What's There to Do in a Eugene July?
Eugene, Oregon Travel Guide
By
Anthony St. Clair
Oregon Bach Festival
Crouching Tiger Concerto
I love Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
I'm a romantic, I dig kung fu flicks, and that cinematic buffet of simple effects, beautiful martial choreography, and a painful yet touching story gets me in the writer's heart like an arrow, with every viewing. I'm a kung fu sap, what can I say? That... well, and yes, I think Jen's really cute.
But nevertheless. Something else I've always dug about CTHD, from the first time I saw it, was the soundtrack. So, when I heard about the Oregon Bach Festival, and decided to write about it for BootsnAll, Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger Concerto was one of the performances that I considered a must-see. For one, it wasn't a full performance of the soundtrack. That would've been awesome, but this was something different. I just didn't quite know what, but that was enough for me.
The Crouching Tiger Concerto was a first attempt at a new format Tan Dun was experimenting with: the fusion of orchestra and film, but in the concert hall instead of the movie theater. "But Anthony," you may be saying, "film and music are already fused – and weren't you just talking about how much you like the soundtrack in the movie?"
Well, yeah. But here's the thing. Composers compose movie soundtracks (generally) after the film is done and edited. The music is cut to fit, so to speak. Tan Dun's idea was to reverse this: Where in cinema the music supports the film, and the music is composed around the film, so in the concert hall the film would support the music, and the director would return to his chair – to direct and create a video based around the music.
Something new. Something original. What can I say? It was pretty damn exciting.
This, perhaps more than any other performance I had attended, was what I also considered to be the most travel-minded. Yes, the Oregon Bach Festival helps connect cultures and people; and yes, this year, for example, it has brought together, in honor of a German composer 250 years dead, a Chinese composer, German and American musicians, an audience with a variety of passports, all in a small city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. But the Crouching Tiger Concerto also reflected the mingling of cultures and peoples on many scales: historical, economic, musical.
The basis of much of the Crouching Tiger Concerto could be found in the instruments played. Tan Dun included instruments from many different cultures – from the tar, a North African frame drum, to the bawu, a bamboo, copper-reed flute that migrated to China from Southeast Asia; in addition to many components of traditional Western music. Why? Because Tan Dun is fascinated by the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that for centuries connected East and West and promoted travel as well as trade. How the Silk Road connected and melded cultures is similar to how Tan Dun merges East and West, old and new, in his music, and the Crouching Tiger Concerto is a representation of the intermingling of culture, from people to musical forms and instrumentation.
This is what I'd been waiting for.
To me, the entire performance is best illustrated by two events:
In one, Renyang Gao begins to solo on the bawu. Just previously cellist Maya Beiser had her solo piece; now it was Gao's turn and after, the two began to play together. Or really, not together; they played their instruments at the same time, but for the first couple of minutes their duet was more like a duel, instruments copying and throwing notes back at the other, tempos racing and tunes bouncing like blows from bawu to cello and back again. If you want to read it symbolically, in terms both of music and of culture and world events, you could say the duel demonstrated the clash of East and West, that has dominated so much of the past few centuries of human history.
But suddenly the instruments mellowed toward one another, and even the body language of the performers changed, from straighter backs and faster movements, to more flowing motions and smiles from one to the other. Like so, the music changed, became slower, smoother; began to harmonize – more like, to wax symbolic again, East and West today: not quite always getting along, and at times old tensions rising and new ones flaring up, but also working together, and better, and learning to live with and learn from one another – and sometimes, even, liking each other.
The second part was in some ways more striking. Percussionist David Cossin played an electric guitar, a flute, a bongo, and bhoran (and these are only the instruments whose sounds I heard and know well enough to name) – but on a cardboard mailing tube with a mike taped inside the bottom end.
Cossin held the tube near a speaker that sat on a chair. Before the performance began, Tan Dun mentioned that the orchestra would be "recycling sound", and Cossin had demonstrated. Holding the mike-end up to a nearby speaker of course created a hellish feedback – "hellish, isn't it?" noted Tan Dun to the grimacing audience – but then Cossin flipped a switch on some equipment on the floor, held the mike-end of the tube near the speaker again, and began to strike the opening at the top with his hand. The feedback noise was changed, altered – renewed and recycled, into a full, graceful, melodious tone, at first like a flute but later, as we found in the performance, as many other things.
When all was done, the audience rose up and roared, and clapped, and "bravo'd!" their hearts out. It was the least we could do. I clapped heartily, shouted and whooped and stamped my feet. I love Croucher Tiger Hidden Dragon – and its soundtrack, and the Crouching Tiger Concerto. I clapped and clapped, whooped and whooped, but my mind wasn't quite all there. I don't know if many, or if any, other audience members had this idea, but suddenly I very, very badly wanted to throw on my backpack, head to Asia, and travel the Silk Road. I suddenly wondered who I would meet, and I wanted to hear what songs I would be singing when I came back.
Questions?
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