My purpose is to find my own language. The music of the future. It does not fit the 20th century, but opens the door to the 21st. -- Tan Dun
Tan Dun's music is a vital expression of independence from the weight of Chinese history, and of
self-assurance amid contemporary turmoil...Every part of Tan Dun's music is violent as a burst of
human blood, yet full of grace, a voice of the soul. I believe he is one of the most outstanding
composer's today.
-- Toru Takemitsu
Born in 1957 in Si Mao, a remote, rural village in the central Hunan province in China, composer/conductor Tan Dun spent his formative years listening to the native folksongs and ritual music of his region. During his youth, Tan learned music largely on his own and had little contact with outside musical influences. The music of his childhood made a deep impression on Tan, and continues greatly to influence his compositions today.
Many of Tan's school years were spent during the repressive regime of Mao's Cultural Revolution. He planted rice for two years as part of his compulsory labor and then worked as an er-hu player and arranger for a provincial Beijing Opera troupe. During his stint with the opera company, Tan was exposed to his first Western classical work--Beethoven's Fifth Symphony-- an eye-opening experience which introduced Tan to a whole realm of new sonic possibilities. He began to imagine the possibility of becoming a composer but it was not until after the Cultural Revolution that Tan had his first, formal musical training.
In 1978, based on his impressive knowledge of traditional Chinese folk melodies, Tan was admitted to the prestigious Central Conservatory in Beijing where he studied with Li Yinghai and Zhao Xingdao. During his eight years at the conservatory, Tan (and his 'New Wave' colleagues) became interested in learning from new, outside musical influences and using composition as a means of exploring and challenging boundaries. Shostakovich, as taught by his Soviet-trained teachers during the Stalin era, influenced Tan. However, it was not until Alexander Goehr's visit to the Beijing conservatory in 1980 that Tan had his first substantive contact with current, musical developments occuring outside China. These discoveries greatly impacted his compositions; by 1983, Tan's musical works--written increasingly in standard, western classical genres in combination with Chinese instruments and elements--began attracting attention in China and abroad; String Quartet: Feng Ya Song (1982) was awarded a Weber Prize in Dresden. In 1986, Tan received a fellowship to attend Columbia University where he completed a doctoral program in music composition, studying with Chou Wen-Chung, George Edwards and Mario Davidovsky. Tan continues to take up residence in New York City today.
Largely regarded as one of the leading contemporary Chinese composers, Tan has been the recipient of major international awards and commissions including the Suntory Prize Commission from Toru Takemitsu and the City of Toronto-Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communication. His latest Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind), commissioned to commemorate the reunification of Hong Kong with the People's Republic of China, premiered to a global audience through its worldwide telecast at the historical, handover ceremonies in Hong Kong on July 1, 1997 and later at the Great Hall of the People on Tianamen Square. Tan's works have been performed (often with himself conducting and/or performing as a soloist) by major orchestras and ensembles throughout Asia, Europe and North America. His compositions have been selected for significant national and international festivals including ISCM World Music Days and the Edinburgh International Festival, broadcast often on National Public Radio, the BBC, German Radio and Radio France, and performed at many of the premier venues around the world. Tan has also gained recognition as a conductor of innovative programming of 20th century music and was recently appointed resident composer/ conductor with BBC Scottish Symphony.
Tan's operatic and orchestral commissions and performances carry him well into the next century. In New York City alone, Tan's performances in the 1997/98 season include New York City Opera's U.S. premiere of Marco Polo withTan conducting, Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind) with Yo Yo Ma, Tan and the Orchestra of St. Lukes at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, Death and Fire with the Metropolitan Opera and conductor James Levine at Carnegie Hall, and Red Forecast (Orchestral Theatre III) with the American Composers Orchestra and Tan at Carnegie Hall. He holds exclusive contracts in publishing with G. Schirmer, Inc. and (more recently) with Sony Classical for his recordings. Tan's recordings have been met with much critical and public support. His latest release, Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind), debuted this past July at No. 5 on the Billboard classical music chart; Marco Polo was chosen by Germany's Opera Magazine as the 1996 "Opera of the Year" (and Tan as "Composer of the Year") and is scheduled for CD release in October 1997. In 1994, the BBC Music Magazine cited On Taoism (from Koch-Schwann) as one of the year's best CD's. In addition to his classical compositions, Tan is known for his experimental works as well -- most notably Soundshape: for ceramics, voice and movement (1990) which premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York -- and for his innovative collaborations with visual and performance artists, theater and film directors, and choreographers. Tan has also just completed his first Hollywood score for a psychological thriller called Fallen, a Denzel Washington film slated for release this coming fall.
