Composers Who Think Big

(Thinking of music by Tan Dun -- His Water Concerto and "Phoenix and Dragon" episode from his 1997 symphony)

I admire and identify with those composers who do as much as possible with just a little bit of music. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms -- they built structures out of little motifs (Beethoven's four note 5th symphony motif being most famous). Bartok admired and emulated that quality of Beethoven. Britten gets incredible mileage out of a C-chord in his "Jubilate Deo," and the first two notes you hear in West Side Story, the gang's danger signal, form the interval that Leonard Bernstein then uses to launch most of the songs in the score. Mid-20th century composers got off into serialism, and the less said, the better. "Minimalists" compensated for those dense and twisted long lines by returning to very very simple building blocks of music and repeating them with tiny changes over time -- to very exciting effect, I think. I got into those composers through Stephen Sondheim, whose own music has always exemplified this quality. (I've been asked to elaborate in an article for a British journal on how he derived the entire score of INTO THE WOODS from five notes sounded early in the show.)

BUT. . .

There are composers who don't seem to think this way, and I admire that. They seem more interested in "color," texture, sound, contrast, and build their pieces with a kind of improvisatory mixing and matching of big sounds and audacious tricks. In the best pieces of his last thirty years, Michael Tippett did this, describing his own late music as a kind of collage.

Today, we have Chinese composer Tan Dun (see TanDunOnLine.com). His concerto for water was a joyful event to see - as he put percussion artists through their paces doing every noisy thing you can think of that you can do with a big tub of miked water, and lots of things you wouldn't think of, all done against a background of chords and orchestral textures to alter the mood, set up dramatic contrasts, and build to a conclusion with the one inevitable sound effect -- the one you expected, and the one you don't get until the very end -- and we laughed and jumped to our feet.

Just heard a bit of his 1997 symphony, characterized by big sounds, big contrasts, no tune, no theme that I could discern -- though a few sounds seemed to repeat. But it's consistently exciting.

I'm thinking of buying a ticket to the premiere of his new opera, commissioned by the Met, to perform in December.

Composers Who Think Big | Category: Music