Tan Dun was born on 18 August 1957 in a village in Changsha in the Hunan Province of China. His first musical experiences were with local shamans practicing rituals in his village, but the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, turned him away from music; he was sent to work as a rice planter for two years. During this time he learned to play various traditional stringed instruments. When several members of a Peking opera troupe were killed in a ferry accident, Tan was called in as a replacement violist and arranger. In 1977, after passing a highly competitive entrance exam, he entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. His early influences included Tōru Takemitsu, George Crumb, Alexander Goehr, Hans Werner Henze, Isang Yun, and Chou Wen-Chung. Later, he would be (somewhat hastily) grouped into the “1978 Generation” which included fellow composers Qigang Chen, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Xu Quiasong, Guo Wenjing, and Mo Wuping.

His quartet Feng Ya Song (1982) won second place in the Dresden International Weber Chamber Music Competition in 1983. Three years later, Tan Dun emigrated to the United States to study as a doctoral student at Columbia University, where he worked with Chou Wen-Chung, a former student of Edgard Varèse. In New York, Tan encountered the music of John Cage as well as that of American minimalists and post-minimalists, such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. His dissertation, titled Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (which includes a text and a short symphony by the same name) already showed his growing interest in cross-disciplinary work and the visual arts.

While completing his doctoral studies, he composed scores for several films, mostly documentaries, which were not widely distributed, as well as concert pieces for the New York underground art scene, including an experimental, non-narrative opera titled Nine Songs (1989), which was a setting of poems by Qu Yan that included fifty ceramic instruments (percussion, stringed, and wind instruments) created for the performance by the potter Ragnar Naess. This marked the beginning of Tan’s “music rituals,” which continued in 1990 with Orchestral Theater I (three others followed), composed in the tradition of interactive American performance art.

His career reached a turning point with a second opera, Marco Polo (1995), with a libretto by Paul Griffiths, that mixed the dramatic styles of Peking opera and the west. In it, dreamlike, transhistorical scenes in the style of Peking opera featured apparitions by Dante, Scheherazade, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, and John Cage. Weaving in and out of these scenes was a narrative of Marco Polo’s famous voyage. This eclectic work received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1998, catapulting Tan Dun to global fame. Another opera The Peony Pavillion, directed by Peter Sellars, premiered that same year.

The watershed year of 1998 was also the year Tan Dun composed Water Concerto, a highpoint of his “organic music.” These compositions are written for ensembles of percussion, wind, and string instruments made from ceramics, paper, or water. These new instruments have for many years appeared occasionally in his compositions for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and stage, culminating in Tea: A Mirror of Soul (2002), an opera in which these organic elements are woven into the very structure, with an act devoted to each “element.”

In 2000, his original score for the celebrated film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon garnered him an Oscar and even greater global renown. His popularity grew with other scores for timeless Chinese films with martial artists as their protagonists, such as Hero (2002) and The Banquet (2006). Each of these films was accompanied by its own concerto (as ballets were once accompanied by their own concert suites), performed by a renowned artist (cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and pianist Lang Lang, respectively).

Tan Dun’s most recent opera, The First Emperor (2006) was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, and was directed by Zhang Yimou (the director of Hero), with Plácido Domingo premiering the title role.

Tan continues to receive excptional, high-profile international commissions, such as in 2008, when Youtube and Google commissioned him to compose an inaugural symphony for the YouTube Symphony orchestra (with musicians from more than 30 countries). Tan Dun became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador 2013.