Tan Dun

Tan Dun is a contemporary Chinese American composer known for his award-winning film score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His style blends the characteristics of Chinese folksong, atonal modernism, ritual, and sounds that occur in nature. He was born in Changsha, China in 1957, and he lived in the countryside with his grandmother until he was seven years old. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Tan was required to work as a rice farmer, but he also played traditional string instruments and transcribed folk music that he heard. Later, he was appointed to work as an arranger and performer for a Peking opera troupe, and his reputation as a talented musician eventually led to a position with the orchestra. After the conclusion of the revolution in 1976, 19-year-old Tan enrolled at the Central Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Zhao Xindao and Li Yinghai. He was also introduced to western classical music, which was previously banned because of the cultural revolution. Tan received additional guidance from the many guest lecturers at the conservatory, including Chou Wen-Chung, Isang Yun, and Toru Takemitsu. After his graduation in 1986, he moved to New York and began studying with Chou Wen-Chung, Mario Davidovsky, and George Edwards in a doctoral program at Columbia University. He examined the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk, and he started to incorporate elements of spirituality, atonality, nature, and Chinese ritual into his music. These influences can be heard in Nine Songs from 1989, Orchestral Theatre I: Xun from 1990, and in his doctoral dissertation Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee. Tan completed his DMA in 1993, and his opera Marco Polo that he composed in 1996 won the 1998 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Other works from this period include Dragon Dance, the opera Peony Pavilion, and Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind, which was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, conducted by the composer. In 2000 Tan received international acclaim and recognition for his score to the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was awarded a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for best original music. He also created an additional arrangement for the Crouching Tiger Concerto, which began a long series of experiments with the use of video in his compositions. In the film, his score was secondary to the video content, but in his concerto version, the music is the primary focal point, while the video component was given a supporting role. He also gave similar treatments to later film scores Hero from 2004 and The Banquet from 2006. In addition to his work in film and video experimentation, he also composed several pieces of what he classifies “organic music,” which utilizes unique instrumentations. Performers use bowed and struck objects such as bowls and bottles in water-filled tubs and basins in Tan’s Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra from 1998. The Water Passion After St. Matthew from 2000 also used similar techniques, and the 2003 Paper Concerto explored the sonic possibilities of instruments made from paper. The Earth Concerto from 2009 was composed for 99 unique stone and ceramic instruments and a large orchestra. Yuja Wang premiered the Symphonic Poem: Farewell My Concubine in 2015 with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra conducted by Long Yu. In 2019, Tan became the dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and he released the album Tan Dun: Fire Ritual - Violin Concertos with Eldbjørg Hemsing. He also appeared as conductor of the Internationale Chorakademie and Orchestre National de Lyon on the 2023 release Tan Dun: Buddha Passion on Decca.
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