Eight Colours for string quartet (1986–88)

Peking Opera

Shadows

Pink Actress

Black Dance

Zen

Drum and Gong

Cloudiness

Red Sona

Tan Dun, who is now an American citizen, was employed during th Chines Cultural Revolution planting rice in a commune but was released from that to play violin with the Peking Opera Group. He studied composition at recently re-opened Central Conservatory but moved to New York in 1986 after his music was condemned by the authorities as “spiritual pollution.” Now recognised as the leading composer of the “Chinese New Wave”, he describes himself as “swinging and swimming freely among different cultures.”

Tan’s Eight Colours, the first work he wrote in New York, is a vivid demonstration of his multicultural style. Unconventionally but imaginatively written for string quartet, it “shares,” he says, “the dark, ritualised singing, very dramatic form and attention to tone colour and dynamics with my pieces written in China… but is still very different from them… It marks the period of my contact with the concentrated, lyrical language of western atonality. From it, I learned how to handle repetition, but otherwise responded in my own way, out of my own culture, not following the Second Viennese School. I drew on Chinese colours, on the techniques of Peking Opera familiar to me since childhood … Not only timbre, but the actual string techniques are developed from Peking Opera; the vocalisation of Opera actresses and Buddhist chanting can be heard.”

The most rewarding approach to the work is by way of its instrumental colouring, which is so brilliant that it clearly does not include the sound equivalents of either tan or dun.