Composer Tan Dun: ‘When I was very young, I was sort of a genius actually’
Tan Dun is one of the most celebrated composers alive. He’s composed scores for vastly successful films, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (for which he won an Oscar), and the music for the opening spectacle of the Beijing Olympics. He’s best known for his lavishly colourful operas, including The First Emperor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, with Placido Domingo in the title role. His hallmark, though, is the mingling of Chinese-sounding melodies, often played by instruments such as the lute or pipa with lush Western strings, spiced with occasional modernist acerbities. There are other Chinese composers who’ve moved to the West (Tan arrived 37 years ago and currently lives in New York) whom some would say are just as gifted. But none have played quite so well on the Western yearning for something enticingly age-old, and yet approachable.
We’re meeting to discuss Tan’s Buddha Passion, the huge work that will open the Edinburgh Festival on Saturday. Among other things, it features Chinese lutes, splashing water-bowls and a Mongolian singer with an impossibly low-sounding voice, all woven very cleverly into a very approachable, ‘filmic’ orchestral and choral sound.
Tan tells me that it is all the result of diligent research. “I really wanted to find the lowest kind of voice. I listened to Russian singers, native American singers, but really this Mongolian singer is the deepest voice I ever heard, and also he plays the Mongolian square fiddle so beautifully. So I invited him to take part.”
As a contrast, Tan Dun wanted an uncanny high voice who voices the lament of the Deer of Nine Colours, a creature from Buddhist legend portrayed in the famous Mogao cave paintings in China. This Christ-like figure who rescues a human being is then betrayed and threatened with death but eventually saved by a wise King is also at the centre of the Buddha Passion. Eventually Tan found the right voice, in the person of a traditional Tibetan singer.
Tan is now 65 but talks with the gushing wide-eyed enthusiasm of an ingénue, rarely pausing for thought. Look at the career, though, and one discovers a shrewd person who even in his student days at Columbia realised there was a huge appetite in the West for music from the East. Tan Dun capitalised on this from the beginning of his Western career, and has often been accused of using Chinese elements in a glibly picturesque way.
Tan Dun rebuts the sceptics by pointing to his own life story. Although he was raided in an industrial city in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, he often used to visit his grandmother in the countryside. Her food still reminds him of home.
“She used to make wonderful things which she would put in a sealed jar, and bury in the ground. The food received the spirit of the earth. You know, my grandmother was a shaman,” says Tan, a declaration which for some urban city-dwelling Chinese is an embarrassing reminder of the past, often satirised in TV dramas. However Tan insists she really was in touch with the spirits of the Elements. “Earth, water, stone, bamboo—all these things are important in cooking, and they are important in music too,” he says, a view born out by pieces he wrote decades later in the West, such as the Water Concerto.
The young boy turned out to be prodigiously gifted musically. “I loved to listen to funeral bands and a wedding band, and I joined in when I was very young, I was a sort of genius actually,” he says without a trace of irony. When I was 13 I took over one of these bands.”
It was at this time that the young Tan first heard Western symphonic music blaring over loudspeakers in the fields, to encourage the workers. “I heard this kind of music I never heard before, bam, bam, bam” he says, banging rhythmically on the table, “and I thought, I want this, I don’t want to become a shaman any more.
“But then later when I saw the great conductors who visited China like Eugene Ormandy I realised that actually that is the kind of shaman I want to be. So for me now, when I am conducting Beethoven or Mahler or my music, conducting is for me a shamanistic approach to the Spirit.”
Then came the Cultural Revolution which broke out when Tan was only nine and continued for 10 agonising years. Educated people were forced to confess their sins in “struggle” sessions, Western books and instruments were destroyed, and wearing spectacles was a sign of Western decadence. The young Tan was forced to lead a music-theatre troupe performing revolutionary drama to villagers, but always had his eye fixed on a bigger, Western stage. When the Beijing central conservatoire re-opened, he stowed himself away on a goods train to make the journey to the audition.
“I could not read music, so I said to the examiner, ‘Ask me to play a folk-song from any region of China’, which I did, and they accepted me” he says. After some years of study, he gained a scholarship to Columbia University in New York where he often busked on subways to make extra money. It wasn’t long before his brand of easily assimilable, gently melancholy evocations of a Chinese world-view caught the imagination of New York, and soon after the entire world.
When I ask him which Western composer most influenced him, he replies without hesitation. “Bartók. I remember when I graduated from a Central Conservatory in Beijing, my teacher asked me, ‘Why do you like this terrible Bartók?’ My answer was that Bartók took the folk-music of his village and gave it to the whole world. He saved the folk-traditions that were dying, and made them sound international, which is why he is still my hero. I want to do the same for Chinese music.”
It’s time for Tan to go – he has to fly to Venice for discussions about a new project – but I’m curious about the way his recent big choral-and-orchestral works, such as the Buddha Passion, focus on Mongolian, Tibetan and Cantonese song. Is this a political gesture, in support of China’s numerous minority cultures? “No!” he says very firmly. “I am not a political person. I want to be like Shostakovich, he put all his heart and feelings into the music. I want my music to express the spiritual aspect of life. I agree with Philip Glass, when he says one should try to embrace all religions. I feel in my soul I am Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian. In life if you add one thing to another and another you have many things. But in the spiritual life, one plus one plus one always equals one!”
With that Tan pumps my hand, and thanks me profusely. Talent and determination may have been the main factors in propelling the eager and ambitious boy to the top of the musical tree, but as he’s just proved to me charm has had much to do with it too.
The Buddha Passion is the opening concert at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 5; eif.co.uk