Overview
Introduction
Tan Dun: On Taoism, for voice, bass clarinet, contrabassoon & orchestra
Tan Dun's orchestral piece On Taoism represents one of the most auspicious debut compositions of its time. The composer was just finishing his schooling at the Central Conservatory in Beijing when he wrote it in 1985. His path to the conservatory had been unpredictable. He emerged from the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s as a violinist and composer in a touring Peking Opera company, a job he got as a teenager because several members of the troupe had drowned in a river accident.
Once the Cultural Revolution was open and the universities and conservatories were reopened, Tan Dun joined dozens of other promising musicians who were primed for some kind of change, but instead received only the most conservative Western training by teachers who had been taught in Moscow and did not depart from the official Russian Communist line of "Socialist Optimism."
It was a visit from the British composer Alexander Goehr that opened up the ears of the Beijing students, and Tan Dun began to depart from the Western-modeled works he had been producing.
This work absorbs some of the sounds Tan Dun grew up with. These include the sounds of the country village where he grandmother lived, and the sound of the mixture of ethnic music he heard in western China (in the "Silk Road" region) during the Cultural Revolution.
The composer has given little in the way of clues as to any programmatic concept the work might have, although there is a relationship to his memories of his grandmother's funeral. It begins with an unaccompanied vocalise, to be sung by an orchestra member. The music, with glides and guttural tone production, has something of the quality of Buddhist chants. The composer uses Chinese scales and percussion. The music is not peaceful enough to be called meditative, but sections of it are slow and at least contemplative. However, there are also a couple of outbursts of wild orchestral playing.
Tan Dun asks for such Chinese techniques as microtonal glissandos and strange, breathy sounds from woodwinds. The contrabassoon and bass clarinet are given prominent, nearly solo, roles in the work, making a particularly exotic effect when they intertwine at the very lowest registers.
At the end, the opening vocal solo returns. On Taoism has proven a successful composition and has been performed frequently in Asia, Europe, and North America
