Tan Dun: Water Passion After St Matthew
The second installment in this week’s feature on Passion setting.
Best known for writing the score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese-American composer Tan Dun has been making a name for himself over the past twenty-five years with multimedia compositions that strive to fuse the natural world with modern technology, East with West and high art with low.
Of his music, Tan says that “I don’t really have any great interest in the East and West as a dialogue. What I am interested in is trying to find a single language and distinctive style that is made up of many cultures and that can reach many different diverse cultures.” His re-dressing of the Passion is at once simplistically beautiful and patronizingly simple.
Out of all the Gospels, St Matthew is the one most suited to Passion setting. It provides the richest variety of incident and divides easily in to two parts balanced equally in length and dramatic intensity. It is somewhat surprising then, that Tan was so liberal in his editing of the text. There are eighteen separate events in St Matthew’s text but Tan chooses to use only seven. The text is reduced even further within those events as only the spoken words of Christ and his disciples and a bare minimum of narrative material are included. Although this dramatic reduction is intended to represent the simplicity and unclutteredness of popular Buddhism, it is dangerously close to being a highlights-only version that sacrifices depth in its hurry to be unaffected.
Traditionally, the Passion story begins in the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew with the Last Supper. Tan however, goes all the way back to the third chapter and begins with Christ’s baptism. As its title suggests, the setting is united by the image of water. He says,
So many cultures use water as an essential metaphor — there is the symbolism of baptism; it is associated with birth, creation and re-creation. If you think of the water cycle, where it comes down to earth and returns to the atmosphere, only to return — that is a symbol of resurrection. I think of resurrection not only as a return to life but as a metaphor for hope, the birth of a new world, a better life.
St Matthew contains only one of the Seven Last Words from the Cross so Tan augments the section containing Christ’s death with “I thirst.” and “It is finished.” from St John. In the final fragment of the Passion after Jesus has died, Tan quotes, “a time to love, a time of peace, a time to dance, a time of silence….” from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.
In addition to the biblical interpolations, Tan wrote seven short texts of his own. All of these are assigned to the chorus and are sung to a sort of chorale tune comprised mainly of both horizontal and vertical perfect fifths. The interval is the most stable after the octave and Tan uses it everywhere as a metaphor for serenity and purity. There are flagrant deviations from traditional Baroque voice leading as Tan has the chorus singing entire lines in parallel fifths. The repeated text and tune unite the work in the same fashion as the chorales in Bach’s setting.
The Eucharist, or Last Supper, is the traditional starting point of a Passion setting. The opening interpolation is sung unaccompanied by the choir in fifths. None of the traditional solo roles (Jesus, Pilate, Evangelist) are assigned to a specific soloist although in this instance, Jesus is being represented by the bass. The music framing the words of Christ is restricted to a pentatonic scale (A, B, D, E, F#) and imitates of the improvisatory nature of Eastern musics.
After Jesus tells the disciples that one of them will betray their master, they panic and demand to know if it they who will do it. Tan represents the panic and confusion quite effectively by having the men of the chorus ask, “Is it I?” in unison rhythm but on a pitch of their choice. Judas is represented here by the soprano soloist, the second time in the setting that Tan gives the role of the antagonist to the woman .
Judas’ betrayal of Jesus in the Garden is one of the tensest moments of the story. Tan responds to the tension by using the tritone exclusively for both the narration and Judas words which are represented alternately by the men of the chorus and the soprano soloist. After this interesting initial treatment of the text, Tan seems to stumble somewhat and sets the words Judas utters after he kisses Jesus (Teacher, may peace be with you) to the same theme he used when Jesus was in the Garden. This incongruous use of motive is puzzling, neither the text nor the speakers are related, and makes one wonder if perhaps Tan just ran out of original material.
The moments surrounding the request for the release of Barabbas are the unquestionably the most compelling of the setting. At the beginning of the score, each chorister was instructed to bring along two flat, smooth stones from a stream or river. The movement begins with the choir rubbing and banging the stones together in rhythm. Solo cello and violin join in with the same rhythm, replacing their bows with guitar picks.
The symbolism of the stones at Jesus’ trial is almost frightening. Death by stoning is agonizingly slow and was the preferred method for killing heretics and adulterers in Jesus’ time. The stones also recall Jesus’ admonishment that, “ He who is without sin cast the first stone” and is sharply juxtaposed with the bloodlust of the crowd. Unfortunately, this engaging beginning is followed by writing that is gimmicky and shallow; unable to fulfill the potential of the opening.
The death of Christ is the culmination of all the hatred, back stabbing and denial of previous incidents and is the event to which all others are subordinate. Bach takes advantage of the obvious dramatic intensity and stretches the event over 196 bars. Tan manages it in 49.
Jesus’ death is the traditional ending point of a Passion setting because it was part of the Good Friday service. The Water Passion is one of the two works in the Passion 2000 Project that breaks with tradition and deals with the Resurrection. It is implied rather than stated in the penultimate interpolation: “A sound is heard in water, the sound of innocence, in darkness, in three days the everlasting waters, tears, are crying for rebirth.”
In this interpolation, a fundamental event of the Christian faith is nearly rendered impotent as it is couched in mystical, New Age/popular Buddhist terms. Following this, is the Ecclesiastical interpolation that many audience members, especially Americans, would recognize this text as the political protest song Turn, Turn, Turn written by Pete Seeger and popularized by The Byrds in the 1960s. It is this sort of writing to the lowest common denominator that prompts critics to dismiss him as a self-indulgent sycophant.
The movement begins with the water percussion beating a steady rhythm over which the chorus sings the “A sound is heard in water….” Each phrase is identical and ends with a perfect fifth. The soothing sound of the water percussion; rising, repetitive motives and text; prevalence of perfect intervals and an extended crescendo result in an incredible five minutes of emotional manipulation. One cannot help but achieve some sort of catharsis as the trance-like rhythm grabs hold. It is brilliant scoring on Tan’s part as it ensures the listener will leave the concert hall feeling good about their experience.
It is difficult to ascertain what exactly Tan is trying to say about the Passion story as it appears that his primary concern is international recognition and record sales. Perhaps Tan is saying that the Passion can no longer stand on its own but rather needs fancy lighting, extended vocal technique, superstar soloists and slick packaging to stay relevant. It certainly illustrates the dilemma of the modern church, which is trying desperately to find ways to keep people coming.
Tomorrow’s Passion setting: Pasión según San Marco by Osvaldo Golijov
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