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Tan Dun - Circle for 4 trios, conductor and audience (Czech premiere)

Before the performance, audience members should read the following carefully.
PLEASE NOTE: For this performance the spoken text is translated into Czech...

There are three places in which the audience is asked to perform with the musicians. The conductor will rehearse these sections with the audience just before the piece, and establish a method of cuing.

1) After the conductor’s text, “Did you see the sound?” the audience responds in ‘breath voice’ (like an exhaling sigh) “haaa”.

2) After the conductor’s text, “Can you write it on the sky?”, the audience respond again, “haaa”.

This is the text:
Conductor: Did you see the sound?
Audience: Haaa
Conductor: hear the shape
catch the wind
Can you write it on the sky?
Audience: Haaa
Conductor: The tree wants to rest
but the wind never stops.

On the WHISPERED repeat of the conductor’s text, there is NO vocalization by the audience.

3) In the climax of the piece, the audience is to vocalize/improvize for about 10 seconds on the ideas of ‘twittering’ — ‘gossiping’ — ‘shouting’, gradually becoming louder and rising in pitch.

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I imagine this piece as a ritual in which musicians, conductor and audience all take part. It exists as sound, as space, and as silence. There is a circle which includes the entire hall, and the conductor as high priest.

I think that there are also dynamics of silence. This idea is similar to the Taoist concept that the greatest sound, the deepest meaning, might be in silence, that nothingness might be all. I feel this strongly as I design the rests in much of my music.

The chanting which serves as a pattern in this piece is from the Epitaph of Seikilos, a first century AD fragment of Greek music. When I first heard it, I felt captured by the remoteness. I cannot explain what affected me so deeply, but the result is that I wrote this piece.

–Tan Dun

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