The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 5 | May 03, 2008

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Of Musical Import: East Meets West in the Art of Tan Dun

Ian Buruma

Of Musical Import: East Meets West in theArt of Tan Dun

Ian Buruma

In Stockholm last fal l , walking past aMcDonald’s, Tan Dun turned to me and said:“Some 20 years ago, I was still planting rice inChina. And now I’m conducting orchestras inall the great concert houses of the world: LaScala, the Met, the Berlin Philharmonic. I stillcan’t believe it.”

A trim, close-cropped man who likes to dressfashionably in dark colors and black leatherpants, Tan Dun is a kind of rock star of themodern music scene. He won an Oscar for thescore of Ang Lee’s film “Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon.” His latest opera, “The FirstEmperor,” starring Plácido Domingo, had itspremiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in2006 and will be revived there this week, witha few changes, mostly to the libretto. Hoppingaround the world, from Shanghai to Stockholm,from Tokyo to New York, he conducts andintroduces his own music to a global audienceof rapturous fans.

Tan is based in New York City, but I managedto catch him in Stockholm (between gigs inShanghai and Rome), where he was attendingpart of a weeklong Tan Dun festival. We firstmet in a hotel coffee lounge. It was self-service.He chose to have tea: “Tea is from the inside,”he said. “Coffee is from the outside.” Tan tendsto talk like that, less like a composer than like amystic. “One plus one makes one” is anotherone of hissayings, meaning — I think — that hismusic is not so much a fusion of East and Westas an individual expression emerging from themixture of different traditions. Speaking of hisbirthplace, he once said, again rather typically:“Hunan is the home of philosophy, of yin andyang, of shamanistic culture. It has good fengshui.”

The wise man is also an astute entrepreneur,however. Walking from the hotel to theKonserthus, where the Nobel Prizes are handed

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out, he was talking in Chinese on his cellphone.After he was done, he turned to me in a state ofgreat excitement. “Just imagine,” he said, eyesshining with pleasure. “We’ve got permission toperform ‘The First Emperor’ on the Great Wallof China for the Beijing Olympics. We’ll have aworldwide audience of billions!” Since then,there have been some doubts raised about thisproject. In fact, the Chinese government maynot let it happen after all, but the very idea of itshows the scale of Tan’s artistic ambition.

First Emperor staged at the Met

It has indeed been a remarkable journey fromrural Hunan to the audience of billions. Tanwas born in 1957. Although his earliestmemories, as he relates them in public, are fullof Taoists, shamans and village sorcerers, hisparents were professionals in Changsha, theprovincial capital. His mother was a medicaldoctor, and his father worked at a foodresearch institute. But he was partly raised byhis grandmother, a vegetable farmer, who toldhim ghost stories, which he adored. Sincetraditional music of any kind, folk or opera, wasbanned during the Cultural Revolution, whichbegan in 1966 and lasted more or less until1976, Tan’s main introduction to musicconsisted of a few permitted revolutionaryworks.

Like all children of “intellectuals” in the late1960s and early 1970s, he was forced to workin the countryside as part of the nationwide“re-education” campaign. “Imagine,” he said,“you were told to report to an office and made

to swear to leave your family, to feed pigs, toplant rice, for your entire life. I cried. Howcould I do this for my entire life? In fact, therequired length of time depended on the purityof your thoughts.” Tan was relatively lucky.Mao died two years after he was sent toacollective farm, and the Cultural Revolutioncame to an end.

“Everyone experienced bitterness,” he recallsnow, “but I had fun. The farmers, who wereexperts in ghost operas, couldn’t let anyonehear their songs. But I found a way around thisby setting Maoist texts to their folk melodies.Everybody understood the ruse, and they lovedit. Since then I became an avant-gardist, notfrom New York, but from that village inHunan.”

He explained the nature of ghost operas, whoseform he has loosely adopted in some of his ownworks. “The traditional ghost opera,” he said,“has three acts: you welcome the ghost, youentertain the ghost, then leave with the ghost.”In Buddhist terms, it is about “the last life, ourpresent life and the next life.” Religion in ruralChina, where Tan grew up, is an eclectic mix ofTaoism, Buddhism and folk beliefs, mostly to dowith nature worship, mediated by people intouch with the spiritual world. That is what hemeans by shamans.

