OPERA ON THE EDGE

By MARK SWED

Jan. 5, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES MUSIC CRITIC

Tan Dun is the future.

One of a remarkable group of young Chinese emigre composers who began making an impact on the music scene in New York in the late 1980s, Tan stood out as the most avant-garde. He was, for instance, just as likely to be found composing a score from the sensual sound of tearing paper for an erotic dance as writing for traditional instruments of West or East.

Now he has bounded dramatically into the mainstream, gleefully breaking down cultural, political and generic barriers.

For instance, Tan’s large-scale “Symphony 1997” was the official commission for the Hong Kong hand-over ceremonies in July and featured a solo cello part for Yo-Yo Ma, with music ranging from a great new populist Chinese anthem to the ancient and modern musical styles of West and East.

In the fall, Tan’s postmodern opera “Marco Polo” bemused and confounded audiences and critics in an otherwise conventional New York City Opera, and it has lately been recorded by Sony Classical, with which Tan has an exclusive contract.

Local audiences soon will have several chances to encounter Tan’s music. He has scored his first feature film, “Fallen,” which opens later this month. The Kronos Quartet will present a staged version of Tan’s “Ghost Opera” at Irvine Barclay Theatre on Jan. 27. And James Levine will conduct a piece by Tan when he brings the Metropolitan Opera to Royce Hall on May 17.

Meanwhile Tan is breaking into opera in a big way. He is working on “Peony Pavilion,” a new interpretation of a classic 16th century Chinese drama, with Peter Sellars, which will premiere in May at the Vienna Festival. Then he moves on to that most prestigious of all American musical commissions: an opera for the Metropolitan Opera.

Tan was reached at his home in downtown New York by phone for this conversation, just as he returned from leading a BBC Worldwide broadcast of music by young New York composers with the BBC Scottish Symphony, where he is, along with everything else on his plate, resident composer-conductor.

Question: For those of us who first encountered you as an experimental conceptual composer, it is hard to believe how suddenly and how successfully you’ve broken through to the larger world of concert music and opera and film. How did it happen? Have you changed, had to become more accessible, in the process?

Answer: Today, the meaning of avant-garde is not being accessible. But everybody is avant-garde in history, from Mozart to Beethoven to Wagner. To me, being stimulating and challenging is much more important than being accessible.

Actually, the only reason we even talk about being accessible is because of record companies, festivals and presenters-producers. But if you look at history, in fact, look just at very recent history, say from the Beatles to Philip Glass, you see that they were successful not because they are accessible but because they offered something challenging to the younger generation, because they made connections with society.

And that is what I am interested in. You know, making music is the entire meaning of my life. And so everything happening in the world today, whether it is the new forms of communication or the economic crash in Korea or the Gulf War or AIDS--absolutely everything happening in this society--hits me.

I deeply believe the artist must always be part of the political life and cultural wave.

Q: Is that why you accepted the commission for “Symphony 1997”? Writing an official piece for the Hong Kong hand-over must have been a challenge politically.

A: Of course, in the beginning I was quite hesitant about the whole thing. I didn’t want to be used politically by either side.

But it stimulated me to think about all my concerns in my music today. I really want to close all those gaps between the classical and the pop, the gaps inside of classical music itself and also the gaps between different media. Everywhere you look, you see crossing over now.

And it’s urgent for any artist to look all around, at fashion design, at multimedia installation art, at craft arts around the world. All those things reflect a picture of what music could be.

Q: How much of this comes from your own restless traveling, since you are now so active performing your own music and conducting all over the place?

A: My big classroom is in between different countries. And my homework, a lot of my conceptual work, is done on airplanes.

But the jet lag, in fact, is for me now much more a cultural feeling than a physical feeling. I get less and less physical jet lag, but I get more and more cultural jet lag. And the cultural jet lag is my model, my engine. Because whatever different culture I am in contact with at the moment feeds back to my own subjects.

Q: Peter Sellars has said that the nature of “Peony Pavilion” will be to move between the conventions of traditional Chinese opera and the modern world, so will your contribution be the next step in this sort of global assimilation in your music?

A: Actually, for me this will be a kind of environmental meditation. For example, when I go from my home, downtown, to Lincoln Center, uptown, I always have to transfer subway trains at Columbus Circle.

