Tan Dun admits that his music is always controversial.
Tan's controversial status means that his music always attracts wide attention from both admirers and detractors.
As soon as the movie premiered in Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong Province in October, the controversial reviews followed.
Some said the music was "too rich," weighing down the movie itself. Some thought the soundtrack sounded similar to that of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Tan's answer is, "After seeing the movie, you would perhaps be disappointed, or you would be amazed, but one point is that you should have your own understanding."
In his words, the soundtrack is "a feast to the ears" but not "too rich."
"Zhang Yimou's movie is an epic with gorgeous scenes. To match the stirring scenes, I structured the music like an opera including an overture. The music itself tells the story, and in every second, the music develops following the movements of the scenes," Tan said.
"As the composer, my responsibility is to tell the audiences through the soundtrack what the director wants to tell them, but could not express visually," he said. "So the soundtrack does not overweigh the pictures but helps develop the plot and express the characters' emotions."
He said, to suit the movie as well as he can, he first outlined a map of the music according to the story, then he found the rhythms, notes and tunes to fit each scene.
To differentiate the soundtrack of Hero from that of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tan made two metaphors: One is that the previous is his son, while the latter is his daughter; the other metaphor is that previous is the running hand in Chinese calligraphy while the latter is a splash-ink painting.
"The style of An Lee's movie and Zhang Yimou's are very different, naturally the two soundtracks are different from each other," he said.
In his eyes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is of the southern China style and its emotion is soft and introverted. In contrast, Hero is of northern China and it depicts power and heroism.
The music for the former is delicate, lyrical and single-line while the latter is complicated and structured, mixing romanticism and heroism.
The music for Hero is complex. Taking Gone with the Leaves as an example, when the soprano vocalist emphasizes the fight between two women, Perlman plays the yang violin like the figures of the two men entangled with the two women.
Besides the yin and yang violins, the taiko drums, the guqin, the soprano and 50 basses, Tan made full use of Chinese instruments such as the nao (cymbals) and matouqin, the Mongolian horse-headed stringed-instrument, and various musical elements including Errenzhuan, folk melody in Northeast China and Qinqiang, a local opera of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
He even taught the taiko drum players to play the drums with finger skills of playing the pipa. In the overture, he asked the bass to produce a strangely profound and the hoarse sound by pronouncing feng (wind) in the local dialect in Shaanxi.
All these ideas come from Tan's imaginative mind and his wide range of musical conception.
"In history, every industrial revolution would promote the development of music in all the aspects, from the styles, structures, languages and instruments," said Tan.
"Now we are at a time when you sit at the desk with a computer on it, and the desk is the whole world for you. People in the global village with different cultural backgrounds are in contact with each other as never before. New expressive languages are being created that cross cultures, ages, and disciplines. So what type of music is being made out of this convergence?"
Tan himself gives the answer by writing music linking rituals with the concert hall, the avant garde with ancient spirituality, and bringing the stillness of nature to the chaos of the computer age. "I am not afraid of being controversial, on the contrary, I hope every composition is a challenge to myself as well as to society," he said.
(China Daily December 12, 2002)
