Концепция органической музыки Тань Дуня

Abstract

The article is devoted to the music of Tan Dun, who is engaged in a dialogue between Western culture with the Eastern tradition. The composer reveals a vision of the ancient world which reflects the importance of relations between the human being and nature. The conception of organic music (to use Tan Dun’s own term) presents the open space of confrontation with the development of contemporary technologies. The new Western musical technologies conjoin in his work with the sacred and almost always spontaneous and genuine traditions of the Far East, creating an intricate multisensory play of perception. It is difficult to relay the musical works of Tan Dun analyzed in this article to any of the stylistic trends or directions of the 20th and 21st centuries, as the musician does not make use of the commonly known ideas of compositional technique. The processes of form-generation in the examined works demonstrate principles of structuring, including such artistic solutions in which not only audiovisual elements (including those incorporating multimedia), but also narrative and even ritual components are united together. Tan Dun appeals to a broader, interactive – multisensory artistic perception. The author of the article arrives at the conclusion that the concept of organic music, which runs like a golden thread through the composer’s entire musical output, is connected with Taoism and is stipulated by Buddhist philosophy. Keywords: Chinese music, Orientalism in music, Tan Dun, organic music, multisensory perception, “Organic Music Series,” “The Map”