Is there a right way to listen to an album? How literally should a listener take the track layout of an album? Does learning the intended listening experience of the composer bring you closer to a work? What is innate to a work, what is perspective and how does listening order impact an interpretation? These are some of the questions rummaging through my mind after speaking with Du Yun about her album A Cockroach’s Tarantella, performed marvelously by JACK Quartet with Du Yun.

My Listening Experience

My first listening experience of A Cockroach’s Tarantella was a particularly pleasurable and illuminating one, so I’m going to share it. It comes with the caveat that this is not the listening experience that Du Yun intended. I’ll be thoroughly sharing her thoughts and intentions later in the piece. 

The album, A Cockroach’s Tarantella, is for string quartet, electronics and narrator (Du Yun). The album begins with a four-minute Epilogue, immediately setting the tone for a work that is cyclical in nature. In this opening track, the sliding strings are simultaneously deeply grounding and disconcerting. Out of these morphing consonances and dissonances enters the unfamiliar: a male voice calling out regularly in Chinese, the sound of seagulls, flapping wings perhaps. And just as it emerges, it slips out of the sonic picture, much like the sliding of the string parts. 

As if abruptly woken, from this Epilogue the story begins. This is the work A Cockroach’s Tarantella within the album of the same name. Du Yun’s warm voice enters alone with the unexpected line, “I have been pregnant, for as long as I could remember”. From here, there is a switch in musical language and the strings begin the underlying churning component to the story with a snap. Listening through the work, my mind took note of the strings and the tone of Du Yun’s voice, but primarily followed Du Yun’s captivating story. It is the story of a cockroach who is bored with her life, yearns to become a human, wants to have babies out of love, desires to cry and prays to both God and Buddha in the hopes that one of them will turn her into a human in four months. 

The story switches tones on a dime. At one moment we’re laughing with Du Yun, then sad for this creature and everything in between while being a little uneasy thinking about cockroaches for such a prolonged period. Throughout the work, the strings continue cyclical sounding musical material, moving and constantly transforming. Like the cockroach who is stuck in this life while trying to become a human, the string parts stay busy but are unable to reach a final destination. 

Off I Go

Even with the often uneasy nature of the story, the work has an oddly soothing and coaxing quality. By the end of the English version of A Cockroach’s Tarantella, I was ready to be guided into whatever musical material Du Yun presented next. Ocean is the final track in the story, which has a beautiful underwater quality to the voice and electronics that gently drifts you into the unknown, ending with the line “Off I go”, propelled into the next life.

Tattooed In Snow

For me, this point is the real trick of the album. From the ending of this story there is a seamless transition to the substantial central work, Tattooed In Snow, which when relaxed after listening to the story has a dreamlike quality to it. Musical ideas surface and submerge like waves. It is the in between, the transitory, guiding from one life to the next. Glimpses of the past manifest, glorious moments of counterpoint come to the forefront only to be swept back into the depths. From here there is a recurrence of sliding, reminiscent violent bug-like thrown musical motifs and swells. It is a constantly shifting platform and is long enough to give an aural reset. There is a difference here in the string writing from what was heard before, an expansiveness and sense of allowing.

Hearing The Work From A Different Perspective

After feeling like we’ve gone on this journey and perhaps might arrive in a new place, the cycle resets. A Cockroach’s Tarantella begins again, but this time it is spoken in Chinese. It is the same story and musical material, but from a different perspective which fundamentally alters the listening experience. As a native-English speaker who doesn’t speak Chinese, my attention was drawn to the sound of and inflections in Du Yun’s voice and the string parts grasped my attention. Hearing the work in Chinese after hearing it in English shaped how I heard it as little memories popped into my mind of what I thought was going on in this part of the piece or that, but the memory was fuzzy. Similarly, hearing the work in Chinese after hearing it in English made me want to listen in English again to notice the differences in tone, tempo and perhaps pick up on more details that I might have missed. This listening experience allowed me to see the same thing from a different perspective and notice what had been there all along. My experience of the work A Cockroach’s Tarantella was fundamentally shaped by listening to it in both languages and the layout of the album as a whole. In the spirit of talking about the same thing from a different perspective, we will shift to my discussion with Du Yun regarding this work.