While composing folk songs, Tan became thevillage musician, playing on anything he couldfind: a fiddle, a wok to use as a drum, evenagricultural tools. His gift for improvisation, formaking music out of anything at hand, is stillevident in much of his work. Bowls of water,sheets of rice paper, rocks, stones, anything,can be used to express Tan’s musicalimagination.Writing about “Inventions forPaper Instruments and Orchestra ,”commissionedby the Los Angeles Philharmonic,The Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swedwrotethat “Tan’s contribution is to make everythingabout the concert experience, even holding aprogram on your lap, part of the heightened

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sensations.”

After Mao’s death in 1976, a freakish accidentchanged Tan’s life. A touringBeijing Operatroupe was in a shipwreck, and severalmembers drowned. Tanwas sent back toChangsha by the Communist Party to join theopera company as a violinist. Since thetraditional operas had been banned for 10years, their revival was hugely popular. Then, arevelation: Tan heard Beethoven’s FifthSymphony on the radio. Western classicalmusic had also been banned during theCultural Revolution. It was a spur for him toapply for a place at the just-reopened CentralConservatory of Music in Beijing. Thecompetit ion was f ierce, thousands ofapplicants, a handful of places. He wasaccepted. But the professors, who hadthemselves spent years feeding pigs in remotevillages as part of their political “re-education,”were still stuck in old Soviet models ofrevolutionary music education.

Then, a second revelation: the British composerAlexander Goehr, married to an Israeliprofessor of Chinese literature, visited China inthe early 1980s and gave a lecture aboutSchoenberg and Debussy. Goehr, whose father,Walter, a famous conductor, was a pupil ofSchoenberg’s, is a highly respected composerin the Schoenbergian tradition. The hall waspacked with at least a thousand students. Oneof them was Tan. “People were so hungry,” herecalls. “Professor Goehr completely reopenedthe door for us. It was like hearing the storiesof 1001 Nights. We were so fascinated. It wasso new to us. Because our beloved professorinfluenced me so much, I spent years trying tocatch up with Schoenberg’s atonal music. Butit’s too easy to lose yourself in a system likethat, and I caught cultural jet lag. I rememberProfessor Goehr telling us to avoid ethniccontent, to be neutral and independent. Butright after he left, I tried to use Beijing operaand folk music. If you want to be a Chineseavant-garde artist, the safest way is to stick to

your grandmother’s tone. The most dangerousway is to follow Western music from theRomantics to 12-tone. This period is poison. Icould only use the techniques as a recipe formy fusion cooking.”

I called Alexander Goehr at his home inCambridge, England, where he was a professorof music for many years. Goehr remembers thelecture vividly, but not Tan, who was just oneface in a thousand. “Actually,” he said, “what Iwarned them against was to do a Chineseversion of Western music. Unfortunately mywarning had little effect. They have becomeWestern composers with a few temple bells.”

I repeated something Tan said about the needfor modern Chinese artists to retain a certaininnocence. Tan told me how he had tried toavoid being too sophisticated. “If you are toosophisticated,” he said, “you lose courage.”Theory, he maintained, “makes for moreboundaries. Competing with the Europeans, bybeing more sophisticated, is to resist yourself.One plus one makes one. Yin and yang, insideand outside, honesty and pretension. I havepracticed this philosophy for the last 20 years.”

Goehr sighed over the phone and said: “Yes,that is what I had hoped as well, that theywould keep a freshness, find somethingdifferent out of their own experience, likeJanacek or Mussorgsky. But that hope was alittle innocent, too. In fact, because of theirsuccess in every other field, the Chinese arenow in the same state as people who are notChinese. They know what the trends are. Theyare technically excellent, but the overallpopularism, which is commercial in origin, willlead to kitsch.”

