Tan Dun was born on 18 August 1957 in a village near Changsha in Hunan, and as a child was drawn to the rituals of the village shaman, whose ceremonies were accompanied by music made from rocks and water. The Cultural Revolution’s bans pushed him away from music and he was sent to plant rice on the Huangjin commune, where he joined an ensemble of fellow workers and learned traditional Chinese string instruments; after a ferry accident killed several members of a Peking opera troupe he was called in as violist and arranger, and the work earned him a place in the orchestra. He entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1977, encountering there the music of Takemitsu, George Crumb, Goehr, Henze, Isang Yun and Chou Wen-chung. In 1986 he moved to New York as a doctoral student at Columbia, studying again with Chou Wen-chung and discovering Cage, Glass, Reich and Meredith Monk; he took his DMA in 1993 with Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee.

He won the Grawemeyer Award for the opera Marco Polo in 1996, and an Academy Award and a Grammy for the score to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. His work covers opera, orchestral, vocal, chamber and solo music and film, along with two categories he named himself — organic music and music ritual — in which instruments are built from paper, water and stone, and Chinese theatrical and ritual practice supplies the form. His first opera, Nine Songs (1989), set nature poems by Qu Yuan in Classical Chinese and contemporary English for a mixed Western and Chinese ensemble that included fifty ceramic percussion, string and wind instruments made for it. He was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2013 and Dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music on 1 July 2019.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tan_Dun
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q314176