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SEPTEMBER 29TH - OCTOBER 8TH 2000 |
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organised by  (ISCM Luxembourg Section) Information: info@worldmusicdays.com |
Tan Dun
Tan Dun was born in 1957 in Hunan, China. After planting rice for two years during the
Cultural Revolution, then working as a fiddle-player and an arranger in the provincial
Peking Opera troupe, Tan was selected for the Central Conservatory in Beijing where he
spent eight years. In 1986, a fellowship at Columbia University brought him to New York
City, where he completed the doctoral program in music composition, studying with Chou
Wen-Chung and Davidovski. Tan currently lives in New York.
Composer and conductor Tan Dun's music is celebrated for its "Vivid drama... wonderfully
expressive harmonies... imaginative colours" (London Times). He has been heralded as
"possibly the foremost contemporary composer to have emerged from China in the past two
decades" (The Telegraph), and this has been most recently confirmed with his receipt from
Toru Takemitsu of the City of Toronto - Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communication.
His upcoming commissions reach well into the millennium, and include a new opera for the
Metropolitan Opera in 2005.
The Gate: Orchestral Theatre IV
The Orchestral Theatre series is Tan Dun's decade long concern with the reconciliation of
apparent contrasts between "primitive" ritual and the modern concert hall experience,
perfomer and audience, and Eastern and Western culture. This series, which has spanned
the years 1989-1999, has come about in the final years of the 20th century and will provide
a compass point for Tan Dun's musical contributions for the 21st century. Orchestral
Theatre I: Xun is concerned with the juxtaposition of non-Western sounds with the Western
orchestra, also questioning the assumption that orchestra members only play instruments.
Orchestral Theatre II: Re is concerned with ritual audience participation and non-traditional
concert hall set-up. And Red Forecast: Orchestral Theatre III, which uses weather reports
as a metaphor for history, is Tan Dun's first video-music collaboration, exploring the use
of video as a means of documentation (of news sound, song, and text) and counterpoint to
music. With The Gate: Orchestral Theatre IV, Tan Dun is further exploring his personal
interest in multi-media and multiculturalism.
"As the new millennium approaches," explains Tan Dun, "every composer is being asked or
asking himself what he wants to contribute. Everyone has a wish, and this is mine: in
writing this new millennial commission, I realized that I wished to commemorate those
people sacrificed for true love." At the gate through which souls must pass to be reborn,
three women who committed suicide for love await judgment in Tan Dun's fourth instalment
in the Orchestral Theatre series. Alongside Yu-Ji, heroine of Farewell My Concubine
(19th Century Peking opera), and William Shakespeare's Juliet from Romeo and Juliet
(16th Century England), Tan Dun has placed Koharu-san from The Love Suicides at Amijima
Chikamatsu (18th Century Japan). The composer further elaborates: "There is such a terrible
lack of love today; resurrection for these three women seemed a very important symbolic task."