Composer of the Week

Composer of the Week, Vol. I, Issue II – January 21, 2008

Name:  Tan Dun

Born:  1957, China

Current post:  Full-time composer

Previous post:  N/A

Publisher:  G. Schirmer

Suggested listening:  Symphony 1997

Quote:

“Organic music” concerns both matters of everyday life and matters of the heart.
These ideas find their origin in the animistic notion that material objects have spirits residing in them, an idea ever-present in the old village where I grew up in China. Paper can talk to the violin, the violin to water. Water can communicate with trees, and trees with the moon, and so on. In other words, every little thing in the totality of things, the entire universe, has a life and a soul.

-Tan Dun, describing his perception of the interconnections between music and the universe