The Deep ‘Why’

One of the first things that I thought of when listening to A Cockroach’s Tarantella was Kafka’s best-known story The Metamorphosis, in which salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself inextricably transformed into a huge insect, a monstrous vermin. I heard A Cockroach’s Tarantella as at least partly influenced by this work, a kind of inverse. I’ve always pictured the bug as a cockroach, Du Yun has always pictured a beetle, and the internet doesn’t seem to have a definitive answer. “It’s one of those stories that I don’t mind associating with as I think it’s one of the best stories written in modern times. It really addresses the human condition within a social context and framework,” says Du Yun. “The inspiration is actually very far away from that story, but at the same time The Metamorphosis informs my story. The deep ‘why’ is that I grew up with stories about reincarnation, that’s the culture that I came from. It’s not unheard of that you become something else. One of the oldest sayings if you feel in debt to a person is saying that you want to be a horse to that person. That’s one of the vernaculars that we use. Then of course there’s the reason of what angels and fairies mean. Who gets to be thrown into the world? Who gets to be a human?”

Life Before Story

Du Yun began writing the story for A Cockroach’s Tarantella back in 2004, when she was 25. She wrote the story as she was simultaneously finishing her first chamber opera, Zolle (2005), a 55-minute one-act opera with narration and singing.  “Zolle starts with the main character being a ghost. It’s an afterlife story. As I was finishing that piece, I realized that it would be really nice to have a life-before story,” says Du Yun. A Cockroach’s Tarantella became that work. “I never wanted to write a string quartet for the sake of writing a string quartet, because it’s one of those overly weighted forms. But with a story like this attached it feels a lot more lighthearted, it doesn’t feel like I’m writing an Opus. That way I can free myself from the associations of Beethoven, Bartok and Ligeti.”

A few years later, Du Yun was speaking with iO Quartet and they got a grant from Chamber Music America commissioning Du Yun to compose A Cockroach’s Tarantella. She started writing the piece in 2008 and the premiere was in February of 2010.

Translating The Story Into Chinese

Fast forward to October 2019, when the Beijing Music Festival programmed Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone. As Du Yun is an exceptional performer and composer, they wanted to also feature her somehow as a performer. That’s when she had an idea. “I used that opportunity to translate the story (A Cockroach’s Tarantella) back into Chinese. I didn’t feel like I wanted to narrate in English to my people. I never believe in a hard translation, like word to word, I go for the spirit of the words,” says Du Yun. “Somehow, the Chinese version is much more fun and goofy. When I deliver it I recite it much faster, that’s why the duration of that piece is shorter than the English one.”

When JACK Quartet approached Du Yun wanting to perform her works, the idea for the album A Cockroach’s Tarantella was born and the album was recorded in June 2020 and released on Modern Sky Records. A Cockroach’s Tarantella showcases the concert music side of Du Yun’s musical practice, the label will soon also be releasing an album featuring her band.

Approaching Listening

It became immediately apparent when discussing A Cockroach’s Tarantella as an album with Du Yun that we had some fundamental differences in how we approached listening to it. Questions are always framed from a particular lens, and as my questions stumbled around what appeared to not be her intention, I briefly shared my experience with the album, which I share in greater detail above. “I love how you listen. I’ve never heard it like that because I understand both languages,” says Du Yun. “But when I listen to European films or films from other regions I notice other camera work. You scan once over the subtitle, you get it, and then your eyes are wide open to wander.”

The string parts in A Cockroach’s Tarantella seemed decidedly cyclical to me. I asked if she used any formal systems when composing these to give the parts this sense of endless business while going nowhere (which I meant as a compliment). “No, but it’s interesting to have people listen differently. Just like you have performers who perform differently, and you welcome that performance, I think it’s fantastic when you have audiences who approach listening very differently”, says Du Yun. “Your listening would never be my listening. Especially since our understanding of language comes from a different place.”

That led me to my next questions about language. Would the order switch for someone who spoke only Chinese so that English would come last? Was the order intentional? “With the order, absolutely that was intentional. But I have to be honest, when I wrote the music I didn’t think about this. It was just a story of a cockroach and I wrote it in English, and that was that, and last year I wanted to do it in Chinese because I wanted to perform to a Chinese audience,” says Du Yun. “But when I was thinking about an album, it begins with the improvisatory Epilogue. The sound that you hear in Epilogue is the Wuhan market and it’s real, not from the internet. It’s from my friend who’s a journalist who was stationed there for four months and was writing for the best journals in China. She covered Wuhan during the lockdown and the rebirth. So I asked her to send me sounds. Out of the many sounds that she sent me I chose this one because it’s the least emotional. A lot of the recordings are very emotional, with sirens, calling 119. But this is just people calling out like lottery numbers. It was the first day after lockdown.”

