1. Hwang Yau-tai or Huang Yau-tai was a Chinese musician, writer and composer.
19 Facts About Hwang Yau-tai
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Hwang Yau-tai wrote over 2000 compositions, the most popular being "Azaleas," which was written in 1941 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
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Hwang Yau-tai was born in 1912 in the western part of Guangdong province.
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Hwang Yau-tai wrote many lyrical pieces and folk songs with variations, which were played with great success everywhere.
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Hwang Yau-tai taught people how to appreciate the solo violin sonatas by Bach and violin caprices by Paganini, as well as lyrical pieces by Wieniawski and others.
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Hwang Yau-tai composed music for the army band and songs for various choral groups, conducting the performances himself.
7.
Hwang Yau-tai obtained the diploma for violin from the Royal Schools of Music in 1955 and taught music while improving his composition technique.
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Hwang Yau-tai discovered that the ancient melodies and folk songs were not limited to the major-minor system, but were actually in different modes.
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Hwang Yau-tai felt that to compose good music in the Chinese style, modal harmony had to be used together with classical and modern harmony.
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Hwang Yau-tai has earned his living by teaching, composing songs, copying manuscripts, and printing music.
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Hwang Yau-tai has been invited to compose songs frequently for schools, institutes, and various associations.
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Hwang Yau-tai loved Chinese culture and felt it was his duty to promote the cultural heritage.
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The Qing Dynasty, already weakened by the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Rebellion that by the time Hwang Yau-tai was born in 1912, its collapse opened way for the birth of the Republic of China, led by Sun Yat-sen.
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Hwang Yau-tai was a young boy at the beginning of the Warlords Era that kept much of the country divided into fiefdoms.
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Hwang Yau-tai left his young family to look for work in Hong Kong in 1949 when Mao Zedong's CCP proved victorious over the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek.
16.
Hwang Yau-tai was still writing, attending concerts and composing music in his own unique Chinese-style of harmony including musical pieces on Buddhist sutras and texts Huihai gei, Xiaowu and Moni Zhu and on the philosopher Confucius before being hospitalized due to a fall in 2009.
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Hwang Yau-tai had three daughters, Mimi, Jane, and Nancy, to whom he dedicated his 1988 songbook, Lyrical Pieces for Piano Solo.
18.
In 1960, Hwang Yau-tai composed two songs for his 11-year-old daughter Nancy, who showed him some of her poems.
19.
Hwang Yau-tai married Liu Feng-hsien in 1943, but after living apart for over 20 years, the couple formally divorced in 1965.