The Voicing of the Voiceless in Tan Dun’s The Map: Horizon of Expectation and the Rhetoric of National Style

During my undergraduate years in Sydney, Australia, one of my embarrassingly preliminary compositions for flute and piano, which no longer remains in my current portfolio, was featured at the Young Composers’ Salon of the 11th Sydney Springs International Festival of New Music.¹ The composition drew its inspiration from a set of eighth century haiku poems. It had a provocative Japanese title, made extensive use of Japanese pentatonic modality, and it featured shakuhachi-like gestures on the flute. I thought nothing of its lack of subtlety at the time; it was, after all, one of those straightforward efforts that you might expect from an inexperienced young composer. After its premiere, a well-respected Australian composer, who shall remain anonymous, approached me and complimented the composition’s attractiveness; she was however puzzled as to why my Chinese-ness did not come through.

It seemed as though in the tug-of-war between the prefix and suffix of my schizophrenic hyphenated-self, the more generic Australian-ness was somehow expected to give way to the more exotic half of my identity. Perhaps the way my name (Kar-Fai Samson Young) is spelled, carrying the unmistakably Chinese romanization of Kar-Fai, also meant that I am not to expect to be regarded as just a composer, an individual, but as a hybrid Chinese-insert-location composer, depending on where I am working from at the time. Given the ambition of the festival, which was to promote contemporary Australian compositions, the political duty of tokenism my colleague had imposed upon me certainly seemed unfair.

Individualism versus National Style

Despite the great disparity between the many different kinds of Chinese-ness in and outside of mainland China, the notion of a coherent, one-size-fits-all national style has often been cited as a stylistic signpost for the collective creative output of ethnically Chinese composers, at the expense of other artistic qualities (Kouwenhoven 1992; Mittler 2003; Utz 2003, 7–8). Ethnically Chinese composers have a love-hate relationship with the romanticized notion of Chinese-ness: On the one hand, for many, it is a time-tested marketing stratagem, a productive resource with a proven track record (Lau 2004, 33–9). On the other hand, when appropriated in commentaries, it remains an artistically restrictive pigeonhole of categorization that imposes enormous burden on composers. In an interview with Christian Utz shortly after the 1998 premiere of Peony Pavilion,² New York-based Chinese composer Tan Dun lamented music critics’ tendency to read too much into his cultural background, and their use of it as a yardstick against which to measure his creative output. Indeed, Tan Dun’s treatment of cultural elements has long been a popular subject of dispute that attracted considerable criticisms from both the press and the academic community in and outside of China (Smith 2003). Yu Siu-wah (2004) in “Two Practices Confused in One Composition” took issue with Tan’s insensitive juxtaposition of cultural signifiers in his Symphony 1997. According to Yu, many of the current generation of ethnically Chinese composers’ insensitive handling of politically charged subject matters had led many into “embarrassing or controversial situations” (71).³

In defense of his compositions against the kind of culturally referential readings that Yu and other critics had put forward, Tan Dun resorts to the notion of individualism:

If I were to write a Ph.D. thesis about Schoenberg, my own point of departure, initially, would be his personality, rather than broader cultural issues [. . .] Ideally, every artist must be regarded, first and foremost, as an individual.

(Utz 1998, 143)

Tan Dun’s defense mechanism seems to be echoed elsewhere. Beijing composer Guo Wenjing, in an interview with Oliver Chou prior to the premiere of his latest offering, Journeys,⁴ remarked:

What is a national style? It’s hard to define [ . . . ] Is Tchaikovsky’s music so popular because it’s [in] Russian style or because it’s Tchaikovsky?

(Chou 2004, 5)

In a recent conference paper, “Against National Style—Individualism and Internationalism in New Chinese Music,” Barbara Mittler (2003) suggested...