May We Be Together at This Moment when We Sing the Song

Pens and papers were left by the shop window of Store No. 163 in Jinwanwan. The passersby could write down their interpretations of love at their will. After two weeks of our stationing, a line of yellow words appeared in a corner of the shop window: “Cheesy Tagalog lines for her”, followed by three hearts. The simpler the words, the more complex the emotions. By crossing different times and spaces, love words usually have a reason that could touch your heart. 

“Wouldn’t love songs be the same way?” we thought. 

Songs played an interesting role during the stationing of “Not Just Love Stories” in Jinwanwan. Apart from the music that poured out from the different stores, we also asked in some of the street interviews that we conducted on Sundays: “Which song can represent your ideal love?” Sometimes, we would listen to a group choir immediately, and others took more time to think about it. They would dig into their treasured songs from their memories, one by one and kept adding songs to their song list.

The Australian singer Troye Sivan sings the 80s-style“Angel Baby” with a touch of sorrow: "I just want to live in this moment forever.”

The English band Rixton cried desperately “all I need is a little love in my life” in Me and My Broken Heart.

In Céline Dion’s To Love You More, she sings “I'll be waiting for you /here inside my heart” with some sort of firmness with hope. 

In Rockwell’s Knife, “Knife/Cuts like a knife/How will I ever heal?/I’m so deeply wounded” is the pain of being betrayed. 

The Filipino band Parokya ni Edgar’s Harana shows us the music during the Spanish colonization – “Ibubuhos ko ang buong puso ko/Sa isang munting harana para sayo.” (Harana means little love song or serenade in Tagalog. It refers to the southern European tradition passed down from the Spanish colonization in which the pursuer woos the woman with a string instrument. Another love song form is “kundiman”, with a different music style that was popular during the XIX and XX Century. They all carry the ethnic spirit of the Filipinos during the colonization.)

It was like on a Sunday afternoon, led by our artist Liu Chun-Liang, we paraded around the first and second floors of Jinwanwa. The song “Can’t take my eyes off you” was played repeatedly, and as we reached the chorus part “I love you, baby/and if it's quite alright/I need you, baby/to warm the lonely night...", we would all stop our feet and sing it aloud together with dances. Without exception, others would join us. On some occasions, we would get some waving and dancing. 

Parokya ni Edgar sings: “Uso pa ba ang harana (Is the little love song still popular)?” Maybe we do not woo under the windows, yet the correlation between love and music is always applicable in different times and places.

When the music plays, we will spin and swing among the jumping music notes and sing along with the song. May we be together at this present moment.

註※ Harana這個字在菲律賓tagalog語裡意為小情歌或小夜曲。意指一個南歐經過西班牙殖民史流傳過來的傳統，追求女子的男性拿著弦樂器，對者女子吟唱求愛。另有一情歌形式是Kundiman，又有不同的曲式，流行於19-20世紀，乘載了菲律賓於殖民時期的民族精神。