“Wuhan is definitely because of 2020. We recorded the album in late June. The first day that we rehearsed was incidentally on my birthday, June 18. It was the first day for all of us to take the subway and the first time that the JACK Quartet rehearsed in person since March,” says Du Yun. “It was very powerful to hear music in the same room. Before I wanted to have maybe a two-minute improvisation (Epilogue) but they did so well, that’s why it was longer. When we were in the studio, we were so excited that we were able to do something. There’s hope in the opening improvisation.”

From here, we will shift once again as the discussion becomes more conversational.

Wings That Don’t Work

Anna Heflin: I’m curious about this recurring theme of wings that don’t work in your pieces. Obviously this is a theme in Angel’s Bone, and there’s a line about the wings of the cockroach not working. What draws you back time and again to that idea?

Du Yun: Well, wings actually mean ambition. Wings are devices and resources that enable you to pursue any opportunities that you might have. I don’t feel like I have wings, many people, especially immigrants, feel this way. I have imagination, imaginative wings that allow me to make my dreams fly. There’s another piece, dreams-bend that deals with that. It was about a dream where I soared over roofs and cliffs and the wings didn’t fly, but I flew with the speed of my blood. The blood is your urge, your reason for being. I think that’s quite to the point of who I am.

Storytelling

AH: Can you talk about the role that writing and specifically storytelling plays in your creative process? Are you writing anything now?

DY: Yes I’m writing stories, always writing stories. When I’m dealing with large forms in music, I come up with stories for me to function as a structure. Some people use sound phenomena or images, I use a storyboard. It doesn’t have to be linear, but it’s a device I use. 

So in the mixing of A Cockroach’s Tarantella I made a decision to break it into sections as it’s a nonstop piece. The text has always been without track titles, but the piece goes to many different corners which are a lot like scenes. So I thought it would be more interesting to break it up into separate tracks in the digital format so that it’s more like a scenery. I thought it would be more fun to approach it this way. Did you think it was more fun?

AH: I did and after listening to the album straight through, I hopped around and listened to the corresponding tracks in English and Chinese to focus on the differences in inflection. It makes me question how my hearing literally changes when listening in different languages.

DY: I appreciate that a lot. Because it’s speaking to a thing that I’ve always been working on, which is the nuance of language which is the nuance of the culture that we inhibit. To say that you’re American and I’m Chinese born is not enough. That’s what the nuance of language brings. If you pay attention to the nuance and subtlety, you realize that it’s much more than just the label. It opens up what the Chinese could mean, what the English could entitle, and shows how the images are different from each other even though they are talking about the same story. Sometimes lost in translation often gets into our way. How can we communicate with each other and how can we really navigate the communication gap? How do we transcend that, right? 

AH: I couldn’t agree more, it also makes me question what I’ve been aurally fixated on the whole time when listening to the piece in English. What have I been ignoring while I’ve been telling a story in my head?

DY: Exactly because English is your native language so you’re not sensitive to other tones. When you listen in a different language, your brain frees up. This is how you position yourself as an immigrant or as a foreigner because this is how the psyche really works. 

AH: That’s brilliant. I think that I have everything that I need, is there anything else that you want to add? 

Analysis of MetaphorS

DY: I don’t think so. Except….maybe it’s important for me to touch upon, and for you to include this. When we’re dealing with a work with a story, or anything programmatic, sometimes it is just what it is. The over contextualizing and framework could actually bring the work further away from what it actually means. 

AH: Do you specifically mean the analysis of metaphors? 

DY: Yes. Metaphors mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I welcome your interpretation and I can’t dictate how things will be listened to and experienced. 

AH: To me, the pieces back to back in different languages with a transition given the subject material does feel like we move into another life that allows us to see things from a new perspective. It didn’t seem like you strongly disagreed with that. 

DY: The album is just an album. The piece is a stand alone piece. Analyzing the album is an independent question, if that makes sense. Because for me, this piece existed before the album. And the album is a documentation of that piece. But I think that whether or not the piece is reincarnated into or not into Chinese is irrelevant for me. 

AH: So would it be an equally valid experience for a native English speaker to only listen to the English version and someone who speaks Chinese to just listen to the Chinese version?

DY: Yeah, totally! I showed a lot of my friends just the Chinese version. I don’t think that people need to hear both. It would be nice if they heard both but that’s not the point for me. But I really appreciate how you listen. 

(pause)

In a society in China or (say), India, you feel like at such an age you must be a mother. And it’s often asked what the use of a career is if you’re not a mother. Still to this day, women are wrestling with that, including a highly educated demographic. This one woman who’s in her early thirties, and is beautiful and very successful, burst into tears when she heard this piece. And it’s not because she was so moved by the music. She was moved by the story because she could hear the cockroach ask ‘what is it like to be pregnant out of love?’. So in different demographics it will resonate differently. This is what matters to me, I feel like we aren’t even as wise as a cockroach. As a human being, the first thing you think when you hear ‘cockroach’ is extermination. It’s never cute. Cockroaches can exist through a nuclear bomb.

AH: The first word I think of is ‘survive’.

DY: Yes it’s like survival and resilience. In the story, she keeps trying to be a woman and fails. She loses count of how many times she tries. It’s also a ubiquitous insect, we all know what it means. This is a very feminist piece. This piece is from the female perspective and I’m not shying away from that. I think the first line is the best line of it. (‘I have been pregnant for as long as I could remember’)

AH: I’d agree with that. I feel like it’s so apparent that I don’t know how much I need to push that. 

‘Pregnant’ Labeled Explicit

DY: Well I’m not going to tell you what to write about but this is how I see it. Just the word ‘feminist’ means such different things in different regions. In many regions of the world, people don’t even get to talk about feminism. They’re not allowed, not encouraged, shunned, ashamed, or afraid that they wouldn’t be a good ally. Feminism is a shunned word, it’s not a badge of honor in many regions. Maybe you have seen it, I was so mind boggled. I have to submit to the Chinese government first to approve the text because it’s through the Chinese label, Modern Sky. The “Piety in Motion” section was originally submitted as  “God and Buddha”. The title was changed because the label said it could be too religious, and I then think the title “Piety in Motion” is a lot better in a lot of ways. She’s very funny in that movement, like a teenager. But then it’s really sad when she’s talking about her delivery. I had tears in my eyes when I delivered that text. So everything was submitted, and then I looked on Spotify and the first section was marked ‘explicit’. The only reason it could be explicit is the line ‘I have been pregnant’. I hate to … be political, and I think this is political. In America people always talk about the surveillance of the Chinese government. But look at this, you can’t even say ‘pregnant’ in America. ‘Pregnant’ is an explicit word. Different governments just use different sets of words. I made a post on Facebook, because you have to make light of it, making fun of it. It couldn’t be ‘cockroach’, every other track has that word. It’s ‘pregnant’. I don’t think I’m imagining this. Later there’s blood involved but that’s not marked explicit. What’s the spectrum of feminism that’s okay to talk about in different regions?

I didn’t want to politicize this, until my work was categorized that way. I don’t mind being explicit, I don’t need to be goody-goody. I thrive on not being that. But how this is being categorized is beyond me. And I think it’s really interesting for us to talk about. 

Can you talk with me about something because I’m curious how you listen. You said that the music in A Cockroach’s Tarantella is busy but doesn’t go anywhere, it’s static, and I like that very much. I think it’s because of the short episodic feel to it. Do you feel that Tattooed In Snow functions the same way since it goes through a lot of different places?

AH: If we’re going with my interpretation, I felt it as this dreamlike ocean that propelled me to the next life. The others were cyclical. Tattooed in Snow presents images that fade and allows what’s next to emerge. You’re being led to this place but reflecting on everything that came before. I don’t know if that explains it in an adequate way, but that was my experience of it.

DY: Yes, me too. 

Du Yun

Born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, Du Yun works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world. 

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019, she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. As an avid performer and bandleader (Ok Miss), her onstage persona has been described by The New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” Du Yun is chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, was listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers, and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in their decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010’s . 

Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. 

A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust); and founded FutureTradition, an ongoing initiative through which she works with folk musicians from around the world in order to champion cross-regional collaborations. In 2018, Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation, and in 2019 the Beijing Music Festival named her “Artist of the Year.” 

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