by Bill Scanlan Murphy
TAN DUN (born 1957)
PAPER CONCERTO for Paper Percussion and Orchestra
Composed: 2002, revised 2005
Premiere: Los Angeles, 2003
Tan Dun was born in the village of Si Mao in Hunan Province, China and has lived in New York City since 1986, when he took up his teaching post at Columbia University. Easily best known for his score for the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tan has sought to combine elements of ancient Chinese mysticism with the sounds of the Western avant-garde. This combination of East and West follows a path blazed by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who did much to advance Tan’s early career.
The Paper Concerto started life as Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra, and “invention” is certainly the word, as the work is a concerto, not for traditional percussion instruments (not even Chinese ones!), but for instruments imagined by the composer out of pieces of paper. The list of solo instruments for the work includes: large paper screens, paper cymbals, thick paper sheets, cardboard thundersheets, thin waxed-paper bags, paper strips, tracing paper, paper spin-phones, paper head drums, paper cardboard tube drum, paper thunder tube, paper umbrella, paper box drums, and Chinese folding paper fan. Far from being some wild extravagance dreamed out of nowhere, the Paper Concerto is the natural successor to Tan’s Water Concerto, which used the sounds of splashing, running and shaken water as solo instruments, confronting the world of natural sounds with the contrived “musical” sounds of the Western orchestra. Tan’s friend Takemitsu began this strange (at least to American ears) tradition with his own Water Music (an electronic fantasia on a dripping faucet) as long ago as 1960.
Tan himself tells us of his musical origins: “Growing up in rural China, I received my early musical training in such an organic way, mounting paper for instruments, singing a song in the village to the accompaniment of water, using ceramics to bang out the beat. I was surrounded by ritual music and ghost opera, not Bach, not Beethoven, not Brahms. These childhood memories have become as important as inspirations." His first musical job was playing the Chinese fiddle for a local Beijing Opera company, a sound-world far from the Western Classics. In his paper music, Tan almost literally rediscovers his childhood; it’s a neat coincidence that the Concerto was commissioned for the opening of the Los Angeles Walt Disney Concert Hall.
There are four movements once carried titles evoking nature, but when he drastically revised the work early in 2005, Tan dropped these in favor of something very like a traditional symphony: “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. In the revision, I still kept all of the violins surrounding the audience in the rear in the fourth movement."
And, indeed, the violins take up positions for very literal “surround sound” in the finale. The audience is not merely confronted by the music; they are inside it. Stockhausen’s mildly terrifying multi-orchestral spatial experiments of the 1960s have become Tan Dun’s own brand of cross-cultural inclusiveness. Come in and join him!
NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844–1908)
SUITE: SCHEHERAZADE, Op. 35
Composed: 1888
Premiere: St. Petersburg, Russia, 1888
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov began his professional career not as a composer, but as a naval officer, starting as a cadet on the steam-assisted sloop Almaz, which began a world cruise in 1862. Rimsky-Korsakov was promoted to midshipman in Brazil a couple of months after her visits to Washington and Baltimore. It was this cruise that also first took him to Spain, where he bought the songbook that became the Capriccio Espagnole—and Arabia, where he saw a little of the world of the Arabian Nights which inspired Scheherazade. Or so he said, eventually. Like the Capriccio, Scheherazade began as an attempt at a violin concerto, then morphed into a symphony: the original movement titles were the less-than-glamorous Prelude, Ballade, Adagio, and Finale. Realizing, rather late, that all four movements were essentially variational in form, Rimsky (who never trained formally as a composer and was morbidly sensitive to technical criticism) dropped the critic-tempting “symphony” label, added a program—and Scheherazade was born. The violin soloist became the wily Sultana Scheherazade, spinning her tales over 1,000 nights as she enraptured her grim husband, Sultan Sharyar, who intended to behead her if he ever lost interest.
The Sea and Sinbad's Ship (Largo e Maestoso—Allegro non troppo)
The brass and strings introduce us to the first main musical element of the Suite—the rough, majestic Sharyar figure, soon followed by the solo violin floating the music of Scheherazade herself over the harp. We are then into Rimsky-Korsakov’s astonishingly successful evocation of the sea; where would Hollywood be without this music? Interestingly, Sharyar and Sinbad appear to be musically interchangeable: if Sharyar and Scheherazade are regarded as first and second subjects, this mystery disappears. Musically speaking, a sonata-form opening gives way to fairly free variations.
The Tale of the Kalendar Prince (Lento - Andante)\
The Kalendars were semi-nomads who made a living by begging, but for some reason were believed to be descended from royalty; the fairly simple A-B-A / variations structure of this movement confronts the simple but elegant melody of the first section with a version of the “Sharyar” motive. The structure may be simple, but the orchestration certainly is not: note the string tremolandi (Rimsky’s revolutionary string effects would eventually be ruthlessly pillaged by Stravinsky for The Firebird) and the then very unusual bassoon solo in the first section, introduced by Scheherazade’s violin. It is no stretch to see in the contrast between the woodwind solos and the bold march of the central section the beginnings of Mahler’s world, or even Shostakovich’s. Whatever the Kalendar Prince was up to (and there is no text to tell us), the huge crescendo growing out of the Sharyar motive at the end of the movement would seem to indicate that it was something fairly impressive.
The Young Prince and Princess (Andantino quasi Allegretto)
A love story, presumably; Rimsky tells us nothing beyond the sweeping string theme being associated with the Prince, and the clarinet’s bubbling response with the Princess, though he does helpfully inform us that the central Allegretto concerns the Princess being carried on a palanquin. It also concerns another A-B-A structure bursting into a series of variations as characteristic Rimskian woodwind solos rhapsodize the music towards Scheherazade’s intervention and the texturally astonishing close – woodwind over pizzicato strings and percussion.
Festival at Baghdad—The Sea—Shipwreck on a Rock surmounted by a Bronze Warrior—Conclusion (Allegro molto)
In this movement, a fairly straightforward rondo with, yet again, variational elements builds on plentiful references to earlier movements, especially the second, with the Kalendar Prince’s melody and its attendant fanfares receiving particular attention. Once again, the orchestration is a driving musical force of its own, with the brass powering the music towards the “shipwreck” as poor Sinbad’s ship collides with a tam-tam (gong) making one of its first appearances in symphonic music. In the end, Sharyar (or is it Sinbad?) and Scheherazade unite in unmistakably symphonic reconciliation.
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