【Season Limited】Rural Life Music Festival in Meinong

Neither sweltering heat in summer nor humid cold in the north, Fall and winter are the best seasons to visit Meinong. It will be a relaxing moment if there is a music concert in the field, along with the featured agricultural products cherry tomato and white jade radish. Rural Life Music Festival was announced for this kind of expectation and annually held in November or December in Meinong.

In initial years, Rural Life Music Festival combined music with various rural experiences. There were farmer market showing the local products next to the concert, trips for exploring the rural town, and rich experiential events - roasting food in earth oven, handmade scarecrow, pickup radish and DIY pickled radish - all of them are exclusive in rural areas.

Not only music performance, the festival is also a stage for releasing Hakka music albums. Since 2012, three episodes of Hakka children song albums that were produced by local musician Lin, Sheng-Xiang, cooperated with other Hakka musicians and local elementary schools were unveiled in three years in a row. Before that there were no modern Hakka songs for children so they could only learn songs in Mandarin. Therefore, these albums with the ideas from daily life were innovative and quickly swept local campus that was eager to promote Hakka language to children.  

The ambition of the festival is not limited in children's song and later it focused on music for teenagers. The previous children albums just invited children to sing in the albums while the ones for teenagers even collected the songs written by teenagers themselves. Teens firstly joined the workshop to know the basic idea of creating an album, and then some of them submitted their lyrics for further composing if chosen while some attended the singer audition to perform the finished songs in the album. Moreover, a music video made this album more similar with commercial albums. Finally, the new album would be announced in the Rural Life Music Festival.

The stage of the festival was changed to the downtown where is easier to reach as Meinong Cultural and Creative Center opened. The programmes of the festival are composed of dance or chorus shows by local clubs, Hakka bands, and of course the new album annunciation. It has no doubt become the platform for teens to show their creativity and energy, especially in front of their families. 

This year, 2017, the final performance was a series of shows including dancing, drama, and crosstalk by Meinong junior high school. The teens surprised the audience by not only their various types of presentations but also performing in Hakka language. In the end of the festival, teens were gathered on the stage to thank the audience, along with their family members sharing the honour moment with them.