Tan, Dun (EN)

Tan Dun, *18 August 1957 Simao (province Hunan), American composer and conductor of Chinese origin. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to work as a rice planter and learned about folk music; he worked as an arranger in a provincial Chinese opera, with which he also performed. He began regular artistic education in the second half of the 1970s at the conservatory in Beijing, where until 1983, he studied composition with Li Yinghai and Zhao Xingdao and musical forms with Yang Ruhai, who introduced him to the works of 20^th-century classics; he also participated in guest courses of, among others, Chou Wen-Chung, T. Takemitsu, I. Yuna, G. Crumb and H.W. Henze. In 1983, his string quartet Feng-Ya-Song (‘folk songs, hymns, odes’) was awarded at the C.M. von Weber Competition in Dresden. Tan Dun was then one of the representatives of the so-called New Wave (“Xinchao”), a group of Chinese artists who advocated aesthetic pluralism in art in the early 1980s. In 1986, he emigrated to the United States, where in 1986–93, he studied composition at Columbia University in New York with Chou Wen-Chung, G. Edwards and M. Davidovsky. Tan Dun was inspired by contact with the New York experimental scene – J. Cage and minimalists Ph. Glass and S. Reich. Tan Dun is a laureate of, among others: the Glenn Gould International Protégé Award 1996, and the Grawemeyer Award 1998 (for the opera Marco Polo) as well as the recipient of prestigious compositional commissions, including by Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Internationale Bachakademie in Stuttgart and Edinburgh Festival. He is also active as a conductor – in the 1990s, he was the first guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony; he is a valued author of film music – for the music to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), he received a British Academy Film Award (2000) and an Oscar (2001).

Tan Dun’s music is characterised by a synthesis of traditional Chinese culture with Western modern tendencies. Inspirations from Taoism, archaic Chinese poetry, calligraphy, folk songs and the sound of Far Eastern instruments are important to him. The youthful fascination with European works resulted in a structural approach to sound material (most often derived from folk music) and a turn towards post-series and sonoristic concepts. Symphony Li Sao, with the same title as Qu Yuan’s lament (340–278 B.C.), is formally similar to a classical symphony; the composer combined the idiom of late romantic symphonic music with a pentatonic scale and dissonant blocks of wind instruments and percussion. Inspired by ancient Chinese poetry, the Feng-Ya-Song quartet was created, in which the influence of European aesthetics was strongly visible; this contributed to the boycott of Tan Dun’s work by the authorities of the People’s Republic of China, which considered the work to be a manifestation of “spiritual contamination” of native heritage.

In the 1980s, Tan Dun began to use traditional Chinese instruments (e.g. in Tian Ying, San Qiu, Nan Xiang Zi, and Shan Yao) and imitated their sound on modern instruments. He also used vocal techniques typical of Peking opera, the singing of Buddhist monks and folk repertoire – falsetto, glissando, whisper and scream (On Taoism). After settling in the United States, he partially abandoned the imitation of European compositional techniques and changed his aesthetic attitude. Under the influence of, among others, J. Cage, he began to emphasise cultural otherness; the influence of Chinese traditional music was manifested by quoting fragments of Peking Opera (Eight Colors, Out of Peking Opera), the use of modal scales and rhythmic patterns (In Distance), references to shamanic practices (Nine Songs) and the use of unusual instruments – paper, stones, water and ceramic instruments (Jo-Ha-Kyū, The Pink. Acoustic Music for Paper, Water Concerto).

In the 1990s, the ritualization of the musical sequence became more visible in Tan Dun’s works; the composer also formulated the concept of “falsification” of the idiom of Far Eastern music. It involves the use of sound emblems and quasi-traditional musical gestures that blur the line between quotation and imitation. An example is Water Passion after St. Matthew and the Orchestral Theater series, in which Tan Dun highlighted the dramatic potential of concert music while reducing the musical material and making it more primitive. Postmodern tendencies are also visible in Tan Dun’s music – the use of the category of irony and grotesque (Death and Fire. Dialogue with Paul Klee, Ghost Opera), the presence of elements of minimalist and popular music (2000 Today. A World Symphony for the Millennium), basically on a model of a sound mosaic.

