Without Boundaries: Music Bridges an Ocean
by Molly Sheridan

My music is to dream without boundaries. Tonight with you, I see boundaries being crossed. As a classical music composer, I'm thrilled to be honored here. Crouching Tiger bridged East and West, romance and action, high and low cultures.
— Chinese American composer Tan Dun, accepting his 2001 Academy Award for Best Score, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

In 2000, the surprise summer blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon marked not the first time Hollywood had crossed the east/west boundary, but it is probably its most critically appreciated and lucrative venture. Underlying the film's success was the beginning of a relationship between the two cultures that partially broke free of the Kung Fu ghetto and gained a broader hold on the country at large. Yo-Yo Ma's celebrated Silk Road Project has since brought countless eastern artists to the United States for cultural exchange through wildly successful festivals and concerts across the country. Indeed, in New York City, a significant community of Asian composers has added to the musical landscape, and they are building careers and creating music that carries the mark of their birthplace as well as their newly adopted home. Composers such as Tan Dun, Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, P.Q. Phan, and many others are rising in prominence, welcomed into New York's concert halls and honored with major awards.

Bun-Ching Lam, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, is another leading example of this new meld of composer. She has created work both for western ensembles and a variety of traditional instruments, most notably the pipa. Since her arrival in the U.S., she has successfully combined the two worlds, and finds that despite the distance, her music reflects more and more of her Chinese roots and aesthetic. "For the past three years, all my work has involved a mixing of instruments, sometimes by choice, some by condition," she admits. "It has been interesting."

Still, after years working in this country, she has also grown beyond the cultural divide. "I am increasingly freeing myself from worrying about east or west, getting rid of cultural burdens. I have claimed both cultural heritages to be my own, destroyed/blurred the borders. Hopefully I can jump back and forth without effort."

Chinese-born American composer Zhou Long immigrated to the U.S. in 1985, and his experiences mirror Lam's. Though trained in Chinese traditional music, he finds that his personal journey from east to west has inevitably been reflected in his work. "I came to live in New York. Uptown, Downtown—everything I could hear. [Ancient Chinese music] didn’t take over my musical style, but it had a very strong impact; so I don’t reject it, because I feel I need that.… But the fascinating rhythm [that] defines 20th-century modernism here interests me too."

On the other end of the spectrum, composer and Juilliard-trained flutist Elizabeth Brown is crossing the bridge east, heading to Vietnam for two months in fall 2002 on an Asian Cultural Council grant to further study the dan bau and traditional Vietnamese music. Brown's attraction to eastern instruments began while she was on tour in Japan. "I heard shakuhachi playing and decided I really needed to make that sound," she explains. "This was actually about the same time I started composing, so the whole world of the shakuhachi and its very different way of thinking about music influenced me."