Tan Dun: The fifth string is above the clouds

He was born in a mountain country where there was no music at all. When he was 12, he was out with his father when he saw a man playing the violin

His mind was shocked. Back home, he made it himself out of wood and wire.

At that time, he did not know that it was a violin, did not know that it was music, but he decided that it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

Every time he made the appearance of playing the piano, his soul would soar and he would shout out the songs of the mountains. Everyone said he was crazy, and the family almost invited a godmother to burn him.

At the age of 15, he finally picked up a violin outside the mountain. It was thrown away and had no strings. He hid penny by penny for a year, and finally bought three strings and installed them. The fourth string is very expensive, the money to buy a string can eat many days of rice, he is not enough to hide, also do not have the heart, because the family often can not open the pot.

You can pull on three strings! Every night he stole it, to the river, to the mountains, to the woods. He thought it was a sound that beasts would love to hear and would not hurt him. He didn't know what music was, he didn't know what phoneme was, but he could pull out a folk song just as accurately as a real person.

People stopped talking about him because they were moved by the way he played.

In 1977, he applied for the Shanghai Conservatory of Music with this three-stringed violin.

Weird piano, weird music, but he got in. Because the examiner was in tears. The examiner said: "His way, his voice, is the real soul of music!"

He then entered the Central Conservatory of Music. Then he had a violin with four strings, and he knew Mozart and Beethoven. After that, he became the top violin player, he can bring all the classic music to the new soul!

But he was not satisfied, because he could not express the feeling that he had heard when he was twelve. He did not like the music of the famous dead, which he thought did not express the roar of his soul.

In 1986, he went to Columbia University in New York to study for his doctorate. He wanted to go to the pinnacle of culture and see the music of the soul above the clouds. Later, he received a doctorate and has the most authoritative knowledge of music.

But all of this still doesn't allow him to see what's in his mind. Everyone is learning at the feet of the old masters, content, life can not exceed, but this can not exceed the thing is not what he wants.

So, he did not life to toss the teacher. What the teacher teaches, he has to go beyond all, all the conclusions to make a new interpretation or evolution. So he walked into the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He became one of the best music conductors in the world.

But he was still anxious and in pain, and the "look, the sound" was forever above the clouds. That's how he got to the top of world music. That's how he got there. He went from a mountain boy to this.

He is Tan Dun on the Liuyang River in China.

When he was the most poor and suffering, the "three stringed harp" has been destined to his high soul above the sky, destined to his life can only transcend beyond and beyond. The violin had always had only four strings, but for him it had one more string, which all the violins in the world did not fit. The fifth string was the god who led him to become a "musical superman". The fifth string was above the sky!