e-mails while resisting the urge to jump into the Pacific Ocean (because the view from the balcony is so tempting), I decided to send off holiday greetings to my friends on skype.
Happy Holidays!
I’m starting a new blog called MauiTips to tempt my friends to come visit.
I had always believed that Taiwan was a hotbed of taste explosions, a dense concentration of cuisines from all provinces of China and the best in Asia. I knew the Dutch had some influence in Taiwan, mainly from the golden age of the 17th century when the VOC (Dutch East India Company) had explored the far reaches of Asia. Thus it was both a surprise and a treat to receive the new book “The Real Taiwan and the Dutch” by the former Netherlands Representative Menno Goedhart and American travel writer Cheryl Robbins.
When Dutch guitarist Robert Bekkers asked what there was to do in Taiwan, in anticipation of his first visit to the island earlier this Spring, I replied that we only had time to eat and see my relatives and friends. In truth, I had always believed that Taiwan was a hotbed of taste explosions, a dense concentration of cuisines from all provinces of China and the best in Asia.
This gastronomical paradise far exceeded any other attraction the island had to offer. [Likewise, my sister and brother would argue over how best to optimise every single meal we had during the two weeks of our family reunion in April 2010. There was simply too much good food to choose from. ] Upon our return to the Netherlands, I had trouble getting used to having to cook or look for the kind of good food that was available 24/7 in Taiwan.
I knew the Dutch had some influence in Taiwan, mainly from the golden age of the 17th century when the VOC (Dutch East India Company) had explored the far reaches of Asia. I had met Taiwanese descendants with Dutch blood. They were considered exotic and attractive by Taiwanese standards. Yet, I knew nearly nothing of the legacy nor the various indigenous tribes on the island.
For me, Taiwan was a place caught between mainland China, where my father had “escaped” with his family during Chiang Kai Shek’s retreat from the communists, and the Hokkien people, who were the majority and who had moved to Taiwan many generations before my mother’s Hakka clan. Being born in a foreign country (Brunei), I “returned” to Taiwan with my parents at the age of 2. But that did not make me a native Taiwanese either, for my father still considered Taiwan a temporary place (to live) until he could return to Shanghai where he was born.
Thus it was both a surprise and a treat to receive the new book “The Real Taiwan and the Dutch” by the Netherlands Representative Menno Goedhart and American travel writer Cheryl Robbins. My friend Josine, a Dutch violinist and journalist based in Taipei, gave me the book in mid-July, and I could hardly put it down.
Published in April 2010 and available in both English and Chinese versions, the 271-page paperback book is packed with high resolution colour photographs of people, scenery, and food. The various cuisines are described with mouth watering finesse.
“The Real Taiwan and the Dutch” is an eye-opener for me and, I’m sure, the many other overseas Chinese who still have relatives in Taiwan. After my sophomore year at university, I joined other college students on the annual Chien Tan overseas Chinese youth summer study tour in Taipei. After a few weeks of intensive Chinese language lessons, we toured the island visiting famous hot spots. I would recommend this book a must-read and include some of the places in the itinerary for these foreign-born Chinese and Taiwanese youths.
Since moving to the Netherlands in 2004, I have befriended many Chinese and Taiwanese wives of Dutch husbands in the Netherlands. They, too, find it fascinating that a Dutch man had explored the Taiwan few of us knew existed.
As the Dutch are famous for preserving their historic monuments, among other specialisations, I find the perspective of this book particularly interesting. Here was a Dutch man (Menno Goedhart) who recorded his notes and conversations with the natives, of legends passed down the generations, of the Dutch who had first come to the island. It’s a personal account of his travels in Taiwan while serving as Representative of the Netherlands Trade and Investment Office in Taipei. What resulted is a personal guide of the Taiwan he loves, so much that he and his wife are retiring in the southern city of Tainan in Taiwan.
The book has also inspired me to consider the possibility of writing a living history of the people and places where we give concerts. This will require a lot of time and stamina. In many ways, the Concertblog serves as a placeholder, an abbreviation for the content that will appear in the future. Photographs of people and places, for example, help us remember and trigger memories of encounters that influenced or changed our paths.
