Word: tans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...symphony? Is it world music? Call Tan Dun's Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind) whatever you like, but be prepared to reckon with it. Composed to commemorate the reunification of Hong Kong with China, this seductively savory multicultural stew is shaping up as the classical-music event of the summer. The 72-minute work was telecast worldwide July 1 from the handover ceremonies in Hong Kong, and the first recording, conducted by Tan and featuring Yo-Yo Ma as cello soloist, was rushed into print by Sony the following week, debuting in the No. 5 slot on the Billboard classical...
...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...
...directors improvised as well. In early talkies the camera could hardly move, but Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) daringly depicted the Duke Ellington composition in bold chiaroscuro, then used woozy prismatic images to show that a star dancer (the gorgeous Fredi Washington) is feeling ill before she goes on for a fatal final number. Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning...