The Tao of Bach: Tai chi master goes with Bach

June 30, 2002

by Janos Gereben
From The Register-Guard

PARALLELS and intersections between two Chinese-born artists featured at this year’s Bach Festival are uncanny.

Tan Dun is the composer of “Water Passion After St. Matthew,” which will have its United States premiere Friday at the Oregon Bach Festival.

Chungliang Al Huang is co-author of “Tao: the Watercourse Way.” He will appear at noon Friday in a free public presentation on “The Tao of Bach” in the Soreng Theatre; his tai chi sessions will be part of this year’s conducting master class.

Tan wrote the music for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Huang is the author of “Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.”

Tan’s teacher and mentor is Chou Wen-chung, founder of the contemporary Chinese symphonic idiom. Chou, a professor of music at Columbia University and a famed Edgar Edgard Varèse specialist, is a colleague and friend of Huang, with whom he participated in a landmark 1967 symposium on Chinese music at Honolulu’s East-West Center.

(In fact, that’s where I first interviewed Huang, at the beginning of an acquaintanceship now spanning four decades and two centuries.)

Tan and Huang – who until now have met only in passing – are connected through China, music, the Tao – and water, perhaps the most important element in Taoism. Water is a key metaphor of the philosophy, which says that water-like, flowing, yielding resilience is the essence of power for good.

That description, Huang says, applies equally to music.

Water entered Huang’s life dramatically, at the very beginning. Born on the day of the first Japanese air attack on Shanghai, he was all of 12 days old when he and his family were shipwrecked during their escape.

The invasion from which they fled soon led to what is known today as the Rape of Nanking.

Some years and several more escapes later, Huang collaborated with the late Alan Watts, chief pioneer of the Tao in America, in writing and illustrating “The Watercourse Way.”

A forty-ish-looking 65, Huang has an eye-popping resume. He has collaborated as a dancer, teacher, philosopher, calligrapher and workshop leader with the Dalai Lama, Joseph Campbell, Yehudi Menuhin, Fritjof Capra, Huston Smith, John Denver, Lorin Hollander, Bruce Lee, Joan Baez and many more.

Although he is now primarily a tai chi master, in his youth Huang was a featured dancer on the “Sammy Davis Jr. Show” and had a role in the movie version of “Flower Drum Song.” An even more important event during his subsequent modern dance years was meeting and marrying a fellow dancer, Suzanne. The couple has two grown daughters: Lark and Tysan.

There are two other important names in Huang’s biography. At Huangpu Military Academy (China’s equivalent of West Point), when two cadets who were to become Huang’s parents studied there in the 1920s, Chiang Kai-shek was the academy superintendent and Chou En-lai, who introduced the two to each other, was dean of students.

Chiang went on to become president of Taiwan, Chou the prime minister of China. Huang’s father, a three-star general, was an officer first in China and then in Taiwan. Huang’s mother, also graduated from Huangpu as an officer, was a practitioner of ba ji chuan.

All four are gone by now, but I still remember “Mama Huang” demonstrating her special kind of martial art before a large audience at Stanford, fiercely brandishing a big sword.

From Broadway, Huang returned briefly to Taiwan and immersed himself in tai chi and the Tao. When he came back to the U.S., he started on a teaching career.

For 36 of Esalen Institute’s 40 years on the California coast, Huang taught popular and acclaimed workshops. He lectured at Carl Jung Institute events in Switzerland. He was a research fellow at the Academia Sinica and a member of the World Academy of Art and Science. He received the Republic of China’s Gold Medal of Education.

The author of a dozen books on topics ranging from maximizing sports performance to mentoring, Huang taught at the Menuhin School in Surrey and at Findhorn in Scotland. He also held popular workshops in China while heading the Living Tao Foundation, which he founded in 1976.

The family lives in Urbana, Ill., and Gold Beach.

In his book “Quantum Soup,” Huang writes that, “Music, like Tao, contains all the glory of sound and silence. Ancient sages played contemplative one-note music to quiet the mind. Today, we are challenged by the infinite variety of tonal intricacies and contrapuntal sonority.

“When I first saw a symphonic score, I was bewildered. What remarkable feat could transform such a complexity into cohesive sound?

“Later, feeling the need to study various scores, moving slowly through webs of sound and feelings, I found an amicable connection: I looked at the individual notes as musical sprouts growing from the many-layered gardens, arranging their plants with delightful variety and individuality.

“I have found in Bach a divine gardener whose dancing sprouts, for all their profusion, never seem to get in one another’s way. Each is fully realized. His flowers bloom all seasons in perfect order and glorious harmony.

“Bach’s original manuscripts are calligraphically breathtaking. They are music for both the eyes and the senses – waves of dancing energy. When I dance to Bach, I dance with Bach as well, I hang his flowing scores all around the walls of my studio. His essence is in me.

“My body sprouts Bach’s music, moving us both in the watercourse way, through time and space.”