Tan Dun's "Nu Shu"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Tan Dun (born 1957)

Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women

Tan Dun is well known to the world for his film scores: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002) and The Banquet (2006). Last year in Melbourne Tan himself conducted his Pipa Concerto and the Triple Resurrection, a work which continues Tan’s interest in the combination of film and music but this time with music prompting the visuals.

Born in Hunan province, young Tan grew up in a world where modern China intersected with indigenous traditions (shamans could communicate with the past and the present, with leaves and stones). After working as a rice planter during the Cultural Revolution and then in the Beijing Opera, Tan went to Beijing Conservatory and from there to New York City where he studied composition at Columbia University with Chou Wen-Chung a student of Edgard Varèse. Now based in New York, Tan is perhaps the most successful exponent of bringing non-Western cultures into orchestral music. This partly reflects his personal biography, and is partly due to his broad concept of counterpoint as reaching beyond sound to encompass the working together (or meshing together) of sound and image, West and East, nature and culture, past and future. Nu Shu is a case in point.

Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women originates in Tan’s discovery several years back that in the village of Shang Gan Tang [Shangjiangxh] in his home province there are women who have had their own means of communication since the 13th century AD. ‘Nu Shu’ means ‘women’s writing’. Advice, messages, instructional tales, life-lessons have been passed down in song form and in a distinct form of writing from mother to daughter and sister to sister these past 800 years. Nicknames for the script include ‘mosquito legs’ writing’ to distinguish it from the square shapes of Hanzi, traditional Chinese writing. Tan prefers its other moniker, ‘music note writing’. The language has been the province of women only (often written on intimate items, such as fans), but is now under threat. Gao Yinxian, described by Tan as the most important woman in Nu Shu village, died some years ago, and Tan Dun promised the villagers that he would create an orchestral piece which helps position the language in the future.

It would be better not to think of Tan’s Nu Shu as an anthropological record. His response to the Nu Shu culture is more poetic, but in creating this work, filming and recording the songs, Tan developed a vast archive that might assist in preserving the culture, an aim he regards among his highest. It is somewhat ironic that a man has finally stepped into this role.

The work sees an orchestral frame around traditional nu shu songs sung on film by women of the village (including He Jinghua, Pu Lijuan, Zhou Huijuan, He Yanxin, Jiang Shinu, Hu Xin, Mo Cuifeng, and Hu Meiyue) Tan’s use of film is true to his concept of counterpoint, in this instance incorporating a counterpoint of time. The ‘archival’ footage denotes nu shu’s past; the orchestra its future. Tan gave considerable thought to the medium which should serve as the bridge between these two dimensions and settled on harp as being the most feminine instrument and one bearing likeness to a nu shu written character. At Nu Shu’s first performance the harp solo was played by Elizabeth Hainen, principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which commissioned the work along with Tokyo’s NHK Orchestra and Europe’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam.

Nu Shu has a very poetic structure which could be considered under the themes of women, weeping, rivers and song. Tan sees the work in six parts (Prologue - Mother’s Story (parts 2, 3 and 4) - Nu Shu Village (part 5) - Sisters’ Intimacy (parts 6, 7 and 8) - Daughter’s Story (parts 9, 10, 11 and 12) and Epilogue (part 13)).

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This note first appeared in a program booklet for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Chinese New Year concert, 28 February 2015. Please contact me for permission to reproduce it.

Readers may also be interested in my proposed synopsis for an adaptation of the Chinese classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber, posted 20 November 2012 and the my briefer synopsis posted 12 April 2015.