On Paper, He Turns Mere Noise Into Sweet Melody
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday January 30, 2006
First it was water, now Tan Dun has taken another everyday medium as inspiration, writes Harriet Cunningham.
TAN DUN is enthralled by counterpoint. "I cannot wait to come to Sydney again. The city is very, very diverse, very multicultural. Very exciting. Meanwhile, Australia has the oldest culture and the most modern culture always counterpointing together. It makes me crazy!" The New York-based, Oscar-winning composer of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack speaks in a heavily accented argot of buzzwords - metaphor, multiculturalism, counterpoint and diversity, passion, life and death. From anyone other than Tan, it might sound like a local government press officer who has been reading too much Confucius. But if anyone has the right to talk about counterpoint, Tan has. He is in himself an essay in counterpoint. This is a man who spent his formative years in the remote Hunan province of China, and at age 17 was sent by Mao Zedong's government to work among peasants in the rice paddies. He has toured rural China as composer/director/actor/singer/dancer and, more than likely, cook and bottle-washer in a Peking Opera troupe. He dismisses his experience of Mao's brutal Cultural Revolution as "a time of kill or be killed". In 1986 he moved from Beijing to New York, and swiftly became the darling of record companies, film producers and music publishers. Tan last visited Sydney two years ago, when he conducted the Sydney Symphony performing his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Concerto. He's here this time with Australian premieres of two more recent works, the Paper Concerto and The Map: a video symphony. The Paper Concerto is the second of his "organic" concertos, orchestral works which incorporate noises that more usually pass unnoticed in life's everyday hubbub. The Water Concerto, which was performed in Sydney in 2004, featured musicians "playing" giant acrylic bowls of water, amplified to capture every splash, drip and ripple. The Paper Concerto explores the many sounds that can be created from humble paper. "Paper is a very interesting metaphor and material. Every day I am with it," says Tan, who still composes his music at a desk, with pen and paper. "There are many, many ways to play paper, like tear the paper, blowing the paper, whistling the paper, waving the paper, shaking the paper. There are more than 50 ways to play the paper." Rebecca Lagos, a percussionist with Sydney Symphony, is one of the musicians who will take a featured role in the performance. She admits to being a little bemused by the score at first sight. "We haven't seen the instruments yet. We're meeting early before the first rehearsal for him to take us through the techniques," she says. "Just looking at the part some of it's fairly obvious, like crinkling paper, for example, but other things I really have no idea." She mentions mysterious objects such as a "spin phone" and "paper cymbals", but is reluctant to give too much away, in case she spoils the surprises built into Tan's ingenious score. Perhaps as a result of his early experiences in Peking Opera, Tan's orchestral works frequently explore the visual as well as the purely sonic.For example, in the Paper Concerto, his huge paper installations will dominate the Opera House stage, and the musicians' movements will be minutely choreographed. But it is in The Map that Tan's mantra of counterpoint - whether it is about the meeting of sound and image, music and dance or past and present - really comes home. During a visit to his home village of Hunan in 1981, the then music student encountered a practitioner of ba gua stone drumming, an ancient ritual combining principles of the I Ching with shamanistic vocalisations. "This man talked to the wind," Tan recalls. "He talked both to the next life, and the past one." Nearly 20 years later, and armed with a commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tan returned with a film crew, only to discover that "the tea is cold" - the stone drummer had died, and with him, his tradition. "That is when my piece became a very personal, spiritual journey," says Tan. "I began reaching inside my heart, drawing the map I could use to find him again." During two extended visits to Hunan province, Tan collected footage of a range of traditional music practices, including Nuo, a ritualised crying practised by professional mourners, tongue-singing, where the singers imitate insect noises with rapid tongue movements, and feige, a kind of antiphonal singing that is question and answer between two musicians who remain out of sight of each other. This footage became the basis for the work, acting not just as a visual stimulus but as an active collaboration with the live musicians."The video was his inspiration for the piece, then he brought it back in with the orchestra," says Lagos, who has been preparing her part with the help of a DVD recording. "That's where it's different from, say, Bartok [who made field recordings of Central European folk song and used it extensively in his compositions]. Tan's included the original source alongside the stuff he's written." So the Nuo singing becomes the basis of a melody for the solo cello, interwoven with the film footage, and in the feige movement the traditional musician provides the questions, with the solo cello responding. It's a dialogue between the past and the present."The orchestra always enjoy so much to play music with the people in the video," says Tan. "We still can play with them, remember them, celebrate life together. "It's a map to bring the people dead already to present life." Multimedia, cross-culturalism, old and new, East and West - for Tan it is much more than a series of 21st-century buzzwords. It's a way of life. And death. Tan Dun plays with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House from Thursday.
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald