The Water Passion

Sounds of Water, Rituals of Rebirth: Tan Dun's Passion Fusion

by Thomas May In 2013 the peripatetic Tan Dun traveled to the Thomaskirche in Leipzig to conduct his Water Passion in the very space in which J.S. Bach had introduced the St. Matthew Passion nearly three centuries ago (most likely in 1727). The gesture underlined the kind of cross-cultural counterpoint that lies at the heart of the Chinese composer’s oratorio. The full title reads Water Passion after St. Matthew, yet Tan also models his work on his reading of Bach’s monumental precedent. It might even be titled Water Passion after St. Matthew after Bach — the second “after” being taken in its double sense of “according to” and “postdating” (for a contemporary world). The result is a fusion of musical techniques and expressive devices from Asian culture (not limited to Tan’s native China) with several features from the Baroque master’s choral masterwork. This fusion is immediately evident even before the first sounds resonate: Tan’s instrumental ensemble, configured around a cross formation of seventeen transparent, illuminated basins filled with water, is markedly focused on percussion sonorities and calls for only two string soloists. This is just one layer — the most obvious — of Water Passion’s contrapuntal design. There is additionally a fusion of Buddhist and Christian outlooks, inspiration from the composer’s memories of a traumatic past (as a boy during Mao’s Cultural Revolution) that mixes with a poet’s reverence for nature, and a theatrical savvy that combines echoes of timeless ritual with avant-garde experiment. Tan’s philosophical and aesthetic interests — his admiration for the ancient art of calligraphy, for example — add a further gloss to his reading of the dramaturgy of the Passion-set-to-music. All of which is to say that Tan’s project in Water Passion signifies something a good deal more intricate and textured than the simplistic formula of “East meets West.” His oratorio stands as a one-of-a-kind creation shaped both by the composer’s unique experience as an émigré from China and by his singular understanding of Bach and the Passion tradition. Bach’s entire legacy — indeed many of the basics of the Western tradition — remained to be discovered by Tan as late as age 20. The opportunity merely to study music had been severely restricted during his youth in a village in the southern Chinese province of Hunan (where Tan was born in 1957). The brutal policies of the Cultural Revolution packed him off to an agricultural commune, where he worked in the rice fields and could be safeguarded by the overlords from the perils of decadent Western culture. Tan was among the first students to be admitted to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing when it finally reopened in 1977; there he gained his initial serious exposure to modern Western music. In 1986 he began graduate studies at Columbia University and resettled in New York, which remains his home base. A string of noteworthy triumphs made him a key member of the new wave of émigré Chinese composers at the end of the last century, several of whom, along with Tan Dun, became internationally acclaimed and garnered some of the world’s most prestigious musical honors (Bright Sheng, Zhou Long and Chen Yi). But during his years in the provinces of China, Tan gathered up a fertile store of inspiration from his direct contact with ancient and enduring folk traditions. The lack of access to basic musical resources during the Cultural Revolution only sharpened his ingenuity in using improvised alternatives (including, at one point, an orchestra of pots and pans). These experiences helped mold Tan’s approach to composition with regard to his signature use of “organic” musical sources and sounds in such works as Water Passion and several concertos (the Water Concerto, written just before Water Passion; Earth Concerto for stone and ceramic percussion; and Paper Concerto for paper percussion, commissioned by the LA Philharmonic for the opening of Disney Hall). A related trait is Tan’s fascination with shamanistic rituals and spirituality. (At several points in his Water Passion score he includes the indication “shamanistically”). An early example is his Ghost Opera for strings and pipa (written for the Kronos Quartet in 1994), which incorporates the sounds of water, metal, paper, and stones to enhance its narrative. Tan even evokes the spirits of Bach and Shakespeare from the West, using a quotation from the Well-Tempered Clavier as a significant conceptual motif. For Ghost Opera he also drew on his memories of timeless peasant funeral observances in which Tan writes, “musical rituals launched the spirit into the territory of the new life” while also entailing “a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature.” It’s not surprising, then, that the invitation to compose a new musical account of the Passion story