Program Notes: Tan Dun Conducts Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women

The first three works in this thrilling program pit fire against water with very different sounds and results. The first is taken from the most successful ballet by important 20th century Spanish composer and pianist Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). Composed in 1915, El amor brujo (The Bewitched Love) is about a young Andalusian girl who’s haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. The popularity of the score prompted de Falla to rearrange the music several times for concert performances by orchestras and smaller ensembles as well as a suite for solo piano. The Ritual Fire Dance is a frenetic tour-de-force meant to portray the widow’s attempt to rid herself of the poltergeist via a dance that ultimately ends with his exorcism in flames. Its tense introduction on strings is echoed in the winds, the uneasy mood continuing throughout the piece as the orchestra mimics the widow’s whirling dance around the fire with fast, repetitive trills and ornaments. 

Washing away the flames is Tan Dun’s first major work for “organic instruments,” Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra. Dedicated to the late Tōru Takemitsu, his 1998 concerto was inspired by the sounds of everyday life growing up in China's Hunan province.. Multiple percussionists manipulate basins filled with water using their hands, bowls made of varying materials (wood, glass), bottles, gongs and various apparatuses. Other unusual instruments are also employed, including the waterphone — a type of inharmonic acoustic-tuned idiophone made up of a stainless-steel resonator bowl with a cylindrical neck and bronze rods of different lengths and diameters located around its rim — while the orchestra creates sounds that wail and screech and moan, or, conversely, turn airy and light, evoking a rustic China countryside. Some of the bowl work is rhythmic, some of it atmospheric, all displaying the range of ways that water can be played. In his statement about the work, Tan Dun commented, “What I want to present… is music that is for listening to in a visual way and watching in an audio way. I want it to be intoxicating. And I hope some people will listen and rediscover life's elements, things that are around us but we don’t notice.” 

After intermission, and preceding this program’s eponymous work, is Igor Stravinsky’s short but explosive Feu d'Artifice, Op. 4 (“Fireworks”), a 1908 piece described by the composer as a “short orchestral fantasy.” It was composed as a wedding present for the daughter of his teacher and mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and while not necessarily representative of his later work, Fireworks helped put Stravinsky on the map as a composer. Similar to Rimsky-Korsakov’s vibrant orchestral coloring, its form is a scherzo but is still labeled "orchestral fantasy" because of its condensed length, with an atmospheric opening and music that constantly builds and falls towards its final gallop, which comes to a booming percussion-and-brass-fueled climax. – Leilani Polk © 2025 

*** 

Years before setting out to compose Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women, Tan Dun came across an anecdote about a group of women who were visiting Beijing to see Chairman Mao, sometime after his 1949 proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. But nobody could understand their strange dialect, and they were cast off as mad. Linguists later determined that the women were speaking Nüshu, a once-secret language invented and used exclusively by women. It peaked in 13th-century Jiangyong County, in Hunan province, where Tan Dun was born. 

“They were treated as witches, because they talked strange, so through the Cultural Revolution they were chased,” said the UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador at a panel discussion before a 2015 performance of his work by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. “[Nu Shu] is a journey. A journey for celebrating women, and a monument for women, actually.”  

At present, Nüshu, which means “women’s script,” is all but obsolete — it’s unintelligible to a contemporary Chinese speaker — though it has experienced a small revival in the last 20 years; there is now a Nüshu museum in the small village of Puwei, on the hills of Hunan. Its origins are obscure, though some historians have traced it as far back as prehistoric oracle bone script. Derived from dialects spoken in Jiangyong, what we know today as Nüshu is composed in verse and handwritten in elongated rhombus shapes. It is phonetic and communicated by chanting or singing. It was passed down orally from mother to daughter over generations. “The singing is so beautiful. It’s about the life, the stress and the tears,” he said. 

To create Nu Shu, the composer, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and immigrated to the United States in 1986, traveled to rural Hunan several times over five years to conduct ethnomusicological research among the last 13 women versed in the language, mostly elders, respected as the guardians of Nüshu. Initially very guarded, they eventually warmed up to Tan  Dun and the project. By the time the piece was completed and premiered — in Tokyo in 2013, with Tan Dun conducting the NHK Symphony Orchestra — there were only seven of them left. 