And at that subway station, I am hit by the sound of fast- and slow-moving trains passing, by the shining quality of those metallic industrial noises. Plus I am among all those people from all those different places who are passing by, coming and going, in that train station.

And it all seems very much to me like this 16th century play, which is a deeply haunting love story, about where love comes from and where love goes.

Q: It does? What exactly is the connection between Columbus Circle and a Chinese 16th century love story?

A: Peter Sellars’ view is not really that this is just the story of a 16th century play. He’s much more interested in crossing centuries, crossing political views, crossing cultures.

And to me that means we are all trying to understand all sorts of things, from love to our lives, where they are coming from and where they are going.

So next month I’m going to go to some very rural and primitive villages in China specifically to record sounds of their old music and animals and natural sounds in the countryside.

And I’m going to bring Columbus Circle together with the Chinese village, those two kinds of noise--one organic, the other urban and industrial--combined through electronic sampling to produce something very, very wild. And through this I am going to try to find a single sense of coming and going, coming and going.

Q: How will it work?

A: It is going to be a very old but also very advanced theater piece, and we are still in the process of figuring out how to do it.

We are going to have a unique world music ensemble. We are dividing the instrumental sound not by single instruments but by categories: double-reed instruments, plucking instruments or bowing instruments. For example, we have Western double-reed instruments like the English horn but also double-reed instruments from China, the Middle East, Korea--and bagpipes.

And all the instruments are going to be electronically amplified. So the cello is no longer just a cello, it’s a bowing tool. The pipa, which is the standard instrument of Chinese opera, is not just a pipa any more, it’s a plucking tool.

We will also use a synthesizer with large sampling sound resources. And there will be about 20 Chinese opera singers chanting and singing.

Q: With “Peony Pavilion,” it appears that the world really is becoming your acoustical canvas. But what about writing an opera for the Metropolitan Opera, which is a world in itself?

A: James Levine and I are trying to come up with a whole new kind of collaborative process.

But first I must get to know everything about this big opera house. So they gave me a pass that allows me to go to any performance and all rehearsals.

I want to work like a composer in Mozart’s time, when you wrote an opera for a company you knew as intimately as if you were sleeping there and eating there. Now, I too spend my time eating in the Met cafeteria, and I jump from orchestral rehearsal room to stage rehearsal room to the theater, like I am part of the family.

I want to know the most advanced things that everyone can do, from the costume department to the singers.

Q: Is this the first step before you actually choose a subject or librettist?

A: Exactly. We are trying to go against the kind of regular collaboration where you are handed a certain subject and you just do it, where somebody writes for somebody else. To me that’s very dry, and it’s not part of my life.

Instead, there will be a continual feedback between James Levine and myself about all kinds of sources, about art and literature and music and conceptions.

It’s a very new kind of total contact, where I must feel both mentally and physically in contact with the company.

Q: It’s interesting about the way you are becoming so close to the Metropolitan Opera, while at the same time you remain so much in contact with the globe and all its different cultures. Can you really inhabit both the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously?

A: It’s back, I think, to Taoist philosophy. You know, the smallest thing can actually be huge. Really, really huge.

But then if you are facing something big, say, the whole tradition and history of opera and a company where so many big stars like Pavarotti and Domingo sing, where there is an endless parade of old faces and new faces, you figure out that this is a tiny, tiny world.

People are people. You see them on the stage or eating in the cafeteria, and it doesn’t matter.

Q: Then it isn’t such a big leap from an experimental theater downtown to the Met?

A: A lot of the things I think of doing with the Metropolitan Opera also cause me to think about what I’d like to do downtown in a small experimental theater too. Everything can be linked.

You ask how could I link a remote, thousand-year-old Chinese village to the Columbus Circle subway station in New York. But finding the way is very, very interesting.

Only today’s composers can think this way, because today’s forms of communication have made us think this way.

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CROSSROADS

The daily Calendar section is presenting a series of interviews, which began last Monday and will conclude Thursday, with arts and entertainment leaders. Here is the schedule:

Dec. 29

Film: Harvey Weinstein

Dec. 30

Architecture: Zaha Hadid

Dec. 31

Television: Martha Williamson

Jan. 1

Restaurants: Nancy Silverton

Jan. 2

Theater: Peter Schneider

Jan. 3

Jazz: Bruce Lundvall