Isang Yun received international attention in the 1960s for his unique music style. He reconstructed the sound organization principle of East Asian traditional music with the western avant-garde music of the 20th century. After suffering from the so-called the ‘East Berlin Incident,’ he continued to change his style constantly. For example, he included non-musical ‘messages’ such as freedom and peace in his works, or pursuing the Tao and Nirvana through music.
Isang Yun’s second Symphony, which he composed in 1984, consists of a musical narrative structure that leads to conflict and violence, followed by tears and anguish, and then resistence and hope. In that sense, it seems similar to his other works such as Exemplum in Memoriam Kwangju (1981), Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1989), and Engel in Flammen (1994). He shows some important characteristics of his music during this period: the brass leads the violence, while strings resist it. The woodwinds, meanwhile, mediate between the two, and percussion functions as the ‘background’ of the incident.
What sets this symphony apart from other works is the conclusion of the musical narrative. The Hauptton (main tone) that makes up this piece starts with C♯, then the momentum rises little by little through intense struggle. But at the last moment, just ahead of the semitone A, which symbolizes the world of Tao, hope is thwarted. The string instrument, which has yielded to the trombone’s brutal figure of the descending fifth, moves down the fifth from G♯ and returns to the original tone, the C♯. In response to this, musicologist Wolfgang Sparrer suggests that Yun is “pleading against the ways of the world by imitating them.”
WonCheol Kim (translated by Moohyun Cho)
