Best known for his score to the hugely popular 2000 martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tan Dun is a Chinese-American composer and creator of some very adventurous soundworlds. Read on to learn more about this innovative composer.
Who is Tan Dun?
Tan Dun is a Chinese-American composer who is perhaps most famous for his colourful musical score to Ang Lee's seminal 2000 martial-arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. However, Tan's achievements as a composer extend far beyond that one moment in the spotlight.
In his music, Tan draws from various influences, both Chinese and Western. It's this dual musical identiry that has shaped much of his musical style and, indeed, his life and career.
He has worked with various of the world's best orchestras, and has received a number of awards including a Grawemeyer Award for his opera Marco Polo (1996) and both an Academy Award and Grammy Award for his film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Tan Dun has written music across a variety of forms, including opera, orchestral, choral and song, chamber, solo and film scores. His compositions often use audiovisual elements, as well as instruments made from organic materials like stone, water and paper. They are often inspired by traditional Chinese theatrical and ritual performance.
What is Tan Dun's music like?
Dun’s musical language melds traditional Eastern timbres with Western orchestration, fusing formats and hybridising styles. The results range from the accessible – he won an Academy Award, a Grammy and a BAFTA for his score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the 2000 blockbuster film that brought historic martial arts to the masses – to complex contemporary works, such as the violin concertos (expertly played by Eldbjørg Hemsing; BIS2406).
Works such as Eight Memories in Watercolour – a series of solo piano pieces – have introduced traditional Chinese melodies to Western audiences. Pianist Lang Lang included the set in an early Carnegie Hall recital alongside music by Mozart, Schumann, Haydn and others, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. Meanwhile Heaven Earth Mankind, a symphony composed to mark the reunification of Hong Kong and China in 1997, mixed old and new instrumentation.
The diversity of sound echoes Dun’s varied life. ‘In Hunan I was barefoot,’ he says, ‘Coming to Europe seemed unthinkable back then. Now, I see a visit to London as a homecoming.’
Tan Dun and water
From the stirring sounds in the cadenza of the Water Passion to the splish-sploshing heard in the Water Music, liquid-based instruments provide literal splashes of colour to Dun’s timbral palette. Percussionists are often comfortable playing unusual materials – Gregor A. Mayrhofer’s Recycling Concerto features strummed plastic bags and poured bottle-tops; Mahler famously employed cowbells.
But Evelyn Glennie faced unusual challenges when performing Dun’s atmospheric Water Concerto at the 2004 Proms, requiring a special waterproof outfit to protect both modesty and comfort as she struck a variety of basins and bowls. Large, timpani-sized vessels are sometimes lit from below, with sieves used to create drips and streams, making the water a visual as well as auditory feature of performances (see the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of the Water Concerto, with percussionist David Cossin and Dun as conductor, available on Opus Arte).
Dun’s fascination with watery textures goes back to his childhood in Hunan, where he lived with his grandmother after his parents were sent away during the Cultural Revolution. The composer recalls the central role the river played in everyday life – for washing, cooking and playing – and uses this elemental sound throughout his work. That was evident most recently in Five Souls, a work for water percussion, harp, brass, strings and digeridoo. The piece – including a movement called ‘H2O Tempo’ – has been recorded by the West East Orchestra, conducted by Dun, and is out via Decca.
How old is Tan Dun?
Born in 1957, Dun worked in the rice fields as a teenager, something that workers had to commit to for a lifetime. His backstory is as dramatic as his stage works (although with a happier ending than Marco Polo).
When a local opera troupe lost members in a ferry disaster, they appeared in Dun’s village enquiring after musicians. Having taught himself the violin, Dun joined the ensemble, eventually travelling to Beijing to audition for the Central Conservatory of Music when it reopened after Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. There, he took inspiration from colleagues including Tōru Takemitsu, Chou Wen-chung and George Crumb.
What instruments does Tan Dun use?
As well as combining Eastern and Western instruments – for example, the pipa (a type of Chinese lute) with string quartet for 1994’s Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos Quartet (one of the best string quartet ensembles of all time) and Wu Man – Dun often creates instruments from unlikely objects. In a selection of works that are now referred to as ‘organic’ music, Dun uses water sounds, effects created from paper (Paper Concerto) and stones (Earth Concerto).
Percussion continues to be a focus in his latest piece The Tears of Nature, a concerto written to commemorate three natural disasters – the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – and released on Decca in 2023. ‘I think nature should be treated as a person,’ says Dun, who was named a Unesco ambassador in 2013. ‘When I see a rainy day, I think that nature is crying. A tide is nature breathing.’
What film scores has Tan Dun composed?
Tan Dun's most famous film score composition is, of course, for 2000's hugely successful martial arts drama Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But he has also composed scores to films including Don't Cry, Nanking (1995), Fallen (1998), Hero (2002) and The Banquet (2010).
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Who taught Tan Dun?
In 1986, Dun moved to the US to undertake a doctorate at Columbia University. There, he became immersed in the worlds of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Cage, with whom he studied.
Isn’t it difficult for someone so inspired by the natural world to live in Manhattan? ‘I always look at the sky; I never get bored of it,’ says Dun. ‘My teacher [Cage] lived on one of the noisiest spots in New York – 6th Avenue on 26th Street.
'I asked why he lived there, and he described it as a treat, because it made you appreciate silence more. He said, “Silence is your permanent friend.”’
Hearing this story about Cage – an artist famous for his bold foregrounding of background noise – is a reminder of Dun’s contemporary music lineage. When Cage died in 1992, Dun composed C-A-G-E-, a solo piano piece almost exclusively using the notes that correspond to the composer’s name.
As Ralph van Raat writes in the sleeve note to his recent recording of the work, ‘These pitches sound strikingly Chinese, and they are most often plucked, strummed or muted, often using playing techniques from the stringed instrument, the pipa. The resulting overtones… transform a conventional piano into a surprisingly folkloric-sounding Chinese instrument.’
What was Tan Dun's Internet Symphony No. 1?
The contrasting sound exemplifies Dun’s approach – one that is often ahead of the curve. In 2008, Dun’s Internet Symphony No. 1, ‘Eroica’ was premiered online, with performers playing individual parts in locations around the world. It was the first time that musicians had played ensemble pieces in this way, and, as the work was commissioned by Google and YouTube, it was viewed with healthy scepticism.
Fast-forward 12 years, and the majority of choral, chamber and orchestral music making – whether it was amateur or professional – was undertaken via the internet. Dun’s composite of on-screen faces sending in their contributions across the ether is no longer a quirk; and, for two years, it was the norm.
There are many seemingly opposing ideas at work in Dun’s music – nature and humanity, East and West, ‘high and low’ culture – but the one he continues to return to is the balance between ancient and modern traditions.
‘During an English lesson many years ago, my teacher told me that anything with “r” was important because it was when old things become new,’ he says, ‘Return; retrospective; revolution – this “r” process is the basis for all my composition. There is no boundary between old and new.’