Opera is a genre particularly close to the composer. Theatrical elements appear in The Silk Road, Nine Songs and On Taoism, which are influenced by performance and improvised art. Tan Dun’s key stage work is the opera Marco Polo, in which the theme of the libretto prompted the composer to address the issue of the artist’s identity, use the concept of an “opera within an opera” and use the idiom of Far Eastern music and the tradition of European opera. The Peony Pavilion, written to a 16^th-century text by Tang Xianzu, is a reconstruction of the classical Chinese Kunqu-Opera; Tea. A Mirror of Soul is an attempt at a metaphysical interpretation of the tea ceremony; while in The First Emperor, Tan Dun recalled the story of the controversial Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the builder of the Great Wall of China.

Literature: [An Interview with] Tan Dun, “Canzona: Official newsletter of the Composers’ Association of New Zealand” 1988 no. 10; P.M. Chang, Tan Dun’s string quartet Feng-ya-song: Some ideological issues, “Asian music: Journal of the Society for Asian Music” 1991 no. 2; F. Kouwenhoven, M. Scherbatskoy, Tan Dun: A brochure with an introduction to the composer, a list of works and a short bibliography, New York 1993; B. van Putten, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo: A multi-cultural journey, “CHIME: Journal of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research” 1996 no. 9; F. Kouwenhoven, New Chinese operas by Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun and Guo Wenjing, “CHIME: Journal of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research” 1997 no. 10–11; T. Brady, James Bond, Tan Dun, and the Canadian future of music, “Musicworks: Explorations in sound” 1998 no. 71; Ch. Utz,  ‘Extreme cross-over, extremely personal music’: Tan Dun’s art for a new generation, “CHIME: Journal of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research”, 1998 no. 12–13; S. Mativetsky, Comments by Tan Dun on his music, “Circuit: Musiques contemporaines” 2002 no. 3; S.W. Yu, Two practices confused in one composition: Tan Dun’s Symphony 1997: Heaven, earth, man, in: Locating East Asia in Western art music, ed. Y.U. Everett, F. Lau, Middletown 2004; F.J. Oteri, J. Lu, R. Nordschow, Tan Dun: Tradition and invention, “NewMusicBox: The web magazine” 2007; W.A. Sheppard,  Blurring the boundaries: Tan Dun’s Tinte and The first emperor, “The journal of musicology: A quarterly review of music history, criticism, analysis, and performance practice” 2009 no. 3; S. Young, The voicing of the voiceless in Tan Dun’s The map. Horizon of expectation and the rhetoric of national style, “Asian music: Journal of the Society for Asian Music” 2009 no. 1; W.A. Sheppard, Tan Dun and Zhang Yimou between film and opera, “Journal of musicological research” 2010 no. 1; E. Hung, Tan Dun through the lens of Western media. I, “Quarterly journal of the Music Library Association” 2011 no. 3; E. Hung, Tan Dun through the lens of Western media. Part II, “Quarterly journal of the Music Library Association” 2012 no. 3;  T. Flice, Water in the work on Tan Dun, “Chime at midnight” 2015 no. 3; J. Subel, The organic music concept in Water Passion by Tan Dun, in: Musical analysis: Historia, theoria, praxis (3), ed. Anna Granat-Janki, Wrocław 2014; Y.U. Everett, Reconfiguring myth and narrative in contemporary opera: Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, Bloomington 2015; T.C. Blackburn, In search of third space: Composing the transcultural experience in theoperas of Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Zhou Long, doctoral dissertation, Indiana University 2015; S. Revuluri, Tan Dun’s The first emperor and the expectationsof exoticism, “The opera quarterly” 2016 no. 1; F. Kouwenhoven, China’s Musical Sorcerer, Tan Dun, in: The strange sound, ed. M. Münning, J.-M. Perkuhn, J. Sturm, Berlin 2016; N.Y. Rao, From Chinatown opera to The first emperor: Racial imagination, the trope of ‘Chinese opera,’ and new hybridity, in: Opera in a multicultural world. Coloniality, culture, performance, ed. M. Ingraham, J. So, R. Moodley, New York 2016; N.Y. Rao, Chinese opera percussion from model opera to Tan Dun, in: China and the West. Music, representation and reception, ed. H.-L. Yang, M. Saffle, Ann Arbor 2017; E. Szczurko, Transgresje w dziejach gatunku pasyjnego w muzyce, in: Transgresje w muzyce, ed. A. Nowak, Bydgoszcz 2022, pp. 115–133.