Conference Agenda

This study examines how Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion (2018) sonically reimagines the sacred spatiality of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its immersive visual and architectural complexity. I argue that the work constructs a multidimensional musical spatiality by drawing together three complementary perspectives. First, physical and cultural geography frame space and place as shaped by environmental context, cultural memory, and embodied experience (Tuan 1977; Massey 2005). Second, Wu Hung’s concept of “total space” provides a model for understanding how material, perceptual, and experiential dimensions function together in Buddhist visual practice and can be extended to musical analysis (Wu 2023). Third, sound studies demonstrate how listening generates spatial presence and supports geographic imagination (Feld 1996; Blesser and Salter 2007). Through this framework, Buddha Passion emerges not merely as a reference to Dunhuang, but as a reconstruction of its spatial logic in sound.

Read through this interdisciplinary lens, the work functions as a sonic reconfiguration of Dunhuang’s spatial imagination, translating geographic, material, and ritual dimensions into musical form. This transformation becomes evident in the work’s compositional detail, where instrumental sonority, perceptual processes, and cultural associations coalesce to produce spatial meaning. An analysis of the “Nirvana” section of Act Six illustrates the interplay of material, perceptual, and experiential space. In the opening nine bars, stone chimes, sustained strings, and choral timbres establish a layered material space. The continuity of the choral chanting is reinforced through timbral augmentation (McAdams 1999), as sustained strings extend and stabilize its presence. Meanwhile, the timbral heterogeneity between the chimes and the choral–string layer grants the chimes perceptual prominence through their clear attacks, bright spectra, and inharmonic overtones. Repeated pitches delineate a perceptual space characterized by what Arnie Cox terms iterative motion (Cox 2011). In the experiential dimension, the chimes recall their traditional ritual function in Chinese settings, where they articulate sacred time and structure communal participation, lending the passage culturally grounded expressive significance. The “Nirvana” example thus reflects broader strategies by which Buddha Passion transforms Dunhuang’s spatial and ritual imagination into an immersive sonic experience.