The broad appeal of Tan's latest projects, underscores more recently stated desires to speak to as large an audience as possible while still maintaining creative and musical integrity. Noting the successful model of older composers such as John Corigliano and Henryk Gorecki, Tan notes in contrast how during "the middle of the 20th century, composers were trying to be as isolated as possible -- extremely, even selfishly isolated. I can't see why we should keep on doing that." Accordingly, Symphony 1997, which "seeks the unity between the eternal and the external," is drawn in broadly accessible, romantic terms. Composed of 13 short movements, ancient, ceremonial bianzhong bells (dug up intact by astonished archaeologists in the Hubei Province after 24 centuries of entombment) open the symphony that interweaves Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Chinese drums (played in an African-style beat), and a climactic children's choir singing optimistically of world peace.
While Symphony 1997 may be Tan's most accessible work to date, it also continues upon a path of exploration for a new language of music and sounds which incorporates Asian instruments, playing techniques and traditional elements alongside the standard apparatus of Western classical music, which challenges the boundaries of what is considered "classical" music, and which deals on broad terms with philosophical meditation on the nature and future of humanity.
On Taoism (1985), one of Tan's last works written in Beijing before moving to New York, prefigures many of his later musical concerns. Written for voice and orchestra, On Taoism was composed following his grandmother's traditional, Taoist funeral. A voice part, suggestive of a high priest or Beijing opera singer, seeks expression of Tan's earliest memories of Chinese village rituals, theater and folk music through its vocalization of sounds -- all non-words in performance. The bassoon and bass clarinet solos actively mediate between the vocalist and orchestra, weaving the elements of Chinese and western, vocal and orchestral. Tan also utilizes Chinese playing methods, tonal intervals and percussion into a western orchestra, creating a hybrid of styles and sounds.
Orchestral Theatre I: Xun (1990), Tan's next major orchestral work and the first in a 3-part series,
picks up many of the issues negotiated in On Taoism. The opening note to his composition sheds
light on some of the questions Tan sought to examine, namely:
How, or if, a classical orchestra could sound not classical, could it convey the sense of another
culture, a ritual of instruments and vocalization? Could this, which is common in Chinese theater and
folk celebration, be done with a western orchestra? What would primitive sounds be like with
western harmony? Why must harp be only harp, and koto only koto, forever separate?
Orchestral Theatre I: Xun begins Tan's exploration of orchestral performance as ritual. The mysterious, lilting sounds of the 'xun' -- an ancient Chinese folk instrument shaped as a pear, clay pipe -- that opens the work is interrupted by a cacophony of sounds created instrumental and by orchestral musician's voices. In this work, all of the orchestral performers vocalize -- hum, murmur, chant, sing -- in 'pure' sound (representing no language, word or meaning), creating a drama of ritual in the performance space. Instruments are again played in non-traditional methods that combines standard classical and Chinese methods for intriguing effects; the harp is utlized like a 'zheng,' an ancient relative of the koto, the piccolo as a bamboo flute, instruments are played in the sliding lines of Beijing opera. Tan has noted that as he wrote this work in New York, "a lot of things were running through my mind: the faces of Peking opera actresses, sacrifice, human noise in Tien An Men Square -- all these images appeared to me as hallucination, jumbled on a huge stage." The interplay of the xun with standard, western instruments, the vocalization of orchestral performers, and the atypical treatment of instruments in Orchestral Theatre I: Xun thus marks a beginning attempt to create a new musical language which uses a diversity of elements and moves them beyond their original, native language, culture and technical traditions.
Orchestra Theatre II: Re (1992), a 23-minute ritual of sound, space and silence" commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo, continues Tan's investigation of orchestral performance as ritual. Orchestra Theatre II: Re uses chanting to simulate a chimerical, Tibetan spiritual ceremony. The audience act like monks and share the performance space with the performers, vocalizing, this time, in a chant of six words (taken from six languages but devoid of any meaning). In this way, Tan attempts to blur traditional boundaries between performer, audience and concert stage, to create instead a total, shared experience of ritual performance. To further this goal, the entire work also uses the single tone re which suggests a sense of endless circling. And 're,' too, is meant to hint at its English language components -- as in repetition, renew, replace and even revolution.
