This entry is a response to the January 13 performance of Tan Dun's 2003 Paper Concerto at the Berlin Philharmonic and marks the first in a series of posts focusing on my emergent interest in music and sound art. This interest is the logical extension of my dissertation's consideration of dance, media, and translation. In the next several weeks on HASTAC, I intend to use this incipient interest in sound as a point of departure to address a number of related events in my two momentary homes, Berlin and Cornell, including Jacques Attali's forthcoming lecture at the Hebbel am Ufer Theater, the Transmediale Festival at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, my observations on the emergent CYNETart Festival in Dresden, and Tim Murray's seminar on the subject, "Acoustic Horizons," at Cornell this semester.

Tan Dun is a Chinese composer (b. 1957) and one of the most preeminent names in contemporary music-he has an informative website that I highly recommend (and widely cite below). Hardly a musicologist, (my home disciplines are performance and dance), I was only fleetingly familiar with Tan Dun's compositions until this Tuesday, when the German Youth Orchestra performed his highly unusual Paper Concerto at the Berlin Philharmonic. A bit of subsequent sleuthing uncovered that his use of paper corresponds to his ongoing investigation into the exploration of the four elements, (of which his piece Water Passion After St. Matthew is an excellent example), the everyday, and traditional Asian materials, such as tea or ceramics. He calls these investigations "organic music," whose idyllic simplicity might seem at odds with a progressive aesthetic approach to the thoroughly mediatized condition of our historical moment. However, Tan Dun's efforts relate to "new" media investigation into an emergent aesthetics-one might cite Bill Viola's groundbreaking work with water and video, or Thomas McIntosh's water work, Ondulation-- that seeks to calm the traumatic experience of rupture inherent binary differences, "new/old", "organic/inorganic," or "east/west." Two ways, dear to my own heart and research, that Tan Dun is trying to get to the site "between" such binaries is in the field of practices, (understood in de Certeau's sense), and the digital. In particular, he has recently accepted a commission to write the inaugural piece for the You Tube Symphony, in his video introduction to which, he repeatedly returns to the notion of the everyday-the Internet a possible site for the organization of quotidian practice. The "pacific" or positively "conciliatory" element of his aesthetics was also implicit in the organization of the performance at the Philharmonic, which also played one traditional Mongolian choral work along with two early 20th century pieces by European composers, Honegger's Pacific 231 and Stravinsky's The Firebird. Given that Pacific 231 describes a train, the avant-garde component of the selection counterpoised machines and fire to Tan Dun's "eastern" emphasis on paper, and certainly the reference to "organic music" might be understood as retreat from the triumph of the mechanic. From machine to media-this is, on its surface, a significant shift from optimized totality to the contingencies of the surface. It might also be noted that Tan Dun's use of media and materials with special relevance to Chinese culture appears to be a strongly established trend among Chinese artists working with the social history and emphemeral quality inherent to materials such as calligraphy, coal, or gunpowder.

Tan Dun's incorporation of such seemingly diverse media into his musical practice gives off all the signs of the kind of artist who may well speak to my own ongoing conceptual work. He also has conducted artistic dialogues with Paul Klee and John Cage, who both equally intrigue me, saying that ""Klee was concerned with finding formal means to embody deep and universal feeling without bitterness or pathos, and out of sophisticated complexity to make a concentrated simplicity." However, despite such broad resonances, the devil is in the details of the works- or not. You Tube and its Symphony Orchestra may be no more than yet another thin-skinned distraction from the discordant reality of mass alienation. Likewise, the concert hall is one of the most reified organs of European modernism, and although the integration of ordinary media may be a step towards diffusing its closure, it could just as easily serve as a sentimental compensatory measure, mere consolation, a breath of playful ethereal air that enlivens and relieves the tragic roots of its form without seeking to address the possibility of substantial change. Even the most seemingly ethereal of the works I have become most interested in never fully elude the burden of trauma, be it representational, social, or personal.

