Tan Hainu - Music Composer

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Tan Hainu in 2008

Contents

Opera of String Quartet Sanskrit
Sextet for Woodwinds for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon and Marimba
String Quartet
Fantasia for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon, Percussion, Harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass
Flowing Water for Solo Cello, adapted from a melody of Chinese traditional Guqin
Trio Lunar Rainbow for Flute, Cello and Piano
A Little Piece for Solo Piano The Strange Steps
Speech Introduce Fantasia for Solo Cello and Voice

Opera of String Quartet Sanskrit Play Video (Play sample)

I like my audiences to enjoy both senses of hearing and sight. That's why I made this small piece like a small opera. The story of this Opera of String Quartet happens in a distant temple. I imagined we are in a temple on the top of a mountain far away from everything. Four players are playing drums and they are also playing instruments and singing songs in the fog. Usually in many countries of Asia, the players will sing and play a musical instrument at the same time. This style is very common in China and India.

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First Movement
The orchestration of the whole piece is very uniform because every line of the texture has its own beginning and ending. The audience can distinguish the different combinations of instruments because the timing of the instruments in each phrase start and end independent of each other. In the first movement, “Morning Died Away,” this has a two-note motive theme using major and minor second and diminishing fifth intervals from which everything develops. The most interesting thing about this movement is the ending of every phrase where we can hear the changes of color as instruments, in different combinations, break off their engagement with the piece. The end of movement comes with a sudden breaking off in a tutti, and the “Morning Dies Away” with a clarinet drifting off through the air.

Second Movement
In the second movement, "Echo of Pastoral," the main melody is a mimicking of variations of the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, and every rephrasing of the melody brings out the echoes and it also dies away during the echoes. The notes of the melody are continually echoed by the accompanying instruments, which are selectively assigned to echo particular notes. The echoes furthermore come assigned with different tempo marks wherein the whole movement is written completely without time signatures and bar lines. The orchestration continues with overlapping echoes, some always fading, while others materialize. The whole movement creates the natural sound of the pastoral.

Third Movement
The third movement,"Rampant Flock," starts with the rhythmic marimba and the oboe maintaining the echoes from the second movement, only now, it develops dramatic dynamics. The clarinet brings out a new two-note motive, which relates to the first movement but this time in the major seventh interval and later the minor ninth interval. The material of the third movement includes material from the first and second movements. The rhythm and the music become rampant and stormy. Then, suddenly, traditional structure ceases with the solo clarinet emerging along a whistling rainbow, which is the players as the vocals who take us to our dreamland. The function of the illusion of this section is necessary as it materializes a surprise for the audience. Here we just dream a bit before returning. The harmony of the dreamland section is the opposite of the rampant section. The AEDA pitches are the main theme that keeps repeating and this time still in overlapping orchestration with overlapping individual notes. The coda of the third movement returns to the beginning of the movement where the piece ends with the each instrumental sound dying one by one.

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First Movement (Play sample)
The first movement, "From the Young," is in ABA form starting from a largo. A melody emerges from the cello at first, while the other instruments punctuate to build up tension. The tension eventually leads to the middle section of the movement, that is, a single pitch played on different open strings of each instrument in the quartet. The glissandos are also a key feature in this particular section. Section A is then repeated once again to wrap up the movement with natural harmonics evaporating the preceding musical tension.

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Fantasia for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon, Percussion, Harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass

The beginning of this Fantasia starts with an overtone melody on the first violin. The timber of overtone and pizzicato on the strings with harp creates a remembered Romance that has gone. The violin sets the stage for this tragically romantic ensemble refusing at first to be brought down by its struggle with the unpredictable storms of this universe, finally giving in halfway through the music. The emotional dive is driven by the double base and cello to the point where even the depths of tragedy must give in, and they do, to the woodwinds that break back through the storms to bring the melody back to its origins, now, with every instrument playing each note of the melody. Love, what’s left, dies away in the crescendo of the glockenspiel.

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This cello solo, Flowing Water, reflects ancient Chinese melody from 722 BC to 481 BC, and reflects Eastern aesthetic philosophy reminiscent of Buddhist music. Eastern philosophy believes everything, whether animate or inanimate, has life. Flowing water, then, is seen as having life. A composer of Eastern aesthetic philosophy has the imaginative ability to reflect life functions within the Arts. Metaphorically, then, it is easy to imagine that water flowing through a landscape is like the blood flowing in our bodies, and the pitch vibrations are our breathing. The rhythm of the melody becomes the heart beat driving the blood, and breathing is developed with the rising and lowering of pitch.

In Flowing Water, I use the timber of the cello to imitate flowing water. To do this, I incorporated the vibrato, followed by a phase of sliding up and down on the strings to describe a small amount of flowing water; long glissandos describe fast and large amounts of water; harmonics give the sensation of flowing water heard from far away, while plucking depicts very close flowing water. The occasional plunk of stone hitting water requires the solo player to use one hand or both hands to play the arco and pizzicato at the same time. The composition structure has an A section based on the pentatonic scale, and a B section based on the whole-tone scale.

Flowing water expresses my feelings about my own life which I relate to the tender and harmonious manner of water in motion. I chose water for its pure and plentiful, free-flowing nature. This reflects my own philosophy of art which demands purity, free-flowing thought, for never-ending inspiration. I see beauty in flowing water, not only with my eyes, but in my heart and mind. Beauty is the result of the spirit.

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Lunar Rainbow for Flute, Cello and Piano

This piece Lunar Rainbow wants to show the feeling of a flower’s life. It describes the flowers coming into blossom from the beginning and withering in the end. And it also implies the beautiful ladies’ life as short-lived, as the beautiful flowers in ancient China. The music is basic on the pentatonic scales and the structure is in “A B A” form. The whole piece described the character of ancient Chinese young women who are very emotional and prone to mood swings, and also as having been sickly and prone to illness. The B section used a Chinese folk song blue flower to be the main melody. Blue flower is the folk song of Northwest of China and it is a powerful folklore popularly sung in Northern Shan xi province. Of Mongolian origin, its sound is similar to yodeling. Moreover, I also borrowed some Chinese instrumental techniques and used them with western instruments.