For most journeys, a map can be stubbornly literal. One may appreciate such accuracy in the physical realm, but matters of the soul require a certain flexibility. For Tan Dun, music has long been a way of charting his own personal journey, of choosing the right path amidst a thicket of possibilities. And more often than not, that path has paradoxically moved forward by looking back.

In this particular journey, The Map has is roots in the ancient village music of Southwest China and its limbs in the cultural currents of the 21st century. It is a ripple from a stone case more than two decades ago, when Tan suffered his first crisis of cultural identity as a student at Beijing’s Central Conservatory, surrounded by music that had been previously condemned during the Cultural Revolution. Fearing that he has “forgotten the things of my youth,” he returned briefly in 1981 to Hunan, where he encountered a practitioner of ba gua stone drumming, an ancient ritual combining principles of the I Ching with shamanistic vocalizations. “The man talked to the wind,” Tan recalls. “He talked both to this life and the past one. I had nothing to offer him, or even to make a record of him, but I promised that one day I would return.”

Nearly two decades later, armed with a commission for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tan returned to the same village in 1999 with a camera crew to document the ancient practice. In the midst of a ceremony, the villages informed Tan that “the tea is cold” ? that the stone drummer had died, and with him, his tradition. “That is when my piece became a very personal, spiritual journey,” says Tan. “I began reaching inside my heart, drawing the map I could use to find him again.”

In one sense, The Map merely extends a journey that began in earnest with Tan’s move to New York in 1986. Indeed, much of Tan’s output seems devoted to recreating that chance encounter with the stone man. Ghost Opera (1994) his music-theatre-ritual piece for string quartet and pipa, requires musicians to play stones, paper and water as well as their respective instruments. His subsequent Concerto for Water Percussion (1999), Water Passion after St. Matthew (2000) and opera Tea (2002) progressively distilled those elemental sonorities into a musical vocabulary of unusual emotional and dramatic resonance.

Nor does his use of video in and of itself mark a new direction. A former Peking opera fiddler and music director, Tan has similarly cultivated more modern multimedia forms, receiving his most popular acclaim with his Oscar-winning score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and its subsequent adaptation as a multimedia concerto. Previously, though, he had embraced video elements in his orchestral theatre works, Red Forecast (1996) and The Gate (1999).

In The Map, however, Tan’s documentary footage wholly drives his compositional material. Central to the nine-movement piece is a series of filmed field recordings capturing the musical life of the Tuija, Miao and Dong, three of the 55 ethnic groups comprising China’s non-Han minority population. “I was looking for inspiration, but I also wanted to create something new,” he says. “I didn’t want this to be a documentary film or an MTV video, but instead to invent an entirely new form.” Using footage from two separate trips to Hunan in 1999 and 2001, Tan not only spins ethnic source material into abstract sonorities, but often keeps that source material in its pure state on the video screen while simultaneously exploring its timbres in orchestrational terms. In a particularly striking example, Tan draws on the antiphonal Miao vocal tradition by having the solo cellist on stage engage a singer on a video screen. Suddenly, a musical form originally intended to communicate across mountains and open fields navigates entirely new boundaries of time, place and culture.