Tan Dun

(b Simao, Hunan Province, 18 Aug 1957). American composer of Chinese birth. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, he received no schooling or early musical training. For several years he planted rice in a commune. After working as a violinist and arranger at the local opera theatre in Beijing, he was admitted at the age of 19 to the composition department of the newly reopened Central Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Zhao Xindao and Li Yinghai and encountered Western classical music for the first time. As the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution were lifted, Tan and his fellow students discovered a wide range of formerly suppressed 20th-century music, from Bartók and Schoenberg to Boulez; they were also stimulated by visits from a number of guest composers, including Goehr, Crumb, Henze, Takemitsu and Yun. Tan soon became recognized as the leading composer of the Chinese ‘New Wave’, the generation of artists, writers and composers that came to prominence in the new atmosphere of cultural pluralism in the early 1980s. As such his music aroused much debate and political controversy: for a brief period in 1983 it was branded ‘spiritual pollution’ by the Chinese government, and performances were banned. In 1986 he moved to New York, where he completed his studies at Columbia University (DMA 1993) with Chou Wen-chung, Mario Davidovsky and George Edwards. Among his numerous honours are the Glenn Gould International Protégé Award, the Grawemeyer Award (in 1998 for the opera Marco Polo) and commissions from such organizations as the Edinburgh Festival, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York PO, the International Bach Academy and NHK, Japan. His Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind was composed for the ceremony reuniting Hong Kong with China on 1 July 1997, and his 2000 Today: a World Symphony for the Millennium was broadcast internationally by more than 55 television networks on 1 January 2000.

Describing himself as a composer ‘swinging and swimming freely among different cultures’, Tan has drawn inspiration from nature, Chinese philosophy and his childhood memories, a combination that lends his work qualities of timelessness, spirituality and mysticism. The last composition he completed before leaving China, On Taoism (1985), already signalled a radical break with the conservative Westernized style that had dominated Chinese art music in previous decades, and the works which followed set about integrating within what Tan has called ‘the concentrated lyrical language of Western atonality’ elements of Chinese traditional music. The influence of Beijing opera is especially evident: Eight Colors for String Quartet (1986–8) employs its characteristic melodic patterns, while Silk Road for soprano and percussion (1989) draws on a number of the vocal techniques (including falsetto, glissando and sharply articulated consonants) associated with it. Tan’s first full-length stage work was Nine Songs (1989), a ‘non-narrative, even surreal’ music-dance drama which derives both its fragments of text (in English and classical Chinese) and its ritualistic essence from poetry by Qu Yuan (340–277 bce). It is also one of a number of Tan’s works to employ original Chinese ceramic instruments. Altogether more ambitious in scale was Marco Polo (1995), which charts both the ‘outer’, physical journey of the title character and an ‘inner’, spiritual journey from West to East, played out by characters symbolizing ‘shadows’, ‘memory’ and ‘nature’. These physical and spiritual dimensions are demarcated musically, the former represented predominantly by music in a Western avant-garde idiom, the latter by the style of Beijing opera. Meanwhile the changes of geographical landscape in the course of the voyage are mirrored by changes of instrumentation within an ensemble that incorporates medieval European, Indian, Tibetan and Chinese instruments.

The series of works entitled Orchestral Theatre provides perhaps the best summary of Tan’s concerns in the 1990s. The cycle aims, in the composer’s words, to restore music’s place ‘as an integral part of spiritual life, as ritual, as shared participation’ through the ‘dramatic medium’ of the orchestra. Consequently it explores the dualities that underlie his work as a whole: those of East and West, the sacred and the secular, the pre-modern (shamanistic) and the modern (urban). Whereas Orchestral Theatre I: Xun (1990) sets out to recreate a Chinese village celebration, evoking its sounds through the use of both folk and Western instruments, the ceremony in Orchestral Theatre II: Re is essentially an imaginary one, though it owes something to Tibetan sources. In Red Forecast: Orchestral Theatre III these elements of ritual confront the modern paraphernalia of multimedia: a variety of Western styles – classical, jazz, rock and pop – are combined with the sounds of news reports and archival video footage focussing on events of the 1960s. That decade symbolizes for Tan a period of idealism both in the West and in the China of his upbringing, and the work courageously addresses the question of whether such idealism can survive the threats posed to it by technological and economic development and the upheavals of global politics. That the ‘forecast’ of the work’s title is not ultimately pessimistic is demonstrated by the transcendent quality of the final movement ‘Sunshine’, a ‘lovesong’ to nature and the future, performed on a stage flooded symbolically with red light.

WORKS

(selective list)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Kouwenhoven: ‘Mainland China’s New Music’, CHIME, no.2 (1990), 58–93; no.3 (1991), 42–75

P.M. Chang: ‘Tan Dun’s String Quartet “Feng ya song”: Some Ideological Issues’, Asian Music, xxii/2 (1991), 127–58

F. Kouwenhoven: ‘Composer Tan Dun: the Ritual Fire Dancer of Mainland China's New Music’, China Information [Leiden U.], vi/3 (1991), 1–24

B. Van Putten: ‘Tan Dun's Marco Polo: a Multi-Cultural Journey’, CHIME, no.9 (1996), 57–62

M. Swed: ‘Opera on the Edge – Tan Dun's Opera’, Los Angeles Times (5 Jan 1998)

JOANNA C. LEE