In March 2019, the first Sing for Love competition held its award ceremony. Backstage, the crew worked through the running order item by item: Solo category, third prize, 林家榮, for the song “Love” (愛).

Before the ceremony, 林家榮 had asked whether he could bring his family. He sold noodles at Taichung’s Second Market and wrote songs on his guitar in his spare time. When it came time to go up and receive the award, he brought his children onto the stage with him. He wanted them to see their father put his passion and his hard work together and be recognized in a grand way.

A running order can record the works, the placings and the names, but it rarely captures details like these. Since 2018, Sing for Love has reached its fifth edition, premiered 58 new works and awarded more than NT$1.67 million in prize money. The numbers are clearly kept; the lives that arrived at the competition along with the works often surface again only later, as people slowly look back.

The first prize in the mixed choir category of the first competition went to “A Promise to Travel” (旅行的約定), with lyrics by 余祖吉 and music by Chung-Yuan Yu. On the list of winners they are simply two names side by side; in fact they are father and son. Chung-Yuan Yu’s parents met through choral singing, and years ago his father wrote a love poem for his mother. In the year she turned sixty, the son set it as a choral piece, and father and son gave it to her together.

The second prize in the same edition, “Silly Child” (戇囡仔), began somewhere even more everyday: a conversation at the dinner table between 劉毅 and his mother. His mother always finished the family’s leftovers, and growing up watching her, he believed she really liked eating them. One day he finally asked whether she liked leftovers. She did not explain; she only smiled and said, “Silly child.” Those words became the title, and the conversation between them went into the song. The piece was later arranged separately for three-part treble voices and published on its own. Many works begin like this: not with a grand theme, but with someone remembering an old poem, a dinner, or a few words not understood at the time and only grasped years later.

In 2022, the third competition received 85 entries. One of them was unlike the other scores. It was not neatly engraved staff notation but a sheet of numbered notation with lyrics written on it. The entrant was serving a sentence in Taipei Prison at the time; the work was sent in with the help of the entrant’s elderly mother, and staff from the organizing team then accompanied her step by step through the registration.

When the results were announced, the song had not won a prize, and the story could have ended there. But the Rotary district governor that year, having read the entries, felt that this work and the spirit in which it was submitted deserved encouragement, and so created two special awards with prize money in addition to the existing prizes. One of them went to this entrant. Later, the Rotary choir paid for an arrangement and, with the composer’s consent, had the original single melody arranged for two-part choir and piano. Over the following year, the choir often sang it at performances large and small. It was never included in the published collection of prizewinning works, yet it left that original sheet of numbered notation behind and kept spreading through one rehearsal and performance after another.

The other special award went to 楊博雄, then eighty years old. His name was already familiar to Sing for Love, because among the eighty-odd entries each year, a dozen or more often came from him. Living in Kaohsiung, he sent in work edition after edition. He did not make the official list of winners in the third competition, but in the fourth he finally won a Merit Award in the children’s choir category with “Scarecrow” (稻草人), which he set to lyrics by 魏水明. He is remembered not only for that award, but because whenever a new call for entries opened, his works would appear among the submissions once again.

Looking through the records of all five editions, one also meets many people who would never otherwise have been put side by side. In the second competition, the Merit Award in the children’s choir category went to “Little Brilliant Memories” (小小燦爛的回憶), with lyrics by 陳偉勵, a professor of ophthalmology, and music by 陳慧玲, an attending physician at a children’s hospital. The composer of “Cabbage” (包心菜), winner of the Outstanding Award in the equal-voice choir category of the third competition, was 盧易之, a professional pianist and university lecturer. “The Moon Behind the Temple” (宮後的月娘), a Merit Award winner in the mixed choir category of the fourth competition, was again a collaboration between father and son. The lyricist 施應州 handed his words to his son 施維哲, then a second-year university student, who completed his first choral piece with them. When the son attended rehearsals, his parents came too. For the staff, it was a routine rehearsal before a premiere; for the family, it was a time of waiting together as a piece of music gradually took shape.

Write your hopes for love; sing your blessings for society.

A father who sells noodles in a market, a second-year university student, a hospital doctor, an eighty-year-old, a professional pianist, and a composer behind prison walls: the scores they sent in were placed in the same pile, numbered in order, made anonymous, and passed to the jury. The competition does not know in advance anyone’s profession or circumstances, nor what each work went through to get there; what the jury sees first is only ever words and music. Only once a work is selected, rehearsed and finally sung by a whole choir do the people and lives hidden behind the notes step forward too.

Over the years, some names have appeared again and again. After winning first prize with “A Promise to Travel”, Chung-Yuan Yu went on to receive more choral commissions. From the first competition on, 劉毅 appeared on the list of prizewinning works four editions in a row, gradually expanding his involvement from writing words and music to arranging. 卓綺柔 won the Outstanding Award in the mixed choir category of the second competition with “The Big Tree” (大樹) and has since received many commissions as well. 謝宇婷 has appeared on the list of winners several times, with prizewinning works in the first, third and fourth editions. What a competition can offer may seem to be no more than prize money, a premiere and a chance at publication. But for someone trying their hand at choral writing for the first time, sitting in the audience and hearing their own work truly sung may be exactly what makes them willing to pick up the pen again.

No one yet knows who will send in a piece of their life this year, words they have carried in their heart for a long time, or a score revised over and over. When the envelopes are opened, what we see first may still be just a name and a piece of music. Only when it is sung together by many voices do people gradually come to know what kind of life the song came from.