Tan’s claim, of course, is that his music doesemerge from his experience, from the ghoststories, Buddhist prayers and village shamansof his youth. One of his most striking pieces, amultimedia event for cello, video and orchestra,called “The Map,” was actually performed in

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Xiangxi, a village in rural western Hunan,where Tan once met a shaman, known as “thestone man,” who could talk to the winds andthe clouds. Out of this encounter, he says, camethe music, written for Yo-Yo Ma in 1999. Themore-or-less Western sound of the cello ismixed with Chinese folk singing and the soundsof rushingwater and clashing stones.

Tan Dun returns to a Miao village in Hunan for hisThe Map

I asked Tan how it was received by the localpeople. “The farmers were more open than thecivilized bourgeoisie,” he replied. “Theytouched the cello, because it was shiny andbeautiful and they were worried that it was toocold. They talked to the instrument as if it werealive, in the spirit of the ghost operas.”

It is indeed a haunting piece of music, and thedrama of the lone cellist, talking, as it were, tothe folk singers on a video screen, is powerful.Even the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen seemsto have been affected by the atmosphere ofTan’s dream of old Hunan. He is quoted asfollows in the liner notes of the DVD: “My oldFrench cello follows ‘The Map’ to Xiangxi. Ithas received great karma from the water there,and has made true connections with the rootsof the people there.”

In fact, Tan found acclaim for Chinese-flavored

pieces long before that. In 1979, he wrote asymphony based on a fourth-century Chineselament. In 1983, he won his first big award, theWeber Prize, with a string quartet. His visit toDresden to collect it was his first step into theWestern world. Two years later, inspired by hisgrandmother’s death, he wrote an orchestralwork, called “On Taoism.” These early pieceswere, in his phrase, part of his “class struggle”against the atonal system. “I used folkresources to compete with the 12-tone system,as a challenge to Goehr and Schoenberg.” In1989, he wrote “Nine Songs,” a musical versionof classical Chinese poems, using ceramicinstruments, another innovation based ontradition, and Chinese gongs.

Alexander Goehr was alluding to a musicaltrend among modern Chinese composers. Whatmakes Tan interesting, however, is not just themusic itself but his theatrical flair. As well as acomposer and conductor, he is a man of thetheater with an extraordinary talent fordramatic effects. Dance, Beijing opera, videoart all have their places in his work. He ispraised for his theatrical imagination as muchas for his music. As the French critic GérardCorneloup wrote in “Forum Opéra”: “Superblighting,magnificent costumes, sumptuous voices andwell-developed characters all participate in thesublime presentation of ethereal music thatcolors both words and phrases. Tan Dun is,indeed, Puccini miraculously reborn into the21st century.”

Corneloup was referring specifically to anopera in three acts, titled “Tea: A Mirror ofSoul.” It was first performed in Tokyo in 2002. Iheard it in Stockholm. A few hours before theperformance began, Tan explained his music toa roomful of Swedish music lovers. He wasdressed in a modish black, semi-Chinese outfitand talked engagingly in English about hisexperience as a farmer in Hunan: “I canremember the young women, planting tea,getting covered in green from handling the

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leaves, their hands, their arms, their legs. I hadan almost erotic fantasy of the soul going greentoo.”

Tea has a certain pedigree in expressions ofAsian culture in the West. The most famousmodern example is “The Book of Tea,” writtenby Kakuzo Okakura in English in 1906. Thiswork was meant to show the essence of whatOkakura, who lived and worked mostly inBoston, regarded as the essence of the Asianspirit. Far less well known is his opera, “TheWhite Fox,” based on a Japanese legend anddedicated to Isabella Stewart Gardner, thefamous Boston patroness of the arts. In a way,Tan follows in Okakura’s footsteps. His art is anattempt to achieve something very few Asianartists have succeeded in doing: to forgesomething new, and at the same t imetraditional, by reworking Asian forms inWestern idioms.

