Biography
Chinese composer Tan Dun was renowned for his film soundtracks, classical pieces and large-scale conceptual works. Born in the Hunan province, he first pursued music while sent as a teenager to a forced-labor camp, a result of Chairman Mao's cultural revolution. He began playing traditional Chinese string instruments, and by age 17 was becoming known as a player and conductor. At that point he was enlisted to join a Peking opera troupe when some of the regular members drowned in a ferry accident; this led to him entering the Central Conservatory of Music at Beijing in 1977. He then came to New York where he studied at Columbia University; during his time there he composed his first opera, Nine Songs (which required a specially built orchestra of ceramic instruments) and his first symphony, based on 14th-century Hunan themes. His future pieces would continue to blend Chinese and Western elements and to utilize custom-made instruments: 1994's Ghost Opera teamed a pipa player with the Kronos Quartet. 2003's Paper Concerto, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, featured a conventional orchestra and an array of bowed, struck and shaken paper instruments. His first film soundtrack was for "Fallen," a Denzel Washington suspense vehicle that was not a major hit. However his score for Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (1998) was as celebrated as the film itself, ultimately winning him both a Grammy and an Oscar. It also led to him rewriting the soundtrack as a performance piece for orchestra, accompanied by scenes from the film. This in turn led to further multimedia pieces. The Map, examined the life and culture of Chinese ethnic minorities; their music was played onscreen and was accompanied by a live orchestra. The piece was debuted by Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2002, and has since been played in 30 countries. In 2009 he wrote the first symphony for online use, Internet Symphony No. 1: Eroica. With four movements totaling only 4:03, the piece was uploaded to YouTube and musicians worldwide were invited to submit video of themselves playing it. The best performers became part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra which performed the piece at Carnegie Hall. A later conceptual piece, Nu Shu: the Secret Songs of Women, was based on a language that Hunan women invented to express feelings to each other; the language died out in the early '80s. The piece included short films, costumed pantomime and an orchestra with a Hunan percussion section. That year also brought a percussion concerto, The Tears of Nature, whose three sections represent the "colors" of nature as passion, thunder and energy. Also during 2013, Tan was named a Goodwill Ambassador by UNESCO.