What else do I need to realise our piano guitar duo‘s dream of giving concerts everywhere we go (and traveling the world with our music)? Meet Menno Goedhart, Taiwan tourism ambassador.
I called it “Completing the trio.” I just needed a violinist to complete my duo with French horn and my duo with cellist. The Dutch violinist who opened the music gates for us in Taiwan was returning to the Netherlands for a short vacation. I decided to make an event of it.
Some of the best memories I have are not recorded on photo, audio, or video. For this reason, I blog as a kind of bookmark — to trigger the memories and to never forget. How could I forget sitting at the piano, playing the Brahms horn trio, the Mendelssohn piano trios, and Piazzolla piano trio versions of his Four Seasons?
That afternoon of Thursday 15th July 2010 was a special one for me.
I called it “Completing the trio.” I just needed a violinist to complete my duo with French horn and my duo with cellist. The Dutch violinist who opened the music gates for us in Taiwan was returning to the Netherlands for a short vacation. I decided to make an event of it.
Once we started playing the trios, I realised that it was the most wonderful thing to play and experience chamber music. The sound was overwhelming and all encompassing. Had I discovered chamber music earlier, I would majored in music instead of engineering. Chamber music didn’t exist in my childhood on Okinawa. The closest thing was quatre main — piano duets. I played the keyboard in various bands, but that was not chamber music.
To entice the musicians to come to this “Completing the Trio” event, I organised a barbecue. I marinated spareribs in a special spicy Asian mix. I defrosted several dozen giant tiger prawns. I prepared Chinese cold noodles in the fridge. It was just a get-together for my indulgence in music — not a concert by any means.
I wanted to keep it small, intimate, and manageable. Just the 3 musicians plus me and Robert, that way I could focus on the music.
I tried to resist inviting others to this indulgent day of music and barbecue. I failed.
In the end, I invited my friend Kristen from Atlanta whom I hadn’t seen in 2 years. I invited a Hawaiian artist and his Dutch partner, both of whom I had never met but was very curious after reading his art catalogue.
The phone rang unexpectedly that afternoon. “I heard you’re having a rehearsal. We’d like to come to hear you. There are five of us. May we come to hear you?” News leaked of our musical gathering. “It’s a rehearsal,” I said. “Not a concert. Bring some chicken for the barbecue.”
The guest list of 3 expanded to 12. There were 14 of us that day enjoying the music, the barbecue, and the acrobatics.
Perhaps I was indulgent, for I wanted to play the piano for my father. He had not heard me play since 2002. When I asked what he wanted, he said that he wanted to see me give a speech. The Tatong Rotary Club granted both wishes.
The Tatong Rotary Club in Taichung meets every Thursday for lunch. As I couldn’t be in two places at the same time, I reluctantly declined Taipei Rotary’s kind invitation to a second lunch, said good-bye to Robert at the airport, and returned to Taichung where my father was waiting.
One Rotarian asked,”Why are there three different words for the Netherlands? In England, the English people speak English. In Germany, the Germans speak German. But in the Netherlands, the people speak Dutch and live in Holland.”
I answered,”Holland is only two of 12 provinces in the Netherlands. I don’t know where the word Dutch comes from, but yours is a good question.”
After my presentation of the Netherlands and my Rotary Club in Utrecht, I introduced my father. He had prepared a 2-minute speech for the Taichung Rotary.
There is more I can write about that Rotary lunch in Taichung. My father’s speech, for example. He had not given a speech since my late grandmother had died 6 years earlier. He had not given a speech in English since he last taught at university and high school in Taipei.
Perhaps I was indulgent, for I wanted to play the piano for my father. He had not heard me play since 2002. When I asked what he wanted, he said that he wanted to see me give a speech. The Tatong Rotary Club granted both wishes.
Thank you, Tatong Rotary Club, for changing your programme and making room for me and my father at short notice. My father finally got to attend a Rotary meeting, an activity his best friend from his university days had taken part — more than 50 years ago. It was to form a new chapter in his memoirs of his journey from Shanghai to Taiwan.
Concert Blog 