Tan’s opera “Tea” features a Japanese monkfrom Kyoto, who is actually a prince andbecomes involved in a love triangle at theimperial Chinesecourt. The ancient “Book ofTea,” by Lu Yu, plays an important role in hisrivalry with a Chinese prince. There is talk ofZen Buddhism, of water, fire and wind, of the“ways of tea.” The libretto, written by Tan andXu Ying, resident playwright for the ChinaNational Opera and Dance Drama Theater,abounds in phrases like: “though bowl is empty,scent glows;/though shadow is gone, dreamgrows . . . . ” Three female Japanesepercuss ion i s t s produced eer ie andextraordinary sounds from rustling rice paperand bowls filled with water. The audience,judging from the applause, loved every minuteof it.

Tea performed in Santa Fe

There is no question that Tan uses Chineseculture in his music. The question is whichChinese culture. It may not be a culture thatmost contemporary Chinese people wouldrecognize. Like the fortune cookie, much of itfeels as if it were invented in America. This isnot necessarily a bad thing. James Joycerecreated his Ireland living in Trieste, Paris andother places abroad. Distance can sharpen theimagination. I decided to ask Tan about thisafter his return to New York, to attend aperformance at the Brooklyn Academy of Musicof “The Gate,” his multicultural opera featuringthree theatrical heroines who died for love:Shakespeare’s Juliet; Koharu, heroine in theJapanese puppet play “Double Suicide”; and YuJi, from “Farewell My Concubine,” a Beijingopera about a woman who commits suicide forher lord.

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We spoke in his office in Chelsea. He served mea cup of superb green tea from Zhejiangprovince. “When I came to New York in 1986,”he said, “to study composition at ColumbiaUniversity, I lived downtown. At first I didn’tknow how to bridge the musical distancebetween uptown and downtown. At Columbia,you immediately got into the atonal system. Butdowntown is so diverse: jazz, rock, the BlueNote, the Village Gate, the La MaMa theater.So I got jet-lagged. But I found a way to fix thedistance. At night, downtown, I would meetwith Meredith Monk, John Cage and PhilipGlass. My jet lag between uptown anddowntown reminded me where I was from. Ilooked back to the Eastern music I playedbefore moving to Beijing. It all came back to methrough my fascination with experimentalmusic in downtown New York. GreenwichVillage taught me about Chineseness from aworld point of view.”

I asked him what role John Cage played in hisdevelopment. I had read somewhere that Tanfelt an instinctive cultural affinity with Cage’sexperiments with music made with water,paper and kitchenware. He said: “Before JohnCage, I didn’t pay attention to Lao-tzu” — theTaoist sage — “or the I Ching. But every time Ispoke to Cage, it was as if I were talking toLao-tzu, not an American, not John. We haddialogues about music in a very philosophicalway — everything is an unanswered question.”

Tan would not be the first Asian artist to havereimported, as it were, Asian traditions fromWestern sources. Many Japanese rediscoveredZen in the 1960s by reading the American beatpoets. But Chineseness from a world point ofview is precisely what many Chinese in Chinadidn’t like about “Crouching Tiger, HiddenDragon.” However slickly made and beautifulto look at, this kung-fu movie, with Tan’s scoreand Yo-Yo Ma’s sinuous cello, smacked to themof a fantasy tailored to Western taste. It couldalso be read the way I read it, as a nostalgicdream of overseas Chinese about a China that

never was. But in fact Tan deals less innostalgia than in juxtaposition, throwingelements from different cultures together.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Tan likes to say that he is like Marco Polo in theWest. Or as he put it in an interview: “I’m aMarco Polo going backward from East toWest.” What is perhaps his most famous operais actually titled “Marco Polo” and features,apart from the Venetian explorer himself,Dante, Shakespeare and Mahler. The libretto isin English and Chinese, with smatterings ofItalian and German. And the music ranges fromBeijing opera to bits of Mahler. Completed in1996, this work earned Tan the GrawemeyerAward for composition. Since its debut inMunich the same year, the opera has beenperformed all over the world.