would inspire a similar network of associations for Tan. According to the composer (from an interview about Water Passion’s world premiere in Stuttgart in 2000): “When I read the account of the Passion in the Bible, I heard the wind, the sound of the desert. I always felt the desert heat, and heard the stones and the water. So I shaped the story through those sounds, giving the element of water an important theme. Not only does it stand for baptism, but also for renewal and rebirth. It is cyclical. Water evaporates, becomes clouds, rains to the earth, and evaporates again. The sound of water is in my composition like a passacaglia theme — it is always present.” The occasion that led to Water Passion’s commission was the worldwide observance of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, neatly timed to coincide with the millennium. Helmuth Rilling, an esteemed Bach conductor and scholar, decided to mark the anniversary by encouraging a dialogue between Bach’s legacy and the perspectives of four contemporary composers from different cultural backgrounds. Rilling arranged for commissions of four new Passions by the German Wolfgang Rihm, Russian Sofia Gubaidulina, Argentine Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, each after one of the four Evangelists (Luke, John, Mark and Matthew, respectively). Another influence on Water Passion is the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, one of Tan’s prominent former teachers. From Takemitsu he learned to cultivate a sensitivity toward the deeper, symbolic resonances of nature’s sounds — and to the silences that shape them: pauses and interlacing moments of silence recur throughout the score. The use of amplification, found sounds, and digital processing provides still another level of counterpoint with the natural acoustics of overtones in Water Passion. The work is circular in its overall design — as distinct from the linear narrative underpinning the Christian Passion: it begins and ends with the mysterious simplicity, familiar yet unpredictable, primal but irreducible, of water’s sonorities. To the ancient, ritual, mythical, universal connotations of the water imagery, Tan had a recent, very personal one to add: around the time the commission arrived, his wife was pregnant, and, recalls Tan, “we went to the doctor for an ultrasound, and there I could see this beautiful baby and hear the heart. Suddenly I heard this beautiful water sound and I realized: this is the sound all human beings hear first.” Takemitsu also furnished Tan with an inspiring model for the creative possibilities of film music. In 2000 the TaiwaneseAmerican director Ang Lee released Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which became a phenomenal international success. A fresh take on the martial arts genre known as wuxia, the film is set in Qing Dynasty China and combines an adventure quest — featuring thrillingly choreographed action sequences — with ill-fated love stories. For this collaboration Tan produced over 90 minutes of music, and his score (which garnered Academy and Grammy Awards) assumes a major presence in the narrative. (Its music forms the basis for the first in Tan’s four-concerto tetralogy, The Triple Resurrection, which features on this summer’s Hollywood Bowl program.) Thus, along with his ear for a sound’s implicit significances and for texture as more than decorative, Tan has cultivated a gift for combining musical and visual images (see sidebar). The water bowls, waterphones, and ritualistic gestures using percussion, which the singers are also assigned, are this composer’s “deeds of music made visible,” to steal a phrase from another highly theatrical composer. They might also be seen as visual embodiments of the kind of symbolism Bach laces so intricately into his scores, with their Christological divisions into three and their encoded names. Water is indeed a fluid image in Tan’s Passion, transforming into tears and blood and back into “the sound of innocence.” Embarking on his Passion setting as an outsider to the culture in which Bach originated, Tan has remarked: “I was nervous about presenting a story that has lived in peoples’ hearts in another culture for thousands of years. But I was excited because it is such a powerful, dramatic, operatic story. And I thought, we are in a global village now, this very powerful story must be shared.” Because of his decision to centralize the imagery of water, Tan extended the arc of the traditional Passion narrative to begin with the baptism of Jesus (the lengthy first section), ending with a vision of water and rebirth. So, too, he includes the scene of the Temptations in the desert to explore another natural setting against the backdrop of the water theme. Tan also fashioned his own libretto, very loosely abiding by the model of Bach’s St. Matthew librettist, Picander: quotations from the Evangelist are juxtaposed against original