Dun, Tan

views updated

TAN DUN

Born: Si Mao, Hunan Province, China, 18 August 1957

Genre: Classical, Soundtrack

Tan Dun, a much-commissioned and much-honored composer originally trained in the Peking Opera, won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Score for his soundtrack to Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which received the most nominations for a foreign film in Academy history. During the ceremony at which the award was announced, CoCo Lee sang "A Love Before Time," nominated from the score as Best Song; it was co-composed by Dun and Jorge Calandrelli, with lyrics by James Schamus.

Dun conducted the performance of his score by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai National Orchestra, and the Shanghai Percussion Ensemble; soloists on Chinese instruments such as the erhu, bawu, dizi, rawap, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was also nominated for honors in the 2001 Golden Globe Awards competition. It won the 2002 Classical Brit Contemporary Music Award and the 2001 Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. "A Love Before Time" was nominated for a 2001 Grammy as Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, and one movement, "The Eternal Vow," was nominated for the Grammy as Best Instrumental Composition. Dun won the Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music at the Orange British Academy Film Awards in 2001.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Drago n was the first film score by Dun, who emigrated to the United States from his native China in 1986. However, his musical accomplishments include 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium (1999), commissioned by the BBC, Public Broadcast System Television, and Sony Classical. The piece was heard on fifty-five major television networks during the BBC's live twenty-seven-hour telecast of millennium celebrations around the world on January 1, 2000. Arias from Dun's opera Peony Pavilion were recorded by soprano Ying Huang and released on the album Bitter Love (1999). His Ghost Opera (1994) for string quartet and pipa, with water, stones, paper, and metal, was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Hancher Auditorium/University of Iowa for the Kronos Quartet, and Wu Man, who recorded it in 1996 for a 1997 release. Dun won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for his opera Marco Polo (libretto by Paul Griffiths), commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and performed in Munich, Rome, Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, among other cities; it was named Opera of the Year in 1996 by the German magazine Oper. He has won Japan's Suntory Prize (1992) and the City of Toronto-Glenn Gould Protege Prize in Music and Communication (1996). He also maintains an extraordinary career as a conductor.

Dun is a graduate of Beijing's Central Conservatory and holds a doctoral degree in Music Arts from Columbia University. Raised by his grandmother and exposed as a child to China's rural, shamanistic culture, he was sent during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution to a Huangjin commune to harvest rice. Pursuing inherent musical impulses, he began studying local folk music and conducting villagers in musical celebrations and rituals at age seventeen, encouraging them to play whatever sound sources were at hand. When several Beijing Opera musicians on tour drowned in a boating accident, he was inducted as a substitute string-player and in 1978 was one of thirty selected from among thousands of applicants to attend the Central Conservatory. Dun became a leading composer of China's cultural "New Wave" of the 1980s, won recognition at home and abroad for his compositions, but suffered political backlash. He achieved creative breakthroughs in combining the natural sounds of his heritage and personal background with Western symphonic and chamber-music forms. Dun's atonalism is tempered by his command of a vast timbral palette, a sensitivity to dynamics, and a deft use of space and silence, making his music accessible to a wide audience.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Ghost Dance (Nonesuch, 1997); Heaven Earth Mankind: Symphony 1997 (Sony Classical, 1997); Marco Polo (Sony Classical, 1997); Bitter Love (Sony Classical, 1999); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Sony Classical, 2000); Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet (Sony Classical, 2002); Passion After St. Matthew (Sony Classical, 2002).