Composer goes beyond her music
Du Yun, a 39-year-old musician who won a Pulitzer for her creation of the opera Angels’ Bone, was recently in Shanghai to take part in a cross-disciplinary art event. Zhang Kun reports.
Du Yun landed in Shanghai, the city of her birth, two weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize for music with her opera Angels’ Bone. She was there to participate in the cross-disciplinary art event Shanghai Project on April 22.
Shanghai Project is a contemporary art initiative started in 2016 as “an experiment, a laboratory for testing the boundaries of existing assumptions”. An exhibition entitled Seeds of Time opened at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum on the same day, which marked the beginning of the Shanghai Project Chapter 2.
At the exhibition opening, Du worked with pianist Huang Jianyi and a group of elderly amateur performers of Huju Opera — a local Shanghai opera popular in the region — from local communities to present a musical dialogue between East and West, and past and present, in front of visual digital projections created by architect Thomas Tsang.
It was a short performance of seven minutes, and Du wanted to bring to attention the authentic folk opera and dialect of Pudong in suburban Shanghai, as well as the plight of the elderly in the community.
Young people today often turn away from folk operas because they don’t like their sounds, says Du. But presenting it at a visual-art exhibition allows audiences to listen as long as they are interested, she explains.
In the past few years, she has presented live performances at a wide range of triennial and biennale events, often collaborating with the likes of visual artists and poets.
Explaining the rationale behind her performances, Du says that it is sometimes a big commitment for viewers to buy a ticket, enter a theater
If you stay a while and listen on with an open mind, you may find it interesting and even fall in love with it.”
Du Yun, US-based musician
and sit for a full-length concert or dramatic production. But at an art event, with her shows, “you can always leave if you don’t like it.
“But if you stay a while and listen on with an open mind, you may find it interesting and even fall in love with it.”
The 39-year-old musician was recognized by the Pulitzer board for her creation of Angels’ Bone, a bold operatic work that “integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world”.
Angels’ Bone premiered at the Prototype Festival in New York last year.
And the review in The New York Times calls her creation “appallingly good” and said that her music “obeys only her own omnivorous tastes and assured dramatic instincts”.
Speaking about the performance, which tells about two fallen angels exploited and enslaved by a couple yearning for money and fame, she says that some people may not be aware, but human trafficking happens all over the world.
“You get a clear picture about the serious problem through news reporting with statistics listed on a excel table. And yet a theater experience about it may leave a deeper impact in your mind.”
Explaining why she uses the show to focus on the issue, she says that art is the opposite of strict doctrines or hard and loud slogans. It is something “that is soft, full of imagination and lasts very long”.
Yet Du is not eager to bring this award-winning piece to audiences in Shanghai but is keen to introduce herself to China’s art scene as a versatile musician.
So far, she has been commissioned by such orchestras as the Seattle Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia and the Whitney Museum of American Art. And her music has been presented by the Festival d’Avignon in France and the Musica Nova Helsinki in Finland.
Besides, she has a strong and wide composition portfolio, ranging from classical instrumental pieces and world music to theater, film music and a pop album.
She is also working with Stan Lai Sheng-chuan and his Performance Workshop studio to compose music for a musical called Dim Sum Warriors, meant for a young audience.
The play, based on a graphic novel series created by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, is scheduled to premiere at The Theater Above in Shanghai in August.
In some parts of the musical, Du will adopt the style of traditional Chinese kuaiban, a rap-like performance that combines storytelling with rhythmic music.
Meanwhile, Du plans to compose a symphony for refugees as well as create a music project combining visual presentations of antique Chinese New Year paintings, a folk craft that’s hundreds of years old.
Du says that artists need to come “down to earth”, and “whatever society cares about, whatever your parents and grandparents are concerned with, you should pay attention to”.
Du, who attended the Shanghai Conservatory of Music before moving to the United States in 1997, displayed a passion for music at age 4, when she pressed her father into buying her a piano with money inherited from her grandparents.
But when her teachers felt that Du’s tiny hands were not suitable for a career in piano, Du was introduced to Deng Erbo of the middle school attached to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and started to learn composition.
Today, she would not recommend studying the methodology of music composition at a young age, but adds: “It is important to nurture creativity in a young child.”