PROGRAM NOTES

ensemble. Soon he was pressed into service as a string player and arranger for a provincial Beijing opera troupe, and in 1978, with the restoration of China’s educational system, he began to pursue his formal musical education at the Central Conservatory in Beijing.

As the political climate thawed, composers from outside China began to visit Beijing. Among those Tan Dun met were Alexander Goehr, George Crumb, Hans Werner Henze, Tōru Takemitsu, Isang Yun, and Chou Wen-Chung. From figures such as these he received his first exposure to not only their music but also the compositions of such central 20th-century Western masters as Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Boulez.

In the early 1980s, he began writing music that mixed Chinese and Western instruments, yielding what at that time were highly unorthodox combinations of sounds. Still, his political travail was not over. For six months in 1983, performance and broadcasting of his music was forbidden due to a national crackdown by hardline Chinese nationalists. Not long thereafter he moved to the United States, where he earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Columbia University. His music began to reflect a more liberated attitude toward tonality as well as the intense discernment concerning nuances of tone color that continues to mark his work.

In 1998 he was awarded the Grawemeyer Awatrd and was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year. Other honors include an Oscar and a Grammy for his score for Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2019, he began his position as dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

His output ranges through many genres, including four operas: Marco Polo; Peony Pavilion; Tea: A Mirror of the Soul; and The First Emperor, which the Metropolitan Opera premiered in 2006. His orchestral catalogue includes numerous concertos. Some feature standard instruments—either Western (piano, guitar, cello, violin, double bass, trombone, percussion) or Chinese (erhu, pipa, zheng)—but three highlight his fascination with exploring the musical possibilities of naturalistic materials: his Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra (1998), Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra (2003/05), and Earth Concerto for Earth Instruments [i.e., stone and ceramic percussion] with Orchestra (2009). By way of explaining such works, Tan Dun says: “For a long time, I have been developing the idea of organic music, which embodies sounds of nature, water, paper, ceramics, and the mind. The environment is related to our lives, and spiritually, everything germinates from one seed of creativity.” And about the Paper Concerto in particular, “We are surrounded by paper in our lives: our imaginations are captured and recorded in words or pictures, as we express newly discovered feelings about ourselves and the world around us.”

The Paper Concerto will offer a novel experience for most listeners. The idea of deriving musical sounds from various forms of paper may seem strange at first glance, but it would not be entirely foreign to percussionists, who are accustomed to extracting precise gradations of sound from all sorts of objects. Tan Dun invites them to think deeply about the paper instruments. “You have to know how paper was made,” he says, “and explore what kind of sound it makes. You have to prepare the instruments [and continue by] rehearsing the instruments, performing the piece, and hearing it from the audience point of view. All of these are organic experiences.” Audience members are likely to be struck by how the percussionist’s art is to a certain extent an art of choreography, the execution of meticulously planned and coordinated movements that achieve specific musical results.

From the Composer

In an interview conducted when the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced the Paper Concerto two years after it gave the world premiere of its original version (under the title Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra), Tan Dun discussed how the work had evolved into its final form:

The revision comes out of the first experience of hearing the [Los Angeles] Philharmonic’s premiere. There was no example of how an orchestra would sound with paper, and that performance provided enormous feedback in terms of inspirations and techniques. The four movements now incline more toward a symphonic structure. The first two movements have been completely rewritten. The first movement is more like a ritual; the second is more like a scherzo. The third movement is like an adagio, with a dark side—violent contrasts, like a thunderstorm. The fourth movement is like a festival.

I have two goals in my heart. I don’t just want to establish a musical idea; I also want to change musical institutions. I want to develop