"Do not expect an ordinary dancing music, but visualize the mystical and meditative atmosphere of a Buddhist temple. There, the monks and nuns perform a dance for driving out evil spirits or a prayer dance, leading to extreme concentration; then, tense and in utmostly slow movement, they gradually fall into nirvanic rapture. In the first bars of my orchestral piece ‹Bara›, you will encounter both meditative calm and nirvanic tension." (Isang Yun)
The subject matter of Isang Yun’s ‹Bara›, composed in 1960, is the Bara dance of Buddhism. Occasionally, we hear rhythms that can generally be associated with body movements, but in fact, this work does not directly depict the Bara dance. It abstractly expresses Buddhist enlightenment mediated by the ritual movement. The individual tones that make up the work are vitalized according to the principles of East Asian music. Isang Yun likened this to the calligraphy in East Asia, which is contrasted with European penmanship. However, in ‹Bara›, one of Yun’s earliest works, the vitality of those individual tones is still weak compared to the later works.
The vitalized chords or sound layers, formed by those vitalized tones, also 'behaves' in his early style. The East Asian idea that parts embody the whole, while the whole in turn manifests itself in every single part, coexists with the twelve-tone technique of the West. As Yun himself pointed out, "In this early work sprouted, in typical forms, all those styles employed in my entire subsequent compositions."
WonCheol Kim
translated by Moohyun Cho
