Word: tannings
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...take off so quickly? One reason is that it is both frankly romantic and immediately accessible--Beethoven's Ninth boldly recast for postmoderns, right down to the climactic anthem in which the children's choir sings ecstatically of the prospect of world peace. The work's user-friendly tone, Tan says, is no accident: "If you ask young people of today to listen to a 20-minute-long symphonic movement, nobody really has the patience to listen--not even me! This is why the symphony is in 13 short movements. It's like paragraphs: each section can be shorter...
Born in 1957 in China's Hunan province, Tan began life as an unlikely candidate for concert-hall stardom. He spent the hellish years of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution planting rice and listening not to symphonies and concertos but to the music of village rituals. "It's more like a language than music," he recalls. "Soundwise, it's like the texture of wind." At 19, while playing violin in a Beijing opera company, he heard his first piece of Western classical music, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which opened up a whole new world of sonic possibilities. He went...
Initially influenced by the jarring acerbities of the postwar avant-garde, Tan has since joined the new wave of classical composers who, following such successful older figures as John Corigliano and Henryk Gorecki, seek to speak to the largest possible audience without compromising their musical seriousness. "In the middle of the 20th century," he says, "composers were trying to be as isolated as possible--extremely, even selfishly isolated. I can't see why we should keep on doing that...
...Tan's first broad-based success came with his Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos Quartet in 1994 (and newly available on a Nonesuch CD), in which a Bach prelude, a Chinese folk song, the chanting of monks and the words of Shakespeare are woven into a haunting musical tapestry. Since then Tan has completed his first Hollywood assignment (a hard-edged, jazz-tinged score for Denzel Washington's next movie, Fallen, due later this year) and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical. Slated for release in October is Marco Polo: An Opera Within an Opera, a work...
...things considered, Tan Dun doesn't have much to complain about these days. The only thing that seems to exasperate him is when pigeonhole-happy journalists, mistaking him for yet another purveyor of souvenir-shop local color, claim that his music "brings East and West together." Nothing doing, Tan replies. "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...