Crouching Composer, Hidden Cellist

Excerpts from the feature that runs in Vol. 5, No. 9-10:

In the latter half of 2000 a motion picture infiltrated American theaters with the stealth of a ninja. It's a movie about ancient traditions, mystical forces, martial knights and their apprentices, secret identities, secret romances, unspoken love and betrayal. Add a light saber and you'd have the greatest Star Wars movie ever made.

Add dialogue spoken entirely in Mandarin Chinese and you've got a hell of a marketing problem. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a martial arts adventure set in a mystical, mythical ancient China, featuring legendary Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh as venerable warriors whose fates are tied to a mysterious young woman played by Zhang Ziyi. Together the three become involved in the theft of a legendary sword called the Green Destiny, and the search for an infamous thief and killer known as Jade Fox. Along the way they engage in some of the most breathtaking, balletic and magical martial arts battles ever put on film. Now it remains to be seen whether American audiences will pay the price of having to read English subtitles in order to watch one of the most amazing adventure films they will ever have the opportunity to see.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was directed by Ang Lee, whose earlier films The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm hardly suggested a man who could helm an epic martial arts adventure film. But Lee had nurtured the dream of making such a film since his youth. He hired acclaimed martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, who produced the kung fu pyrotechnics of both Jackie Chan's Drunken Master series and the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. For the film's music, Lee turned to two masters of a different discipline: the concert performance. Composer Tan Dun began his career in the Peking Opera and is a graduate of Beijing's Central Conservatory and Columbia University in New York. He has written symphonies, operas, and a large-scale work for choir and orchestra to commemorate the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Tan Dun had scored the Denzel Washington film Fallen in 1998 but was otherwise unknown to American film audiences. "I actually scored 20 feature films in China, from experimental movies to big feature films," the composer explains. "My first film I did when I was about 20 years old and in my second year of study at the Conservatory. I was working with a younger generation of Chinese directors. What I did mostly were dramas and love stories; I had never scored a martial arts movie."

His assignment on Crouching Tiger grew out of his relationship with the film's director. "Ang Lee and I had known each other for probably 10 years," he says. "As friends we shared time together but we never talked about collaborating until four years ago when he finished The IceStorm and he told me he had the idea of doing an updated, historical kung fu film that would be more of a crossover melodrama. And he asked if I was interested in scoring for him. We sat down and listened to all kinds of music and talked about the story and he asked me about what the score could be like."

Lee and Dun immediately hit on the idea of collaborating with famed concert cellist Yo-Yo Ma. "We wanted him to be the leading thing that would cross the East and the West," Dun explains. "We also wanted to have two orchestras: an Eastern orchestra and a Western orchestra, to have a dialogue about inner space and outer flaming. This film to me is not really a conventional impression of a martial arts film. To me it's a drama, it's something seen through martial arts but actually much more discovering the human side stories between woman and woman, between woman and man, between teacher and student and between the old and the new. I thought cello would be something much more efficient and especially with Yo-Yo Ma because his fingering is always very romantic and very touching. We thought using cello would lead people to think this is something much deeper and more dramatic than just a martial arts film."

Like Ang Lee, Yo-Yo Ma had a prior relationship with the composer, having collaborated with him on the work for the Hong Kong changeover, Symphony 1997 (Heaven Earth Mankind). "I'm a fan of his and I really love his work; his music is very evocative and very theatrical and has great imagination," Ma says. "The way that we worked on the film score was that I was actually doing the first dub of the cello line from which he then took to various places and added to it. So what made it possible was that I did know Tan's work and a little bit of Ang Lee's work and they were both there at the sessions. It was incredibly helpful to have Tan be there and other than just looking at the music on paper to have him say 'this is where I think it's going, this is how I'm going to write it.' I could get an imaginative sense of what he was going to do and I saw snippets of the film with Ang Lee who had been shooting for I think a year, including very difficult locations in the western part of China in the desert, with no real infrastructure for filming. He had film crews shooting around the clock. It was obviously a huge effort; I was dropped in there, but knowing a little bit about it allowed me to go with their flow. It's very exciting to be part of that."

Ma adopted a style of playing for the film that fit into traditional notions of performance, allowing his cello to fit in seamlessly with the other native Chinese instruments in the orchestra. "I knew that it was going to be the cello and the erhu playing that theme together," Ma says of the film's central romantic melody. "In terms of my contribution, having had knowledge of Tan Dun's music and knowledge of the instruments he was going to be working with, including the tar in the desert fight scene and the erhu -- which was an instrument my father used to play so I fiddled around with it a little -- and the different techniques and styles of playing with different instruments, I knew enough about it to be able to suggest those sounds and colors. I think that was quite important within the score to be able to bend certain notes and know about the techniques so it doesn't just sound like a classical or romantic cello performance but could refer to a wider family of instruments."

While Tan Dun's deeply romantic primary theme speaks to the film's central focus on drama and love, the composer faced an equally great challenge in finding unique approaches to scoring the film's spectacular martial arts sequences. "Ang Lee's fighting is almost like a ballet, and my experience working with him is pretty much like Stravinsky working with Ballanchine," Dun explains. "What he's doing with martial arts is not really to just let them fight -- each second is choreographed and the length of each step of jumping and feinting, he had specific things in mind and specific instruments and music in his mind. So in that way we would go back and forth and compare our music notes. But basically all the meters and timings are pretty much like a ballet score. Like in ballet, the dance is already there, and composers use this click track and the timing in one way as a technical marking, but meanwhile you don't want them to steal away your soul. It's tough, but in a way it's very convenient."

Dun scored the film's show-stopping first fight scene using only traditional stick percussion, an idea gleaned from Lee. "He was thinking that we had to have an astonishing kind of smash power there," Dun says. "But meanwhile we've got to have some humorous and dramatic kind of story-telling there. In the East we have drumming-talking, drumming theater, spoken theater. In spoken theater a man or a woman can spend a whole night talking about Scheherezade. And drumming theater is somebody drumming with words to tell the whole landscape, the whole story of something happening. Ang Lee asked if it was possible that we could use drums like in Peking Opera drumming, and I said of course it was possible because I was a Peking Opera musician and I know it immediately."

The brilliant, stunning choreography of this first, nocturnal martial arts fight combined with Dun's accelerating, percussive scoring has led to an almost universal audience reaction to the close of the fight: wild applause, something not often heard in movie theaters. Dun himself was surprised by the intensity of audience reaction to the scene. "I saw it at a film festival closing night, and I was quite happy," the composer recalls. "To see the music solely from yourself compared to the thing becoming a product -- when the consumer meets the product and the people to challenge you and be challenged by your work it is quite stimulating because people breathe together with your music. They have an immediate response to any movement and any sound -- that's very exciting..."

Be sure to look for the full version of CROUCHING COMPOSER, HIDDEN CELLIST in Vol. 5, No. 9-10, soon to be released!
 

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