The 7th National Golden Voice Chorus Contest was held at Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on March 9. TKU Chorus won the First Prize, thus proudly bringing back the much-coveted Dr. Sun Yat-sen Cup.

The battle was hard won. As we know, the members of TKU Chorus came from two groups: veterans and green horns. By veterans, we mean TKU alumni/ae; by green horns, currently enrolled students.

Given that the TKU Chorus possesses every potential to win, they had to compete with so many sophisticated groups and none of them was easy to topple. For instance, they had to grapple with the famed Taichung Philharmonic Chorus and The Benevolence Love (Ta Ai) Chorus, etc. Anyway, they won despite all the odds against them.

The 2nd Prize goes to the combined Chorus of Taipei First Girls Senior High School and Taipei Chien Kuo Senior High School; for the 3rd winner, they are no other than the Music major students of the Taipei National Teacher’s University of Arts.

In the contest, they had to sing a given song “My Permanent Hometown” in southern dialect, so-called “Ming Nan Hua”. It was a task as Mr. Chen Yung-chih, the TKU Chorus Leader told us, “What if one doesn’t speak the Ming Nan Hua? One had to learn at any cost. There are some expressions which are proven to be too hard to handle, even to a veteran speaker of the dialect like me.”

The second song “The Inner-Mongolia Folksong Suite” was their option. It consists of two songs “Loves in the Prairie” and “A Hymn to 8 Beautiful Stallions”. The Suite is an adaptation of the original Inner Mongolian folk song that had won a 2nd Prize in an International Musical Event. The two songs, in fact, had made such an impression upon Mr. Tu Ming-yuan, music conductor of TKU Chorus, that he could not resist the temptation of adapting them into his own creation. Here is what he said, and it is worth quoting here: “These two songs impart two sentiments: the heroic and the grandiloquent. When combined together, the effect they evoke can be quite stunning and therefore unforgettable.”