Composer Tan Dun: ‘I wanted to be a western shaman, the conductor of a western orchestra’

It is hard to imagine a less promising starting point for a composer. With the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966, intellectuals, including students, artists and scientists, faced a horrific government-sponsored crackdown that crushed a generation.

“I was around nine when the Cultural Revolution started,” says Tan Dun. “I knew nothing about it. I was horsing around in the street and saw a large, six-floor building, where students were humming the Ode to Joy, surrounded by people with machine guns. ‘Who is this Beethoven?’ I thought. ‘Why do the Red Guards want down with Beethoven? Why is the Ode to Joy a poison?’ One side believed in the east, the other in the west, and when those inside started jumping from the high building, the others fired their machine guns in celebration.”

It was not until US president Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 that there was a new openness to western culture. In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra toured to China playing Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Tan Dun was enchanted. “The window of China opened on to the world,” he says. “During the Cultural Revolution I had been a high-school village shaman, conducting at weddings and funerals, which for me at the time was the highest honour. Now here was the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Beethoven and the music was so beautiful that it changed my mind. I didn’t want to be an eastern shaman any more, but a western shaman, the conductor of a western orchestra.”

Tan Dun’s remarkable journey has gone from Changsha in Hunan province, where he was born in 1957, and planting rice as a teenager, to worldwide acclaim as a composer. It is easy to believe him when he says the first time he stood in front of the Philadelphia Orchestra as a conductor felt “like a glorious joke”.

Just before he was 30, he made a leap in his studies from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to Columbia University in New York. That paved the way for the east-west marriage of musical styles for which he has become renowned. Traditional features of Chinese music, such as using paper, water or stone, found a new place in his reimagining of western music.

Many people will know Tan Dun from his soundtrack to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which he won an Academy Award. His Internet Symphony No 1, commissioned by Google/YouTube, reached 23mn people. His Piano Concerto was premiered by Lang Lang, his multimedia work The Map by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his opera The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera by Plácido Domingo. He was invited to compose 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium by a consortium of international television broadcasters and provided official music for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Tan Dun has come to London to conduct his recent large-scale choral work, Buddha Passion. It will be a trip to remember, as his son has come along for their last overseas visit together before he heads to Stanford University for a course that includes conducting.

True to the open-mindedness of the man we know from his music, Tan Dun has not wasted any time on this visit. The night before, he was at the ballet, Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House, and he has fitted in a visit to Tate Modern, where he was enthralled by the work of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (“I fell for her reinventing of the art — I am like a barefoot wild child, interested in all kinds of things in nature”).

Now he is at the offices of Universal Music, where he has just signed a new recording contract. First up will be Five Souls, written for a small ensemble including didgeridoo, water percussion and harp, followed by the Buddha Passion and his percussion concerto The Tears of Nature, which he will conduct alongside works by Debussy and Ravel, a pairing with music by other composers — unusual for Tan Dun.

With its title recalling Bach’s great Passions from the gospels, the Buddha Passion relates comparable stories of compassion. When the work was given its premiere in Dresden in 2018, Tan Dun says a sign in the box office read, “In 2000 years you have always heard Passions from the west, but this is the first Passion coming from the east, so please get your tickets.”

The work was inspired by cave paintings in Dunhuang, which led Tan Dun to a decade of musical exploration. Some of that research took place at the British Library in London. “I started trembling,” he recalls. “There was a 10th-century Heart Sutra and then a score of spiritual dancing about Buddha and [pictures of] ancient instruments that only appeared on those cave paintings. What I discovered led me from cave to paintings, paintings to sound, from sound to recreated historic instruments, and then how to blend those instruments with a western orchestra to create a new sonority.

“Imagine: if those manuscripts had not been kept in the best conditions, they might have been burnt in the Cultural Revolution.”

The result is as deep a marriage of music from east and west as any he has achieved. “People are always saying Tan Dun is trying to lead, to make things new, but to me it is a religion,” he says. “Every sound has a life. When you hear a faraway sound, it gradually seems to disappear, but its life is still going on. It is just that you cannot hear it any more . . . 

“Why is it that God, or nature, arranged for there to be so many artists to act as spiritual doctors? The problems of this world cannot be solved by politicians alone. This is why we have to help. Throughout our history of nations, and through all the wars, the arts could be an effective bridge of communication, and my music is trying to serve this purpose between east and west. As a composer, if you are able to realise those two worlds, you are very lucky.”

Tan Dun’s ‘Five Souls’ and ‘Buddha Passion’ are released in March by Decca

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