Listening precedes singing in the Tsou people’s oral musical heritage, therefore “listening” (tmayaezoyx) in the Tsou language assumes a humble and compliant attitude. This context of listening is not only the focus of songs performed in duets of traditional rhymes, but also of understanding and acknowledging communication with all sentient beings. We could say that Tsou music begins with listening and resolves in singing. How to listen is thus based on the Tsou’s symbiotic relationship with the mountains, enclosing a mental state of consciousness.
Uong e Yatauyungana (1908-1954), the first composer to lay down notes for Tsou music and songs, came to understand this profoundly. He was born to the Tsou people in Alishan and was a Taiwanese Tsou thinker, and composer as well as poet. When the political regime changed hands after the war in 1945, he adopted the Chinese name Kao Yi-Sheng.
During the Japanese colonial period, Kao Yi-Sheng became keenly aware that Tsou culture’s transmission needed documenting, and had assisted in Taiwan with international studies of Tsou traditional mythology and linguistics. Uong e Yatauyungana would adopt for the first time the Japanese name Yata Issey when Japanese ethnomusicologist Kurosawa Takatomo and his recording crew arrived in Tapang to inquire about and collect Tsou music. As the war ended with a political handover in 1945, he would again revert back to the Chinese name Kao Yi-Sheng. Uong e Yatauyungana would see his name change many times with the ebbs and flows of tumultuous times, but he had always known that he was born in the mountains, and would eventually find his resting place there.