Overview
Introduction
Tan Dun: Water Concerto for water percussion and orchestra
What is water? Sometimes you feel water is the voice of birth, or rebirth. But now I feel water is like tears, tears of nature. Every time I travel around I feel it’s very difficult to find clean water. Everywhere is polluted almost. So it makes me feel difficult to sing with my music…
To me, my early life, living with water, having fun with water, and playing ritualistic music with water, has become very inspiring. Somehow now, I spend so much of my time to recompose this kind of memory…to recompose this kind of experience, with the new method. In Hunan, water was a daily thing with our life. Every day we washed everything with the river. All the old women, they always went to river for laundry, making a beautiful sound, very rhythmic. So I transpose those memories of beautiful laundry sounds, and swimming sounds, body popping sounds, water dancing sounds, water teasing sounds, water popping sound, into my orchestrations.
Technically it’s very complex, because you have to find the resource color, then to blend the resource color with the institutions of orchestra color, and to have those two colors be blended as one. Every day I’m struggling for what? I’m struggling not really trying to find unusual and never been used music sound. I’m trying to find myself. If I could find myself, then I could find my music. My theory, which has been my major practiced recently, not just visual and aural, not just organic and orchestra, or not just east and west, or inside and outside, or old and new, or last and future, but all of those philosophically to figure out 1+1=1, but not equals 2. It’s very tricky and difficult, and of course, it’s very personal too..
–Tan Dun; Excerpts from an interview with Helen Elmquist; May, 2007
