We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on

from 2023 Ojai Music Festival Program

Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program

During his youth in Hunan Province, Tan Dun became fascinated by local lore associated with shamans and sorcerers, listening eagerly to the ghost stories his grandmother told him as a boy. But he had to rediscover the folk traditions of his own culture following the upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which banned not only Western composition but Chinese music as well — unless it had the “revolutionary” seal of approval.

Since he came from a family of “intellectuals” — his mother was a doctor and his father a researcher — Tan Dun was forcibly separated from them as a teenager and sent to an agricultural commune to be “re-educated” by toiling in the rice fields. Mao’s death in 1976 put an end to these policies, and Tan Dun was allowed to gain experience playing violin with a Beijing Opera troupe and to hear Western classical music on the radio. He was accepted to the newly reopened Central Conservatory in Beijing to study composition and eventually found his way in the mid-1980s to Columbia University — where Chou Wen-Chung numbered among his mentors. New York City has since remained home base for Tan Dun’s tirelessly peripatetic career, which keeps him internationally in demand as both a composer and a conductor.

Even when Chinese folk traditions were still forbidden during his period on the collective farm, Tan Dun found a way to experience these sources by offering to set texts of Maoist propaganda to the folk tunes he persuaded the farmers to share with him. The impulse to reconnect with aspects of Chinese culture was later intensified by his encounters with John Cage and similar figures in New York’s experimental downtown scene, which provided an enlightening counterpart to what he was learning more formally uptown. As with so many émigré composers, the stimulation of distance encouraged a fresh perspective on his native culture.

Ghost Opera is an early breakthrough work in which Tan Dun comes to terms with these formative influences by forging them into a strikingly original musical language. The result, as in this composer’s oeuvre overall, transcends reductive (and bland) formulas such as “East meets West” or “ancient juxtaposed with avant-garde.”

Indeed, Tan Dun relishes the creative tension generated by combining perspectives often assumed to stand in contradiction — whether Buddhist and Christian traditions (in his Water Passion and Buddha Passion, both modeled on J.S. Bach) or the spontaneous music of nature and “composed” music (a fusion integral to his vocabulary, which plays a key role in the soundscape of Ghost Opera).

Originally created for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, Ghost Opera is also characteristic of Tan Dun’s artistic practice in its engrossing theatrical sensibility. The scenario alludes to a tradition of shamanistic performance that is believed to reach back thousands of years, which later became integrated with Buddhist philosophy. In its traditional format, according to Tan Dun, the performer “has a dialogue with his past and future life — a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature.”

For his version of this long tradition, Tan Dun created a sequence of five acts or movements. Among the departed who are invoked by the performers are the spirits of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach, who join the proceedings through references to their work — via quotations from The Tempest and the C-sharp minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. In addition to their usual instruments, all five musicians are called on to play percussion and “natural” instruments (water, metal, stone, and paper) that allude

We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

to the classical Chinese philosophy of the elements. In the Ojai Music Festival’s new production, a dancer mediates between the spheres of the living and those who have passed on.

Although Tan Dun’s treatment of the pipa itself, according to Wu Man, involves no avant-garde extended techniques, the idea of a dialogue between pipa and string quartet is unprecedented — and a novel kind of music theater. Tan Dun never merely evokes the past. His “ghosts” join together in a dialogue whose surprising twists are spellbinding. The “exhalations of a ghostly monk” in the first movement, for example, underline the porousness of the borders between sound and silence, the motions of breathing that mark the passage of time against eternity.

Ghost Opera is also, for Wu Man, “a very personal piece” because of her close involvement in the process while Tan Dun was composing it. When Tan Dun was searching for a folk tune, she suggested “Little Cabbage,” which is played on the pipa in the third act and which she sings in the fifth. During this final movement, the song’s significance is revealed as the lament of “a little girl who has lost her parents,” explains Tan Dun. “Such an odd, sad song. It’s the essence of ghostliness. You can talk to the past, the stone can talk to the violin, and the cabbage can sing of her sorrowful life.”

Tan Dun’s use of the visual aspects of the performers interacting with their instruments — and, in the final scene, with the paper installation — is further enhanced in this production, specially designed for the Ojai Music Festival, with new choreography, lighting, and stage direction.

Through the strands that he weaves together in Ghost Opera’s unique counterpoint of cultures, eras, and instruments, Tan Dun himself becomes a contemporary shaman able to communicate between realms thought to be inseparably divided.