Spirits Move Them

For most of its 400-year history, opera essentially has been a staged play with music. Contemporary composers, however, have begun to explore other possibilities.

They may eliminate plot but retain voices, instruments and staging. Is it still opera?

They think so, even when they modify the sound through electronic processing or incorporate unconventional instruments.

Take rocks. Or water, metal or paper--all of which Chinese composer Tan Dun uses in his “Ghost Opera,” created in 1994 for the adventuresome San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet and pipa (Chinese lute) player Wu Man. (Kronos and Man will appear in the Southern California premiere of “Ghost Opera” Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in a staging by Kronos lighting designer Larry Neff.)

Kronos has been at the forefront of new and experimental music since its formation in 1973. The musicians--violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--collaborated with Man in 1992 in a piece written for them by Chinese composer Zhou Long.

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“It seemed to me that it would be great to have another piece at some point,” Harrington said. “I learned of Tan Dun’s music, started listening to some of the recent works and thought he’d be great. He came out to San Francisco, and we began talking about a piece the dimensions of which would expand one of our concerts. This piece became ‘Ghost Opera.’ ”

The title refers to a 1,000-year-old Chinese tradition in which performers have dialogues with their past and future lives.

“We have ghost festivals for two weeks that begin on July 15,” explained Man, a native of China. “July 15 is the first day of the second half of the year, and is considered by both Buddhists and secular people to be the best time to worship ancestors and to commemorate the dead.

“In [‘Ghost Opera’] you will find elements of the festival. People put the names of their dead, beloved, on paper boats and float them down the river. In this piece, you will see paper and water.”

The Chinese regard death and ghosts both “fearfully and happily,” Man said, as do Westerners. “For people who get married, we say, ‘red happiness.’ For people who died, we say, ‘white happiness.’ It’s all happiness because dead people go to heaven.”

The work’s libretto is spare (a fragment of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” a Chinese folk song, monks’ chants), and the five players must not only vocalize but also move about the stage.

“It is not easy for musicians to do,” Harrington said. “None of us think of ourselves as dancers, not that we’re dancing, but the sense of grace and sense of movement we feel we need, we have to work with.”

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The movement is critical to the piece.

“It’s amazing when I can look over and see Joan’s features behind this scrim,” he said. “Later, I can see shadows of different players. You begin to think of reality in a different way. This piece does expand the sense of reality, for me anyway.”

The work starts in the dark, with the sound of water. “It’s amazing how refreshing that sound can be,” Harrington said. “Shortly after that, there’s this beautiful chorale from [Bach’s] ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier.’ I’m kind of commenting on that with a gong that I bow and dip into water, which changes the pitch. It’s amazing how composers work with sounds and work with imagery.”

The music goes “in and out of various sound worlds and images,” Eastern and Western, he said. In one place, he has to strike stones he holds in his mouth.

“That’s one of those sections that I really love because something that you think of as an inanimate object all of a sudden has this musical life.

“Of course, you have to be careful not to break your teeth.”

The net effect is a sharpening of perception.

“One thing that really changes is your listening,” Harrington said. “You become very finely tuned. I think this happens with the audience too, not only to the five of us on the stage. From the beginning, drops of water, you start to hear every aspect of sound that you can detect and that actually becomes part of the piece.

“One of the things that happens to me in performing ‘Ghost Opera’ [is] I begin to think of the world as a musical instrument, and not only the instruments we play--that cello, viola and two violins as well as the pipa--but I begin to realize that there are a lot of other instruments, and I like that spectrum.”

* The Kronos Quartet and pipa player Wu Man will give a staged production of Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera” on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. The program is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. $18-$25. (714) 854-4646.