By blending the sound organization principles of East Asian traditional music into the 20th century Western avant-garde techniques, Isang Yun created unique music styles. In that aspect, he was praised as “the first composer to perfectly express oriental ideas and musical techniques by combining them with Western music usage.” Isang Yun’s music is therefore a matter of understanding the difference between Western music and Eastern music from his point of view.
In Western music, individual tones are fixed and thus musical meanings are created by establishing relationships with other tones. However, in East Asian music, an individual tone alone have its own vitality and forms a microcosmos. Also, microcosmoses gather to build a grand universe, and the grand universe already exists in each microcosmos. In this way, the key to Isang Yun’s musical language is to organize vitalized tones to form vitalized chords or ‘soundscapes’.
Another noteworthy thing about Isang Yun’s ‹Pièce concertante› (1976) is that Korean traditional music (especially ‘Jeongak’) is segmented by respiration, while Western music is generally divided by beats. In traditional Korean music, it is not always a problem even if the attack of the tones does not match exactly for each person participating in the ensemble. The important thing there is to “breathe” together.
‹Pièce concertante› is a work that may appear to be Western modern music. However, in terms of ‘breath’ that was just mentioned, the tones (which make up the vitalized soundscapes) grow and then rest. In that aspect, I can feel the elegance of Korean style a bit more than Isang yun’s previous works such as ‹Loyang› (1962) and ‹Réak› (1966). It seems important to both the performer and the listener to feel that breath, which Koreans are familiar with (and yet at the same time seem to be unfamiliar).
Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that Isang Yun wrote this piece in the same year as his cello concerto. Yun began to incorporate a non-musical ‘message’ in his work for the first time through that cello concerto. At this point, his musical idioms also underwent a major transition. Since then, he constantly developed his styles further by containing more Korean (or East Asian) soundscapes.
WonCheol Kim (translated by Moohyun Cho)
