NEW YORK — He was born in Chairman Mao Tse-tung's home province in 1957 and spent two years planting rice in a commune during the Cultural Revolution. He never heard the names — let alone the music — of Bach, Beethoven or Mozart until he was 19.
Now, Tan Dun is one of the world's leading composers, a true citizen of the 21st century cosmos where East meets West in Manhattan's SoHo melting pot. His music spans the avant-garde minimalism of John Cage and the romanticism of Hollywood.
Among Tan's latest works is the score to Ang Lee's acclaimed fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma. Set in imperial China, the movie takes the kung fu tradition on a journey of balletic battles through austere deserts, thickets of bamboo trees and mountain tops. Its theme — the elusiveness of love — transcends borders. (Tan has also received an Academy Award nomination for the "Crouching" score.)
The music, too, straddles East and West. An orchestra of lush strings is augmented by traditional Chinese instruments, including snakeskin fiddle, bamboo flute and hand drum. The cello plays a sentimental melodic line that slides over musical frontiers and up and down octaves like a pair of tigers sizing each other up.
Lee, Tan and Ma themselves are living examples of the movie's cross-cultural transcendence.
Lee, who won the Golden Globe directing award for the movie, was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States in 1978, studying theater and filmmaking at the University of Illinois and New York University. He went on to make such movies as "The Wedding Banquet," "Sense and Sensibility" and "The Ice Storm" before directing "Crouching Tiger," which he calls "a dream of China that probably never existed except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan."
His current projects include "Incredible Hulk" and a movie about magician Harry Houdini.
Lee and Tan became friends after meeting at a party about 10 years ago, when Tan was a student at Columbia University and Lee was at NYU. Lee remembers hearing "a very energetic, passionate guy" with a peasant accent telling a dirty joke.
For the movie, Lee asked Tan to set aside his minimalist style, which has included atonal, deconstructive compositions that use ceramic instruments and sounds from water, stones, paper and metal.
"I don't know how he took it. I went very straight with him: 'You cannot do what you used to do,' " Lee said. "I wanted a constructive film, like opera . . . more accessible to the audience."
Tan recalls Lee approaching him after "The Ice Storm" about collaborating in a kung fu movie.
"I was shocked," Tan said. "I said, 'Why?' Because I hate kung fu film. But he said, 'No. Let us look at it from a totally different angle. . . . This is very, very interesting. Kung fu is not about fighting.'
"If you look at it this way, kung fu is about a philosophy. It's about beauty. It's about inner and outer balance," Tan said. "So I decided to participate, and immediately I said we need a bridge between high and low cultures, between East and West."
Enter Yo-Yo Ma.
After being asked to join the project, Ma welcomed the opportunity to work with Lee for the first time and to collaborate again with Tan; Ma and Tan had worked together on Tan's "Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind" at the internationally televised ceremony marking the British handover of Hong Kong to China.
Ma is the Paris-born son of Chinese emigre musicians who later moved to the United States. Two measures at a time, his violinist father started teaching him the Bach Cello Suites at age 4. The rest is history. His grasp of the classical music canon is so firm that he has more or less exhausted the traditional cello repertoire and has become a leading crossover musician, going from Bach to bluegrass.
He's now expanding the musical boundaries even farther. He has embarked on what he calls the Silk Road Project — turning Marco Polo's trading route into a two-way street of musical exchanges, from New England and Carnegie Hall to Central Asia and China.
"The purpose," Ma said, "is for people to communicate their inner lives. It's a hard thing to do, and music I think is a very good way to express the inner life. . . . This is a way where people can say, 'Oh, I really get what you're about.' "
What's Tan about?
He was born in Hunan province and grew up in a village with shamanistic traditions. He received no early training but was drawn to music as a child, playing violin in an ensemble whose other instruments included woks, cooking pots, chopsticks and any other implement that could be used to make sound.
"For a long time I would play the violin and have only three strings," Tan explained. "That's because I didn't have a violin teacher, and during the Cultural Revolution, first of all it is not allowed to teach Western music. Second, I didn't have money to buy the extra string."
He didn't know of Western music until the Philadelphia Orchestra visited China during the thawing of U.S.-Chinese cultural relations. "I totally got into Western music because since I never heard Western music until I was 19, I suddenly realized that kind of music should be my future," he said.
After the tragic drowning of musicians from the Changsha Beijing Opera orchestra in a boating accident, Tan was recruited to play with the company and studied at the Beijing conservatory. He moved to America in 1986 to attend Columbia for a graduate degree in music. To help pay rent and tuition, he played violin on the streets of Greenwich Village.
"Another student used to play with me, and we would fight for the better location to get the best money — in front of the Chemical Bank," Tan recalled. "Ten years later, when I finished a rehearsal with the Metropolitan Opera, while passing the Chemical Bank I saw that he was still playing there. So I was talking to him, and I said, 'Hey, how have things been?' He said, '. . . Business is getting slower and slower,' and he asked me, 'Where are you playing now?' And I said I am playing in Lincoln Center. He said, 'I didn't know you can play in Lincoln Center.' I said, 'I play inside.' He said, 'Are you kidding? You can play inside? In the lobby?' I said, 'inside of lobby.' Anyway he said, 'I have to find out how you figured out the business.' Actually, I didn't tell him the true story, that I am a professional. My life is like a joke sometimes. I never tried to be something, just going with the wind."
On the web: www.tandun.com; www.yo-yoma.com; www.crouchingtiger.com