Tan Dun’s Conception of Organic Music

Abstract

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”