Tan told me that when he writes his music, hehas no specific audience in mind. But there isno question that the exoticism of his work isperfect for a globalized market hungry for newand unusual flavors. Tan expressed thisperfectly in an interview with Hong Kong radio:“It’s not just listening to music. Also, the waywe’re eating dinner, no more just French,Italian; we eat Mexican, Cantonese, Russian,Indonesian, Japanese. . . . ” In Stockholm, hetold me how globalization offers newopportunities to artists, like himself, “not tostandardize, or neutralize, but by giving peoplea chance to be seen.”

The danger of Tan’s huge commercial successis that it leads to a decorative, rathersuperficial kind of Chineseness. It is hard not to

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cringe a little when hearing such fortune cookielyrics (in “Tea”) as: “In tea mind—/ womanmakes life art,/man makes art life.” I asked Tanabout the commercial constraints on his work,and he gave a very candid answer: “It isinescapab le . You can ’ t avo id be ingcommercialized. I don’t want to be, but Icannot resist it. I’m pushed that way. If myname is not a brand of Chineseculture in the avant-garde, Peter Gelb is notgoing to be behind me at the MetropolitanOpera.”

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, isknown for his keenness to make opera morepopular and has worked to open up a ratherhidebound institution to a wider audiencethrough television and video screenings and bybringing in famous filmmakers to direct operasor commissioning hot composers. He met TanDun while serving as president of theworldwide classical-music division of Sony. Isat with Gelb in his small, rather airless officedeep in the bowels of the opera house. Wespoke with half an eye on a television screen,showing the dress rehearsal of Prokofiev’s“War and Peace,” with 227 extras, 118 chorusmembers, 41 dancers, four chickens, one horseand one goat.

“Look,” he said, when I asked him about therisks of what Alexander Goehr calls popularism,“most successful composers craved popularsuccess. It’s only in recent decades thatpopular success was thought to be unseemly.But this is changing with composers like JohnAdams and Tan Dun. Tan is theatrically savvy,an entrepreneur in his instincts. He thinksvisually. In his best pieces he has found aninteresting balance between accessibility andoriginality.”

Gelb’s concern, as a manager who wants to“encourage popular success withoutcompromising high artistic ideals,” is to makesure that Tan “continues to pursue thatdirection and not to become too derivative.” He

paused. I asked: Derivative of whom? “Ofhimself.”

Tan’s most ambitious opera to date, “The FirstEmperor,” was not actually commissioned byGelb, but he was manager of the Met by thetime it was performed and has worked hard fora successful revival this month. Like all Tan’soperas, it is visually spectacular, with a Beijingopera singer, a phalanx of imperial soldiers,Chinese drums, an aluminum staircase withstones suspended from ropes representing theGreat Wall of China and Plácido Domingo asthe warlord who unified China in the thirdcentury B.C. The producer of this spectacle wasZhang Yimou, the director of such classicfilms as “Raise the Red Lantern” (1992) and“To Live” (1994). The music, borrowing a littlefrom Puccini here, a little from Bernstein there,mixed with Chinese operatic effects, gongs andvarious improvised instruments using water,paper and stones, is the usual eclecticmulticultural mix that Tan specializes in. Thelibretto, written with the novelist Ha Jin, isheavy with references to yin and yang. Whilethe opera was still in production, Tan told TheNew York Times that “opera will no longer be aWestern form, as it is no longer an Italian form.In the shamanistic sense, there is no East orWest; all is human. Plácido and Zhang Yimouare also shamans.”

Not all the critics were impressed. AnthonyTommasini wrote in The Times: “His musicdoes sing. And sing. And sing. On and on. . . .Mr. Tan’s goal in this work, it would seem, wasto create a ritualistic and hypnotic lyricism. But‘The First Emperor’ gives soaring melody a badname.” Peter Davis wrote in New Yorkmagazine that “the lyrical set pieces in ‘TheFirst Emperor’ are couched in a sickly sweetAmericana idiom that sounds rather likewatered-down Copland or Bernstein with adash of Hollywood banality. Parts of Act Two, infact, become so operetta-ish that I half-fanciedDomingomight break into a song from Lehar’s‘Land of Smiles.’ ”

