Crouching Tiger/Everlasting Love by Tan Dun (2000) Video

Best known for writing the score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese-American composer Tan Dun has been making a name for himself over the past twenty years with multimedia compositions that strive to fuse the natural world with modern technology, East with West and high art with low. Although his music has not met with universal acclaim, those that value it say that he has transcended the fusion of East and West to make a music which is both and neither. His writing is filled with voice, space and silence and the deep singing of all natureno longer national, not even international, but simply human.

Critics have been less than kind. One wrote that the prominent feature of his 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium was the sound of laughter all the way to the bank and another described his Symphony 1997: Heaven, Earth and Mankind as saccharine and derivative.

The elastic nature of Tans biographical details does little to assuage the scathing criticism. There are several versions of his formative years available and each is more fantastic than the last. As one Guardian columnist aptly put it, [this flexibility] probably says more about the need for modern composers to distinguish themselves as much in their press packs as in their work. Although it is necessary to keep the salt pot very close at hand, after reading several versions it is possible to ferret out bits of truth.

Tan was born in the Hunan province of China in 1957 and spent his formative years with his grandmother in a rural village. When the Cultural Revolution began in the mid 1970s, he was sent to be a rice-planter for two years. During this time he began to collect folk songs and lead his own ad hoc group of musicians that played for weddings and funerals in the village. As a child, Tan had learned to play the fiddle and when a boat carrying the local Peking Opera Company sank he was called to serve as fiddle-player and arranger with the orchestra. His more formal musical training began in when Chairman Mao died 1978 and the Central Conservatory in Beijing was re-opened. Tan managed to win one of the eight places available to over 400 applicants for the composers course. After gaining a fellowship to study at Columbia University in 1986, Tan relocated to the United States and began to concentrate on making a name for himself.

Of his music, Tan says that I dont really have any great interest in the East and West as a dialogue. What I am interested in is trying to find a single language and distinctive style that is made up of many cultures and that can reach many different diverse cultures.

For me this piece is both simplistically beautiful and has the interaction and punctuation of two lovers in conversation.