Of all the criticisms of Tan Dun’s work, arguably the most damning and least sensible have come from those, particuarly in China, accusing the composer of fabricating a China of his own making strictly for Western consumption. Why this is necessarily a bad thing I’m not exactly sure, given that Tan now works in the West, where any artist worth his salt represents himself first rather than his people. But if nothing else, The Map should put listeners straight about where ‘his China’ comes from.

That Tan has largely shunned ‘cultivated’ China is hardly in doubt. Ever since Ghost Opera (1994), the music-ritual piece requiring a string quartet to play stones, paper and water in addition to their instruments, Tan’s music has been much more at home in the villages than the urban cultural centres. This time, however, he literally invites listeners to the source in his quest to find the shamanistic ‘stone man’ he once heard in his youth.

Armed with a commission from Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tan returned to Hunan with a camera crew to document village musical life and the non-Han minority peoples in particular. Once back in New York, the composer became a sort of Bartók for the media age, spinning ethnic traditional material into an abstract modernism while simultaneously preserving its roots on screen.

The results are sprawling, to say the least. At times, such as the polyphonic tongue-singing of a group of Dong women, the orchestra merely frames the film footage. Other times, Tan’s orchestral writing cheekily adapts the techniques of the village practitioners on a grand scale, such as having the entire percussion section enter into a dialogue with a group of Tujia cymbal players, or the winds and brass playing their reeds and mouthpieces in response to a village leaf-blower. The most creative touch comes in a feige, traditionally an antiphonal courtship song sung across mountains and valleys, but here featuring a Miao girl on screen performing with a live cello soloist, transcending entirely new boundaries of time and space.

Grasping the dimensions of this piece in a home format obviously requires a video recording; fortunately Hunan television was on hand when Tan brought the The Map to the village that inspired it. That broadcast, carefully edited and remixed here, is paired with a short film documenting that production, as well as Tan’s original writing process.

Much of these musical traditions, it must be said, remain as exotic to most Chinese listeners as a Navajo chant would in the West. The most obvious weakness of The Map to my ears (having recorded several of these minority groups in the neighboring province of Guizhou) is that in some cases Tan himself seems all too content to play tourist, filming music that villagers play for outsiders rather than what they perform for themselves.

Still, for someone whose stated goal was not to document those cultures but to bring their rustic vitality into counterpoint with the slick urban world, Tan succeeds with The Map not in spite of its messiness but because of it.