With his team, Tan Dun shot 200 hours of video, focusing on the singing tradition and its unique calligraphy, which was written with bamboo sticks on fans, handkerchiefs, scarves and other artifacts, and exchanged between the women who knew the language. Nu Shu was composed simultaneously with the making of the videos; it is a symphony for solo harp, 13 “micro films” and orchestra, commissioned by the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Like the best of his music, the 40-minute multimedia piece adroitly bridges Eastern traditions and Western classical music. The solo harp, which Tan Dun considers the most feminine of instruments, serves both as a storytelling device and as an intermediary between what the composer imagines as the future — the Western orchestra — and the past, represented by the micro films. He composed the solo part for Elizabeth Hainen, principal harpist for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which presented the American premiere in 2013. 

The piece documents Nüshu melodies, which came from the Yao people, an ethnic minority in south China. They’re made of dissonant intervals — unlike the pentatonic sounds of traditional Chinese music — and heartbeat-like syncopated rhythms. By making videos of the women singing the melodies and setting them to orchestral music, Tan Dun gives us a glimpse into the lives of these women who devised a language of their own as a way to commiserate — many were in arranged marriages since girlhood and couldn’t learn Mandarin — and to promote a life of virtue, giving hope to each other in a patriarchal society. More than a language and culture, Nüshu is a proto-feminist movement. 

Structured into 13 uninterrupted parts, Nu Shu preserves Nüshu culture through film, which is played back with sound during performance on three screens, on either side of the stage and behind the large percussion battery. Tan Dun transcribed and notated the ancient songs in the score, making the field-recorded videos and sound inextricable from the live orchestral music.  

The first part is Secret Fans, in which the video introduces the beauty of Nüshu calligraphy: six characters that simply mean “mother, daughter and sister.” The music starts with a slithering, acerbic contrabass motif. The woodwinds make a bold statement, with the notes for each instrument thickly stacked on top of each other. The solo harp soon comes in soothingly, contrasted by the return of the contrabass motif. What immediately grabs the ear is the sliding between the notes, and the strumming, of the solo harp; it conjures the sound of the pipa, a Chinese lute. A solo clarinet, echoed by a solo flute, introduces the melody that the mother will later sing in the video for Mother’s Song. The daughter imitates the song, with echoes of the harp pulling their real-life song and image into the world of the orchestra, our world, as audience members.  

As the piece progresses, this connection between the different spheres in which the orchestra, harp and video each exists takes us to more intimate spaces, especially during Cry-Singing for Marriage and The Book of Tears. The melancholic Longing for her Sister captures the suffering of loneliness. Tan Dun has chosen not to include translations in the videos or in the score, yet the soberness of the singing still conveys the emotional turmoil. 

Nu Shu Village is a musical depiction of daily life in rural Hunan. The score is marked “river sounds” and, specifically “water drips.” The composer has used water as a percussion instrument in several works; he considers water as deeply connected to humanity — not just as a natural resource but as an inherent element of life. Rivers and lakes are “seas of tears,” according to his program note. “These drops of tears come together to form the nurturing Mother River significant to each human race, as each drop contains and carries our treasured culture from one generation to the next.” One of the rivers he had in mind was Liuyang River, in Hunan. 

The splashing of water in bowls, amplified live from the stage, gives way to the full string section imitating the sliding up and down of the harp. The water trope is connected to Daughter’s River, which also opens with dripping water. A two-note motif in the strings suggests a downstream motion, rocking gently, and returns in Soul Bridge, near the end of the piece, but this time on solo flute and horn. 

There are virtuosic passages for harp in Grandmother’s Echo, while The Book of Tears introduces a solo bass clarinet followed by a solo oboe, with loud interjections from the brass. The woman in the video talks through tears. The return of the downriver theme in Soul Bridge feels like a comforting homecoming, but Tan Dun gives us an upbeat coda with Water Rock ‘n’ Roll, a rhythmic finale that merges the downriver motif with the women’s singing percussion, which includes the clattering of stones and the splashing of water. The piece ends with shimmering harp glissandos and a thick major chord for the full orchestra. 

It is a hopeful end to an inspiring work that is part anthropological documentation, part symphony and part concerto. What makes it poignant is its fascinating subject matter and the earnest commitment of Tan Dun’s multi-pronged approach and supple merging of video, orchestra and soloist. “It goes beyond gender and women’s rights; it’s a message of humanity,” said Hainen, the Philadelphia harpist, at the aforementioned Hong Kong panel discussion. “And I think that’s what really touches people’s hearts with this piece. It speaks to everyone.”

Esteban Meneses © 2025