TAN DUN (born 1957)

CONCERTO FOR CELLO, VIDEO and ORCHESTRA: THE MAP
COMPOSED: 2002
PREMIERED: Boston, MA, 2003

Visitors to New York's Carnegie Hall will be intrigued to find the manuscript of The Map displayed in the Composers Gallery. This is no surprise: there is simply nothing like The Map in the entire repertory, though it may well form a template for music still to come. The composer describes The Map as a "multimedia concerto grosso." In a sense, it represents at one level the ultimate working out of the concerto grosso concept—the interplay of the small group of soloists (here, the cellist and the field-recorded Chinese instrumentalists) and orchestra. But it is far better seen as the first step along the road to what we might call Total Music Awareness: the knowledge of the underlying unity of all music. This process began with the emergence of Oriental composers like Toru Takemitsu and Bright Sheng—who synthesized, respectively, Japanese and Chinese elements into a language that speaks to all listeners; they melted their own cultures into ours and invited us into the mixture. What we are being invited to do by Tan Dun is to confront—and absorb—the "other" directly, and experience the unity of vision arising from both cultures, while becoming aware that entire musical worlds are fading into extinction all around us. That is the challenge of The Map.

Let the composer give us a glimpse of the work's origins:

In the winter of 1981, while a student at Beijing's Central Conservatory, I returned to my home province in Hunan to collect folk songs. When I arrived at a Tujia village, I met a famous "stone man" who welcomed me by playing his stone music, a very ancient stone drumming. He talked to the wind, clouds, and leaves; he talked to the next life and the past one. At that moment I felt he was a map. Then I asked him, "Someday soon, might I come back to record your performance and study music with you?" In the winter of 1999 I went back; the Tujia villagers told me "'one has left, tea is cold'—the "stone man" has gone with the old music that nobody knew anymore." I left the village with emptiness.

I really wanted to find a way to search for him, to follow him, to bring him back. Might we find a way to follow all that is vanishing? To keep things from disappearing?

When he went back to Hunan in search of the Stone Man, Tan took with him the tools of the modern ethnomusicologist. Where Grainger and Bartók took wax-cylinder phonographs, Tan took digital recorders and video cameras. While McPhee and the other "ethnomusic" composers arranged the music for Western instruments, Tan decided to create an entirely new form to combine this found music with Western instruments; the Western performers would react in real time to the music itself on video, visible and audible to the audience. The new technology would bring the two worlds into direct contact. It used to be a cliché of Baroque musical criticism to say that composers either combined or coordinated national styles in forms like the concerto grosso; in Tan's new musical world, this has become literally true. He has transformed a tired musicological metaphor into a searing reality.

The Map falls essentially into ten movements, divided into four sections. The composer himself describes the musical structure thus:

Movements 1, 2, and 3 constitute the first section and are played in succession. Sonic counterpoint is designed differently in each of these three movements. The following two movements are studies in contrast. Movement 5 creates a dialogue not only through space (we hear a Feige, a song always sung antiphonally across mountains and valleys by a woman and a man), but also across time (the same woman in the video will for all time sing antiphonally with the cellist on stage, therefore transcending history). Movement 6 is an interlude in which video images are replaced by text and sound in counterpoint, leading into movement 7, a video quartet with live stone solo. The last section is made up of Movements 8 and 9, where the cello solo, orchestra and video, become "one" and recreate music in its original, monophonic state simple, like heartbeats.

Brahms' last symphony received its very first performance in a two-piano version a few weeks before the orchestral version, with Brahms himself, a legendary keyboard-thumper, playing one of the pianos. The combined impact of the music and Brahms' elephantine touch led the critic Eduard Hanslick (who, remember, was one of the composer's friends) to declare: "I had the feeling that I was being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people." Hanslick was Brahms' prime supporter in the composer's running war with the Wagnerians, who declared Brahms old-fashioned and passé, a lumpen irrelevance in the Age of Wagner. It is one of music's grimmest ironies that this is what many of Brahms' most fervent admirers thought (and think!) was right with him; time and Brahms' sheer popularity have conspired to make us forget that he, too, had an eye to the music of the future. Hanslick had what Nietzsche called the "new ears" needed for the "new music;" he knew what was going on under the reserved surface of the music. With just a little effort, we can know, too.

It was not for nothing that Arnold Schönberg often referred to Brahms—not Wagner—as one of his own precursors. He saw in him his own predilection for secret stories buried under an ostensibly serene musical surface (a process taken to near-lunatic extremes by Alban Berg). In the Fourth Symphony, this takes the form of a network of musical allusions and references that sound almost like something out of Charles Ives once the listener knows they are there. The work does not have a program, but it does have a subject, and the subject is death. Brahms was already unwell when he embarked on the last stages of the symphony's composition; he was more or less writing his own Requiem.

One of the very earliest reviews of the Symphony pointed out that the first subject of the Symphony's first movement had a strong resemblance to "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow" from Handel's Messiah. Indeed it does; it also has a strong resemblance to material in at least three of Brahms' songs on the subject of death, and a song he wrote after the Symphony, "O Tod" (O Death) refers directly to it. Schönberg pointed out that the theme was also filtered through the main theme of Mozart's despairing Symphony No. 40; in fact, Schönberg found this doom-laden idea so powerful that he used it as the model for his own (serial!) Piano Concerto. This may give us a clue as to why Pierre Boulez once described Schönberg as "Kokoschka-ized Brahms"; the symbolism is a two-way street. Brahms' most prized possession, incidentally, was the manuscript of the Mozart 40th.

Schönberg, again, loved to point out that the thematic material of the genial slow movement actually consists of several restatements of the same material in a kaleidoscopic process that has more to do with obsession than repose; even the great cello melody is simply the woodwind fanfare played slowly. With all the prevailing gloom, even the triangle-dominated jollity of the third movement seems to be under a shadow; do not be fooled.

Brahms once referred to the Symphony as his "tragic symphony," and all of this gives us a clear indication of why. The process culminates in an unarguable note-for-note quote from a Bach cantata: the passacaglia theme of the fourth movement is taken from the Cantata O Lord, I Long For Thee, and originally set the words "My days of sorrow." The form of the movement—a passacaglia is a set of variations of a repeating "ground bass"—shows Brahms consciously joining the ranks of the Baroque masters, many of whom (especially the French ones) used the form for their most profound utterances. An irony unknowable to Brahms is the fact that the Cantata is now known not to be by Bach at all.

In a startling flash of modernism that also refers back to Beethoven and the ever-recurring prime motif of the Fifth Symphony, Brahms brings the Symphony round in a full circle by introducing a form of the first movement's main them into the last-but-one variation of the Passacaglia, a stroke of monumental formalism that Sibelius turned into an entire career.