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Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, mightseem a strange choice for a tragic hero in aspectacular opera. He ordered the building ofthe Great Wall, killed his critics, was the firstrecorded book burner in history and set thetone for the most brutal Chinese rulers to come(including Mao Zedong, who much admiredhim). In fact, however, although he wasdepicted through the centuries in China as amonster, he became a symbol of patriotic prideafter the Communist revolution. Tan’s opera isdecidedly ambiguous on this front, reflecting ina way the ambivalence that many Chinese feelabout Chairman Mao. On the one hand, theopera is about the conflict between the rulerand the court composer, Gao Jianli (sung byPaul Groves). The emperor wants to beglorified; the composer wants to expresshimself. But the opera is also punctuated byrousing choruses rejoicing in a unified China.

Ha Jin, who now lives in Massachusetts butexperienced the horrors of Maoism first hand,as did Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun, was notinitially enthusiastic about the project. He toldme on the phone that he didn’t like the idea ofQin Shi Huangdi, whom, like most Chinese, hesaw as a symbol of harsh oppression. But hiswife is a fan of Domingo’s. And Tan “persuadedme by saying it was a once-in-a-lifetimeopportunity for Asian-Americans. And I thoughtit might be O.K. — not to celebrate the FirstEmperor but to highlight the conflict betweenthe individual and the state.” So he accepted.Tan would send him texts in Chinese and Ha Jinwould send back the revisions in English. But itdidn’t quite turn out the way Jin hoped.Heexplained: “Zhang Yimou said there weretwo themes: conflict and patriotism. In hismovie, ‘Hero,’ ” — also about the FirstEmperor, for which Tan wrote the score —“they highlighted one theme, patriotism. That’sthe problem. I just wrote one line about Chinabeing united. Domingo sang it many times,‘China! China! China!’ like a glorious moment,a celebration. But what can you do? I was just aworker.”

I asked Tan in Stockholm why he took oncommissions that would obviously require ashow of Chinese patriotism. Putting on “TheFirst Emperor” for the Beijing Olympics wouldcertainly have to be a patriotic gesture. He alsowrote “Symphony 1997,” featuring Yo-Yo Ma asthe soloist, for the official celebration of thehanding over of Hong Kong. Peter Gelb claimsresponsibility for bringing the two starstogether. Ma, he told me, “was interested,because he wanted to create music withancient bells.” The firsttime I asked Tan about his relationship with theChinese government, he gave the examples ofShostakovich and Prokofiev in the SovietUnion. He said: “A major commission fromChina is still focused on patriotic things. LikeShostakovich, sometimes we have no choice.But you can still express yourself. By doing‘Symphony 1997,’ I could study bronze bellsand introduce Yo-Yo Ma, as well as Westernconcepts, to China. There’s a way to educatethe Communists without using their methods.”On the same occasion, Tan claimed that “TheFirst Emperor” “reflects my own life, and thatofShostakovich.”

Symphony 1997

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I found the comparison with Shostakovich odd,and told him so. After all, Tan was not confinedto China but free to go and work anywhere heliked. Unlike Shostakovich, who had to contendwith Joseph Stalin, Tan was not forced to doanything. We let the matter rest. Later, I askedhim the same question at his office in NewYork. This time he gave a very different answer.“To me,” he said, with an impish smile, “it isthe way for shamans to behave. I want to beplayful, like a child, teasing the world, teasingthe whole system. That is Taoism. It is notabout political or cultural messages. It is aperformance. Performance art.”

I suspect that this time he was telling the truth.Finding his stride, he continued: “I have noego. The ego is to illustrate philosophical

strangeness, to be a musical Taoist.” While Iwas mulling this over, heshifted in his chair and said: “And you knowwhat? This strangeness helps my business. Ihave always worked with the best orchestras inthe world. And never once did one of them failto ask me back.” I can quite believe it.Whatever i t i s tha t i s beh ind Tan ’ sextraordinary success, it surely isn’tinnocence— or a lack of sophistication.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce professor atBard College. His novel “The China Lover” willbe published in the fall.

This article appeared in The New York Timeson May 4, 2008 and at Japan Focus on May 12,2008.