The title of this piece, Glissées, comes from the French verb "glisser," meaning to glide. In music, it refers to a glissando, but in Isang Yun's ‹Glissées›, it also symbolizes the colorful and ever-changing movements of East Asian music. The cello in this piece sometimes sounds similar to Korean traditional instruments such as the Geomungo, Gayageum, or Haegeum.
In East Asian music, individual tones have vitality and move freely. When Isang Yun translated them into Western notation, he used ornaments, glissando, and other special performance techniques. This is not simply an imitation of East Asian music, but rather, as musicologist Wolfgang Sparrer stated, "in his specific notation and imagination of sounds, they undergo individual alterations and characteristic, pointed emphasis."
Isang Yun wrote ‹Glissées› following his international recognition with ‹Réak› (1966) and other pieces. In those pieces, he built soundscapes by compiling different tones into clusters and giving vitality to individual tones, in order to express the sounds of East Asian music with Western instruments. In contrast, ‹Glissées› focuses on only one instrument, the cello, and explores the microcosmoses that are given birth by the individual tones with vitality.
Korean traditional music, particularly court music, has a fundamental difference from Western music in that the music is segmented by respiration rather than beats. This feature can also be found in ‹Glissées›, and in addition, there are even no bar or time signatures in the score. Therefore, what is important for both the performer and listener is to "breathe" together as a tone is born, grows, rests, and decays.
