East Meets West at Lincoln Center Fest

Ignore China at your own risk. Nixon said it a quarter century ago. The music world, a lot slower on the uptake, is now getting the message.

That China is suddenly becoming a significant force in Western music should be of no surprise. Isaac Stern went to Beijing years ago to help awaken a musical sleeping giant. So did Pavarotti. So did American and European orchestras. And they all came back with stories about young musicians and composers who heard Western music for the first time and went bonkers.

Now, Chinese composers are coming here and showing us something new and original. And none has done so more dramatically than Tan Dun, the 38-year-old composer who has emerged as one of the stars of Lincoln Center Festival 96 with a program called Tan Dun and New Generation East, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall Saturday night.

It is not an easy business combining cultures so radically different as the musical ones in Asia and America. In the West, harmony and melody rule. In Asia subtleties of timbre and texture are more important. Both worlds honor rhythm but use it differently. Our instruments are made for our kind of music, theirs convey their priorities. Concert rituals differ as well.

Tan, who has lived in New York since 1986, heard Western music for the first time when he was 19 and the Philadelphia Orchestra toured China. He has a good handle on Western technique and instruments and is comfortable with silence and letting sounds be independent sounds. He often cites John Cage as a mentor. He seems to have a fondness for pretty Western melodies. But his music does not sound, as does the music of some other Chinese composers, like Chinese folk music orchestrated for the Western palate or like the kind of music Westerners might write if they were trying to evoke China.

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Most notably, he brings in ritual. In the closing piece of Saturday’s program, “Circle With Four Trios, Conductor, and Audience,” Tan spread the trios around the hall and had the audience participate with breathing sounds and shouts. He had text to recite as well as conduct (he conducts with expressive elegance), and the music was made of disconnected sounds that eventually were hushed by all the players singing a ghostly soft lullaby.

In another piece, Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments, Tan placed the instruments in a circle around the piano. “Pizzicato piano” means that the instrument’s cover is removed and it is played by plucking the strings. Few of the gestures in this music are Western, and it is an achievement that it is notated in Western style (although the music sounds different than it looks on the page).

Tan also conducted works by young composers from China, Japan and Korea, some academic, some atmospheric--the piece from the Korean composer, Jin Hi Kim, combined the composer playing komungo (a zither-like instrument) with a Western ensemble. But East and West often remained at war. Tan could have included some of the more prominent Chinese composers now in the West, including Bright Sheng, composer-in-residence for the Seattle Symphony, and Ge Gan Ru, but it is a highly competitive world.

New York does not like to take second place to the Pacific Rim in its appreciation of Asian performance art, and the festival has also distinguished itself by being the first to bring to America two important Asian ensembles. One, the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre from Vietnam, has been hugely popular--the puppets are cute as can be doing little skits while skirting across a pool of water.

The other ensemble is Reigakusha, which performs the medieval court music of Japan called gagaku. The ritual of this music, played by robed musicians performing on flutes, mouth organs, kotos and drums, is very beautiful, and Reigakusha is said to do it best. But what is most notable about this ensemble is that it has commissioned new music (something felt to be sacrilegious in some traditional Japanese circles), and Lincoln Center commissioned a new piece for Reigakusha from Lois V Vierk.

Vierk, one of the most striking downtown New York composers, learned the tradition and instruments studying music at UCLA and CalArts, and in “Silversword,” which had its premiere Sunday night in Tully, she did exactly the reverse of what Tan did. She brought melody and post-minimal rhythms to instruments made for other kinds of expression, and the result was explosive. Like Tan, Vierk managed to be true to herself but well enough versed in another tradition that she could generate a synthesis and create something new.

The future prosperity of the world lies as much in the East as in the West and in both worlds learning from the other while remaining true to its own heritage. Music can help show how it can be done, and Tan and Vierk offer possibilities we can’t afford to overlook.