In regard to its conceptual potential, the Paper Concerto both exceeded and failed to meet my initial expectations. Its strength lay in the seemingly genuine, unpretentiously playful ingenuity of its exploration of paper as a percussive instrument. The variety of ensuing explorations of paper as a material lent the work a distinctly performative element-it began with three long paper scrolls in a triangular formation suspended from the ceiling, behind which the percussionists stood. They emerged with thin sheets of vellum, which they ripped, waved, crunched, blew across, waved, etc., as a quiet, unseen vaguely Asian and vernal string accompaniment. (I did not notice until later that sets of musicians had been spread throughout the building.) This play expanded during the course of the performance into a wide variety of paper objects-a fan, a paper umbrella, sheets of various sizes and material, a long, thick paper tube, pom-poms made of paper scraps-that took on a dimension that was almost choreographic, all of which culminated in a fanfare of pounding on thick stacks of ordinary white loose leaf paper. In a personally favorite moment, the orchestra turned the pages of their score back and forth, producing a crisp, collective "flip-flip," a ubiquitous part of music hardly ever recognized in performance. Of course, the exploration of theatrical presentation is nothing new in the realm of contemporary music. But unlike many such experiments, Tan Dun's theatricality never seemed forced or unduly self-conscious, perhaps because it restricted itself to its material- which was enough to enchant its audience.

As a result of their material restriction, the percussionists are never given a "voice" and remain faithful to the "rules" of the composition's structure. This silent play is at once essential to its calming aesthetic-the limits of the work's unity are not dramatically confronted-but it is also the point at which I find myself doubting whether Tan Dun's aesthetics are too simply content with its play... where are the traces of desire for change, for the subject? Is this lame lyricism, one that fails to account for its history, even as history is being endlessly evoked in paper, tea, or ceramics? (I have similar doubts about W.G. Sebald, another artist whose work I've been flirting with recently, although I should emphasize how different, and potentially more complex, Sebald's aesthetics are. Could a "Doubting Sebald" post be forthcoming?....) Indeed, the noticeably dramatic nature of the work seemed at odds with its potential relation to emergent media aesthetics. Although I am far, far from a musicologist-and my severely qualified ruminations on Tan Dun's general reception in the circles of experiment music will nevertheless be momentarily voiced-the Paper Concerto's seemingly conventional tonal language and compositional structure were surprising. The music was accessible pleasant, and subdued, distinguishable from a traditionally major vocabulary by palpably Asian-influence. Likewise, although a few less ordinary instruments, (the bass flute comes to mind) were used, as well as unusually frequently plucking the strings and tapping the fingerboard, the orchestral accompaniment to the foregrounded paper percussion followed a relatively predictable narrative pattern of development (from ethereal origins through waves of orchestrated crescendos) and consistently supported the central percussive thread's predominance and legibility. The work's sections seemed discretely unified, even as its use of paper had suggested a possible reconsideration of those units.

In light of its surprising accessibility, I found myself struggling to identify Tan Dun's relation to major points in 20th century music history. A clue to this was later provided when I read that in accepting a Japanese prize and commission in 1992, he was obligated to choose a program of works by composers that had influenced him, Shostakovich, Cage, and Takemitsu: ""Shostakovich, as a composer also living under a dictatorship, taught me to express deep humanity. From Takemitsu, I learned that Western and Eastern instruments can be part of the same color palette. John Cage led me to discover structures and sounds as yet unknown, by always keeping an open mind." With Shostakovich included, I find this a strange trio, especially since, to my musically untrained ear, the Paper Concerto did not engage the structural experiments in non-unified forms that characterize Cage and Takemitsu.

Tan Dun does present one alternative, an investigation into the movement of music in space, an aspect of the performance that was distinctly palpable. The official description states: "In Paper Concerto, Tan explores and combines six different acoustic scenarios: 1) live surround sound; 2) sounds traveling in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions; 3) antiphony between sounds on stage and amidst the audience; 4) the contrast of orchestral sonority and organic natural sounds; 5) wide-ranging dynamic levels; 6) and the difference in aural textures of amplified and non-amplified sounds. In addition, the stage will be set with three distinct areas where percussion soloists will manipulate a wide range (in sound and size) of paper materials, using gradated amplification from the stage." In theory, this is a compelling area of investigation, and I find myself attracted to the way in which it makes the space of the concert hall tangible as a series of planes or surfaces... and thus like paper?