Red Forecast: Orchestral Theatre III (1996) Tan's third work, brings his Orchestral Theatre cycle
to a retrospective close. In his composer's note, Tan explicitly states some of the goals for the three
works:
The Orchestral Theatre series had its origin in some musings about the place of music in the world,
and of humanity, in society and in nature. Music which clearly separates the role of performer from
listener, of orchestra from audience, seems usual to modern concert-goers. Actually, such isolation
began only a few hundred years ago, while the history of music as an integral part of spiritual life, as
ritual, as shared participation, is as old as humanity itself. The idea of 'orchestral theatre' gradually
came to me as a way of finding this lost unity...I began to see the orchestra itself as a dramatic
medium which could once again bridge the creative and the re-creative, completing the circle of
spiritual life.
In Red Forecast, an ambitious, multimedia work cast for soprana, soprana, orchestra, video and taped audio news clips, Tan recasts the notion of theatre away from ritual to a more traditionally western sense of drama, where 'actors' move (both sound and the orchestral musicians themselves) around the stage. From postmodern iterations of Western classical, pop, jazz, strains of Chinese folksong, Taoist funeral bands, and political tunes from the 1960's, emerge a pool of red -- a literally red video image and optimistic musical sensation. Tan's forecast is red -- renewed passion and hope in the idealism and spirituality of humanity.
Ghost Opera (1994), written during the period of his Orchestral Theatre series, shares many of that series musical concerns. Commissioned for the Kronos quartet and Wu Man, a pipa player, Ghost Opera represented Tan's first broad-based success; the Kronos Quartet took the work on tour globally to both critical and public praise. Ghost Opera, composed for string quartet, pipa, water, stones, paper and metal, experiments again with the idea of performance as a shared, spiritual experience with the audience. In Ghost Opera, the performers play both facing and with their back to the audience, and also with an installation of paper, water, stones and metals (which all represent instruments in this work). Tan globally diversifies the Chinese idea of a 'spirit opera,' in which performers talk with their own past and future, to include a cross-cultural discussion between Bach and Chinese folk song, Buddhist monks and Shakespeare, Chinese pipa and string quartet, stones and watergong basins.
Tan's music has often been described in such cliché binarisms as 'East meets West' -- where "ancient, exotic, other-worldly" properties of the 'Orient' clash with the more "modern, rational" West. Yet such dualisms, simplifications at best, frustrate Tan. His artistic goal is to challenge such broad-sweeping terms as 'East,' 'West:' "no East anymore, no West anymore. My purpose is to be flexible and freely flying around among all kinds of experience. Not to be driven by the wave of culture--fashion, trends, isms, schools--but to create my own unity."
Tan's works to date have brought him closer to his goal, and traversed many deeply
philosophical, aesthetic and musical concerns along the way. Broadly stated, some of the questions
explored include: what is the role of the audience be in classical performances? How can the
concert stage create a sense of ritual? What is the nature of humanity in this global, postmodern
age? What type of musical language can Tan employ (invent) to give voice to his own complex,
personal history? As Tan engage these concerns (and many, many more) into the next millenium,
one has the sense that his most challenging works are yet to come.
Tan Dun
Main Works
Opera
| Marco Polo | 1995 | Libretto by Paul Griffiths |
| Nine Songs | 1989 | Libretto by the composer, after Qu Yuan (340-277 B.C.) |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra | 1983 |
| Don't Cry Nanjing (from original sound track of Nanjing 1937) | 1995 |
| Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee | 1992 |
| Guitar Concerto: Yi2 | 1996 |
| The Intercourse of Fire and Water (Yi1) | 1993 |
| On Taoism | 1985 |
| Orchestral Theatre I: Xun | 1990 |
| Orchestral Theatre II: Re | 1992 |
| Red Forecast: Orchestral Theatre III | 1996 |
| Out of Peking Opera -- Violin Concerto | 1987, rev. 1994 |
| Self Portrait -- from Death and Fire | 1983/92 |
| Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind) | 1997 |
| Circle with Four Trios, Conductor and Audience | 1992 |
| Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments | 1995 |
| Eight Colors for String Quartet | 1986-88 |
| Elegy: Snow in June | 1991 |
| Ghost Opera | 1994 |
| Lament: Autumn Wind | 1993 |
| A Sinking Love | 1995 |
| String Quartet: Feng Ya Song | 1982 |
| Traces | 1989/90 |
| Silent Earth | 1991 |
| Jo-Ha-Kyu | 1992 |
| Soundshape: for ceramics, voice and movement | 1990 |
| The Silk Road | 1989 |
| Golden Sparrow | 1991 |
| Snow in June | 1989 |
| Crossings | 1988 |
| Nan Xiang Zi | 1984 |
| Pipa Concerto | 1983 |