"Organic music concerns both matters of everyday life and matters of the heart. These ideas find their origin in the animistic notion that material objects have spirits residing in them, an idea ever-present in the old village where I grew up in China. Paper can talk to the violin, the violin to water. Water can communicate with trees, and trees with the moon, and so on. In other words, every little thing in the totality of things, the entire universe, has a life and a soul.” --Tan Dun
In the late 1980’s, Tan Dun began developing his Organic Music Series which incorporates sounds and instruments from the natural world - including water, wind,credit repair ceramics, and paper–in order to create a new way of defining and experiencing music.
Commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in 1989, Soundshape, Tan’s first work in this vein, is written for an ensemble of more than 70 ceramic instruments which are classified into the five categories of skin, wood, bamboo, metal and earth, and played by blowing, striking, plucking and bowing.necktie
Tan Dun followed this ceramic music with a composition of paper music, which was created as part of a dance work called The Pink (1991) at LaMaMa Theatre in New York. This paper music was composed for 9 different types of paper and the performance techniques include blowing, shaking, crumpling, tearing, hitting, waving, slapping and singing through the paper materials - thus revealing how ordinary paper objects from daily life can create sounds of longing and suffering as well as love.
Taking his organic music concept to the next level, Tan Dun soon began weaving these natural elements into his works for the traditional concert hall. penis enlargementCommissioned by Kronos Quartet, Ghost Opera (1994), a five-movement work for string quartet and pipa, with water, metal, stone and paper, employs elements from Chinese, Tibetan, British and American cultures, combines performance traditions of the European classical concert, Chinese shadow puppet theater, visual art installations, folk music, dramatic theater and shamanistic ritual.
Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra (1998), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, hypnosisuses water as a musical instrument; this innovative technique was blended with the visually striking aspects of the performance of these unique instruments, resulting in a new and transformed concert experience.
Water Passion After St. Matthew (2000) was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of J.S. Bach with a setting of the“Passion”story that inspired Bach. The work is composed for a unique instrumental ensemble, including 17 transparent illuminated water basins, an extensive array of percussion, electronically processed sounds of ancient stringed instruments alongside the more familiar buy violin and cello, and a chorus and narrative vocalist. It endeavors to revisit the Passion form and bravely suggests a 21st century interpretation of the work through different cultures, religions, and media.
Tan Dun then brought his paper instrument concept to quit smoking in the concert hall with Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra (2003), commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in celebration of the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. At the premiere of Paper Concerto, Tan Dun spoke about his work saying,”Every living thing, including human beings, have their own way of living and depending on each other. Organic Music, for me, begins with a pursuit of nature’s purest sounds, it then enters into a dialogue with these sounds; rehearsing them into being. In performance, I evoke Nature’s spirit and begin to communicate with it.necktie My Organic Music is an awakening of human minds to the horrors of societal corruption and environmental pollution. These pieces are the tears of nature.“