Kronos Quartet, with Wu Man - Tan Dun: Ghost Opera

A COLD, NEEDLE SPRAY SHOWER ON A HOT SUMMER'S DAY:
I'm fortunate because I brought to the first hearing of Tan Dun's GHOST OPERA, a love of string quartette music; a love of percussion music of all kinds; Cinese Opera music, as well as contemporary Avant-Guard compositions that incorporate drumming, strings and mixed sounds, including voice. Coming to GHOST OPERA with wide listening experience, allowed me to focus on the limited numbe and t ypes of instruments used, as well as on the non-instruments used to produce music, and to focus on the way these sources were chosen to form patterns. I did not expect melodies, and did not feel the need for them, yet when they came, though they very seldom appeared, I found I could enjoy them as arbitrary choices on the composer's palate. There are five sectins in this GHOST OPER. Myself, I did not find the titles of these pieces anything other than irrelevant. The music, overall, is abstract, and nearly impossible to describe. All in all, if you enjoy to experience something very different from the usual, the hackneyed, this piece has much to offer. As a piece of chamber music it has everyting one hopes for; it is intimate, spare, compelling, dramatic, comic sometimes, and always demanding or challenging. It is ear candy, both sweet and sour -- a prickly confection -- and wuld sit well on a program with the latter Bartok quartets, or some Schoenberg or Berg equivalent. (German elecronic music of the 70s might appear more human, beside it.) The difference would be, perhaps, that whereas European quartets would be expected to sound well in an enclosed space or room, this (augmented) quartet suggests an enclosed space open to the sky. A garden, you see. Something to be played and listened to in a pavilion. This is music to clean the palate, so to speak; to scrape off of one's organs of perception, the mucus of the ordinary; the common place. This piece, like others of his pieces, help one experience the present more vividly.

The Ghosts are in your memory!:
Three disclaimers to start my review: 1. I like Avant-Grade/Experiental music. 2. I adore Chinese music! 3. I generally do NOT like Tan Dun's music. That said, I have listened through Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera" five times in a row since I purchased it. To neatly pigeonhole it, the music is experimental, multi-cultural and for lack of a better term, "post modern." Tan Dun is one of the best-known representatives of the "Sent Down"/"New Wave" generation of composers. (Others include the CHEN Yi, ZHOU Long, CHEN Qigang, HE Xiantian and GUO Wenjing). Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, these young men and women were sent into China's hinterlands both to represent the revolutionary values of the Party and to share in the experiences of the peasants first hand. These musically gifted teenagers absorbed - and several of them catalogued and transcribed -hundreds of folk songs. When the Cultural Revolution ended, this same group was among the first students admitted to China's newly re-opened conservatories and universities and were the first to have exposure to the modern music of the west. TAN Dun is certainly more fortunate than most of his generation, is better marketed and is a bit of a musical chameleon in comparison. His scores for Hero, Crouching Tiger and most recently The Banquet are very different from his "concert" music. Yet there are similarities. What sounds audacious in a concert is perfectly suitable in a soundtrack for a epic martial arts film. I do not know if TAN Dun would agree, but upon my listening to this piece, I found that the "Ghosts" alluded to in the title are indeed, the Ghosts of Memory. Passages of Bach weave in and out of textures generated both by natural sounds (TAN's signature use of water sounds...), traditional Chinese gestures (brilliantly performed by WU Man on the Pipa) and extended playing techniques from the Kronos Quartet. The use of the voice - often in hushed whispers or fragmentary vocalizations - is ANYTHING but jarring. To even suggest that this music may have been influenced by Peking Opera is ill-informed. This music sounds more like George Crumb at his most "oriental", poetic and dream-like rather than anything you'd ever hear in Chinatown. FINAL WORDS: While not a fan of this composer, I found the music poetic, creatively scored, brilliantly performed, at times quite beautiful and profoundly sad. To the ignoramus who likened this to Kabuki, well, first off Kabuki is JAPANESE! This composer is from CHINA! I think there is a difference! And whoever heard "yowling"... what were YOU listening to? JEESH!

This is the Avant Gard kind of Kronos that i can't get into so much:
i LOVE Kronos Quartet...got the chance recently to see them live performing "again" with Wu Man..doing a Terry Riley piece which put me into heaven, i didn't want them to stop, and didn't want to leave...therefore why wouldn't i wan't to hear some other work of theirs with Wu Man, and a composer whose movie music i've liked... well it didn't pan out so well for my feeble brain, it's cute, it's crazy, it might be great to see live (or on the DVD of them), but it's not something i can listen to frequently, as background music...guess i like their more accessible stuff..Nuevo, Caravan, Pieces of Africa, etc.

For musical masochists only:
CD's that I don't care for go into the charity box. This is one that went straight into the garbage (but I can always re-use the jewel case)

Among Tan Dun's works without total crossover gimmickry, but less satisfying that some of his other pieces:
The Chinese composer Tan Dun has gained great acclaimed over the last 15 years or so for his blend of Western avant-garde stylings and Chinese folk materials. Born in 1957, the composer was sent into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to participate in peasant work. He made lemonade out of these lemons by absorbing a great deal of folk music, and signing onto a Peking Opera troupe that visited the area. Tan Dun came to New York in the mid-1980s, studying with figures such as John Cage, and he began to work towards a synthesis of East and West. "Ghost Opera" for string quartet and the Chinese pipa lute (1994) is a good example of Tan Dun's mature music, quoting from both the Western canon and Chinese folk material and delighting in unorthodox sources of sound. The performers not only play their customary instruments, but also rip up paper, splash water around in elaborately lit glass bowls. There's no real plot, instead the fragments that make up the brief libretto give the work a ritual-like atmosphere, harkening back to the village shaman that so enchanted the young composer. It takes talent to follow a quotation from a Bach prelude with a Peking Opera standard, not to mention some avant-garde clanging and scratching, and still make the whole work generally cohesive. The Kronos Quartet were the dedicatees of the piece along with Wu Man. They've toured the piece around the world and even recorded it on video. Their performance here thus has an air of definitiveness about it. Still, at times these American musicians seem a bit uncomfortable with the Chinese material, and it would be interesting to hear a recording of the piece by an all-Chinese ensemble. While there's much technical invention in GHOST OPERA, and the work as a whole avoids simple crossover gimmickry for something much more rich and rigorous, my attention was lagging at time. I believe that the synthesis of East and West Tan Dun was looking for was better realized in his multimedia concerto Tan Dun: THE MAP (available on a fine Deutsche Grammophon DVD). Fans of the composer who know more than his popular Hollywood soundtrack work and know what they would be getting into in this disc might find it worth picking up.