The Voicing of the Voiceless in Tan Dun’s The Map : Horizon of Expectation and the Rhetoric of National Style

Abstract

During my undergraduate years in Sydney, Australia, one of my embarrass ingly preliminary compositions for flute and piano, which no longer remains in my current portfolio, was featured at the Young Composers' Salon of the 11th Sydney Springs International Festival of New Music.1 The composition drew its inspiration from a set of eighth century haiku poems. It had a provoca tive Japanese title, made extensive use of Japanese pentatonic modality, and it featured shakuhachi-like gestures on the flute. I thought nothing of its lack of subtlety at the time; it was, after all, one of those straightforward efforts that you might expect from an inexperienced young composer. After its premiere, a well respected Australian composer, who shall remain anonymous, approached me and complimented the composition's attractiveness; she was however puzzled as to why my Chinese-ness did not come through. It seemed as though in the tug-of-war between the prefix and suffix of my schizophrenic hyphenated-self, the more generic Australian-ness was somehow expected to give way to the more exotic half of my identity. Perhaps the way my name (Kar-Fai Samson Young) is spelled, carrying the unmistakably Chinese ro manization of Kar-Fai, also meant that I am not to expect to be regarded as just a composer, an individual, but as a hybrid Chinese-insert-location composer, depending on where I am working from at the time. Given the ambition of the fes tival, which was to promote contemporary Australian compositions, the political duty of tokenism my colleague had imposed upon me certainly seemed unfair.

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