PROGRAM NOTES

of Another, a 1966 film directed by Teshigahara, the story of a man who, after his face is disfigured in an explosion, is fitted with a mask that effects a drastic change in his personality. At once romantic and melancholy, “Waltz” underpins a scene in a German-Japanese bar (with German lyrics in the movie), resembling something from a Viennese operetta or perhaps from Shostakovich’s socalled “Jazz Suites.”

Takemitsu and Film

Given that Tōru Takemitsu’s concert works often reveal a penchant for delicate writing, one is surprised to find him explaining his enthusiasm for writing film scores in this way: “It’s because movies have erotic elements as well as violence. I don’t like things that are too pure and refined. I’m more interested in what’s real. And films are so full of life.” On another occasion he observed: “I often think of movies in terms of problems in sound. But I think sound and words can be understood at the level of images because it is in the movie that these things, images-words-sounds, exist somewhere outside ordinary time. ... I remarked that sound is also an image, but then that is a remark by a composer asserting himself in the area of moviemaking.” And elsewhere: “I only add music to give the audience a little help hearing the pure music that’s already there in the images—in other words, it is much more important to prune away the sound than to add more.”

—JMK

Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra

Tan Dun

First Performance on this Series

Born: August 18, 1957, in Simao, Hunan province, China

Residing: New York City

Work composed: 2003 on commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra; revised in 2005 into Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra

Work premiered: In its original form, on October 16, 2003, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and soloist David Cossin; in its revision, on April 28, 2005, with the same orchestra and soloist at the same venue, but with Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting.

Instrumentation: Two flutes (one doubling bass flute), two oboes, clarinet and bass clarinet (doubling E-flat clarinet), bassoon and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani (doubling paper strips and slapstick), orchestral paper percussion (two musicians playing two large paper screens, paper cymbals, large paper sheets, cardboard sheets, wax-paper bags, paper strips, tracing papers, and paper spinphones), harp, and strings, plus an array of paper percussion played by the soloist (large paper screen, tracing papers, paper cymbals, cardboard sheets, paper strips, wax-paper bags, paper head drums, cardboard tube drum, paper thunder tube, paper umbrella, paper box drums, paper spinphone, and Chinese folding paper fan)

Born in a village in central China, Tan Dun grew up surrounded by the shamanistic traditions of Chinese rural and small-town life. Hs life underwent a somersault with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. In the mid-1970s, he was ordered to live among peasants, and he spent two years planting rice. Nonetheless, his aptitude for music persisted, and he set about collecting folk songs and even (at the age of 17) conducting an ad hoc village music