Isang Yun: Chinese Pictures
Hi, I’m Stefanie, and I want to tell you something about the composer Isang Yun, and his work “Chinese Pictures.” Isang Yun was a South Korean composer who lived and studied for a long time in Germany. He endured several severe crises in his life. Once, he was put in prison by the Japanese invaders in South Korea during the second World War, and later, when he was in Germany, he was kidnapped by the secret police of South Korea. He was drugged, put on a plane and flown to South Korea, where he was imprisoned with a life sentence for so-called espionage. He was freed after two years, only because of political intervention by German diplomats. Still, back in Germany he would continue with his own fight for democracy in the region of East Asia, and for the unification of North and South Korea. He must have had a very strong belief in his own individual path because, in spite of these difficult situations, both financial and even life threatening, he would just continue on his own path. In his music, Yun combines Western Avant Garde writing with his own traditional background. He said once about his composition style: “I didn’t simply make a kind of Chinese-Korean folklore with Western technique. I worked with both spiritually: I worked with Western technique, but behind that was always East Asian sound imagination. Isang Yun was a practicing Taoist. Tao says that everything is in harmony but in constant movement. Nothing exists without its counterpart. The aim is to reach a balance between the different polarities of Yin and Yang. Isang Yun used the philosophy of the Tao, but also of Buddhism – which is only present in the life of South Koreans – in his music. You can feel this in the endless streams of sounds, in the atmosphere of deep meditation, and then sudden eruptions of quick sounds or ornaments, and then getting back to the endless stream. The piece “Chinese Pictures” is inspired by traditional Chinese paintings. It consists of four different movements: The Visitor of the Idyll, The Hermit at the Water, The Actor with the Monkey, and The Shepherd’s Flute. I chose to play “Chinese Pictures” because it consists of four beautiful miniatures, which are full of imagination. They inspire me to search for new sounds and colors in my own instruments, and these sounds are related to the traditional East Asian music.
Stefanie Liedtke
