MUSIC AND WATER FESTIVAL: MUSIC AND WATER: The Music of Tan Dun —April 21, 2007
SFNM’s Music and Water Festival opened with a program which provided an intimate look at the music of Tan Dun. The featured composer of the Santa Fe Opera’s 2007 summer season with his opera Tea – A Mirror of Soul, Tan Dun has integrated many experimental avant-garde techniques with elements of Chinese music. A chief influence of Tan Dun in his development of natural sounds and what he calls “organic music” was John Cage.SFNM’s program examined this relationship with two works entitled “Water Music”, one by each composer. Cage’s “Water Music” is for solo pianist (Margaret Leng Tan) as a performance artist, using a number of sound-making devices in whimsical ways. Tan Dun’s “Water Music” is for two percussionists playing his specially-designed water instruments. The featured performer was Haruka Fujii, a percussionist who has worked closely with Tan Dun and performed his music widely. She was joined by SFNM’s David Tolen. The program also included Tan Dun’s rarely-performed “Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments”, a work which is a development of the pitches C-A-G-E. Featuring soloist Margaret Leng Tan, for whom the work was written, the concerto is for the piano as a pizzicato instrument, played entirely inside the piano. Ms. Tan also opened the program with two solo piano works on the theme of water, Tan Dun’s Dew Fall Drops, and Jhala by Alan Hovhaness, another composer whose work influenced Tan Dun.
Many instruments were made for this piece, including the hemispherical transparent water basins which Tan Dun adapted in 1990, and are hallmarks of his longtime experimental voice and art installations: Jo-Ha-Kyu (1992), American Dream (1993), Ghost Opera (1995), The Gate (1999), and Water Passion after St. Matthew (2000). Among the other water instruments used in this work are water bottles, water tubes with foam paddles, water shakers, water drums (floating wooden salad bowls), water gong, water agogo bells, slinkyphone (the toy for children, with styrofoam attached to one end), and waterphone. In addition to the percussive sounds created by instruments agitating water, the water instruments can also play a chromatic melody. For Tan Dun, water is a metaphor for the unity of the ephemeral and the eternal, the physical and the spiritual, as well as a symbol of renewal, re-creation, and resurrection. The use of a Water Instrument Ensemble is musical metaphysics, a powerful musical drama of Tan Dun’s personal music journey, where one hears sounds central to the nature in which we live, but have too long not listened to.
ON TAN DUN’s “CONCERTO FOR PIZZICATO PIANO” from “TAN DUN ONLINE”:
Simple things carry within themselves the potential for complexity, or for an unlimited number of changes, believes Tan Dun. In Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments, written in memory of his mentor John Cage, Tan examines the countless ways four pitches, C-A-G-E, can be articulated and resonate. (Although this work presents the spelling of Cage’s name, it does not incorporate any of his musical or philosophical ideas; Tan was attracted to the Do-La-Sol-Mi CAGE motive because he also finds it sonically Eastern in character.) The piano presents in all different registers the four notes of this motive; they are plucked inside the piano, directly on the strings, and not played in the traditional way with keyboard. Each of these notes is developed further through the soloist’s use of fingering techniques borrowed from the pipa, a Chinese plucked instrument; colors of individual pitches are enriched with harmonics and by manipulating the strings with a plate and bottle. The concerto is structured in a variation form: the first part focuses on and develops only the pitch C; the second part, A; the third, G; and the fourth, E. Subsequently, all four pitches are mixed and varied together. Pitch content is similarly restricted in the ensemble, but developed differently. Gradually their notes become rhythmically livelier, and the concerto culminates in an exuberant, tutti expression of imaginary jazz.
Just as this concerto’s jazzy ending represents Tan’s current life in New York, he says, so its dance festival atmosphere recalls events from his teenage years. Born in 1957 in Hunan, China, Tan led village peasants during the Cultural Revolution in impromptu musical celebrations on folk instruments and cooking pots. Here, the players gather like ritual dancers in a village ceremony, in a carefully positioned circle around the pianist. Sounds travel at times around the circle, moving alternately clockwise or counterclockwise, or shoots diagonally across it. The Concerto was commissioned by the Paris Festival d’Automne, and premiered in 1995 by Contrechamps with Margaret Leng Tan as soloist. The solo part may be performed separately as the composition C-A-G-E for solo piano.
