A Choir in Budapest and the Politics of Many Tongues

A Taiwanese conductor, a Hungarian choir and an endangered island song

10 June 2026

What can a concert reveal about two ways of imagining ‘Asia’? A single concert in Budapest, where a Taiwanese conductor leads a Hungarian choir through the endangered tongues of Asia, shows what a state owes the peoples who carry those languages and why CEE should recognise the stakes.

On a spring evening at the Budapest Music Center, I had the opportunity to listen to the Kodály Choir of Debrecen perform a programme titled The Far East Is Near’, led by the Taiwanese conductor Ms. SzuYun Swing Hsieh, herself trained here in Budapest, a small bridge between two places that rarely appear in the same sentence.

By the end of the evening, I had stopped thinking of it as a musical concert and started thinking of it as an argument communicated through music.

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Waka Ikeda

Waka Ikeda is a Japanese journalist based in Budapest and Tokyo. Her work appears in The Japan Times, Nikkei Asia, Newsweek Japan, HuffPost Japan, Madame Figaro Japon, ELLE Japan and VOGUE Japan, among other outlets.

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