verse, written by Tan himself. But Tan’s use of the scriptural source is far more condensed and laconic, and he includes a remarkable quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes (yes, the source of the hit by the Byrds) at the end. He also reorders Jesus’ cry “Eli, Eli, lama” and includes it in the Garden of Gethsemane scene. Water Passion is structured in two parts, each comprising four sections; altogether, Part One is nearly twice as long as Part Two. As in Bach, choral music frames the Passion, but not in the form of architectonic “pillars.” Tan’s music emerges from and fades again into indistinctness, then silence. The overall narrative design calls for solo singers alternating or singing with the double choir — which in this case is divided according to men’s and women’s voices. The solo bass (requiring a low C) sings the roles of Jesus and John the Baptist, while the soprano represents the devil (Temptations), Peter’s accusers, and at times the Evangelist; both share the roles of Judas and Peter, and both are given the equivalent of Bach’s more elaborate arias. In addition to its traditional role as the angry “crowd,” the bipartite chorus sings some of the narrative passages and articulates Tan’s poetic reflections as well (most prominently, the recurring motif “a sound is heard in water”). Tan makes no neat division between singers and instrumentalists, since he requires the former (soloists and chorus) to play various instruments as well — such as the very ancient xun (a globular ceramic flute, for the soloists) and Tibetan finger bells. Moreover, each member of the chorus is responsible for coming prepared with smooth-contoured stones, “preferably from the sea or river.” As for the orchestra proper, a violinist and cellist situated upstage are the only representatives of Bach’s orchestra. The percussion orchestra calls for such instruments as water gongs, water tube drums, tubular chimes, timpani, and other improvised sound sources (small soda bottles for bubbling sounds, for example). Western and Asian performance techniques are combined throughout. For the singers, this entails such devices as resonant Tuvan throat singing to exaggerate overtones, monk-like chanting, or the signature high-pitch gliding of Peking Opera (a genre in which the young Tan acquired important practical experience while he was still living in China). A simple chorale style, by contrast, is used for the setting of the first words to emerge distinctly (“a sound is heard in water”). This chorale (most of it set as unison, in fact) traces an ascending pattern: G—D—E-flat—G-flat—G with B-flat (a minor third) and is the functional equivalent of the famous “Passion chorale” in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Indeed, Tan uses it even more recurrently as a unifying signpost to guide us through the narrative. The violin and cello soloists, meanwhile, resort to a variety of techniques to evoke the microtonal inflections and bent pitches of their more ancient Asian counterparts (such as the Chinese erhu) — “the fiddling of the Silk Road cultures,” as Tan puts it. Balinese and Indonesian ritual music is evoked both by the percussion and the singing techniques in the Temptations scene. Water Passion incorporates numerous evocative passages of “soundscape,” such as a “water cadenza” at the end of the Last Supper sequence, the elaborate Crucifixion scene (which is treated by Bach with remarkable narrative brevity), the terrifying earthquake, and the return of the mysterious water sounds during the concluding scene of rebirth. “There is no beginning, no ending, only continuing,” writes Tan on the first page of his score, by way of instruction to the choral forces, who are to “fade in one by one on any note and for any phrasing” using a circle of tones the composer has provided. Water Passion elides the demarcation between indeterminacy and order, nature and religion, doctrine and spirituality, beginning and ending as it maps out what the composer has called “a musical metaphysics and drama based on the story of Jesus’ Passion according to St. Matthew.” SIDEBAR: List of Tan Dun’s Music Theater and Film Works  Opera and music theater form an important part of Tan’s oeuvre. He has extended this tendency to embrace multi-media in various high-profile experimental projects, from the Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind on the occasion of the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the Internet Symphony No. 1 “Eroica” for the first-ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra. OPERAS:  1995 Marco Polo  1998/2010 Peony Pavilion  2002 Tea: A Mirror of Soul  2006 The First Emperor — co-commission between the Metropolitan and LA Opera  FILM SCORES: 1995 Don’t Cry, Nanking  1998 Fallen  2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — Best Original Score in the 2001 Academy Awards  2002 Hero  2010 The Banquet

Archival Recording