Unsuk Chin

Chin Un -Suk ( born 1961 in Seoul, South Korea ) is a South Korean composer living in Berlin. She studied with György Ligeti 1985-1988 and in 2004 was awarded the Grawemeyer Award, 2005 with the Arnold Schönberg Prize and in 2010 the prize for musical composition of the Foundation Prince Pierre of Monaco.

Biography

Chin Un -Suk Kang Suk studied composition with hi - at Seoul National University as well as a DAAD scholarship holder with György Ligeti at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Hamburg from 1985 to 1988.

1984 wins Chin Un -Suk first international prices. During her studies with Ligeti but it comes at a three-year hiatus, as their teacher dismisses the previously formed, composed in the post-serial style works as outdated. 1988 settled Chin Un -Suk over to Berlin and worked there for years as a freelance composer in the studio of the Technical University of Berlin, where she realized seven pieces. The first major orchestral work, Trojan Women, is premiered in 1990 by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. 1991 produced her breakthrough work acrostic word game commissioned by the Nieuw Ensemble; Since then the work has been performed in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and North America. 1994 begins with Fantaisie mécanique Intercontemporain their collaboration with the Paris New Music Group Ensemble, which leads to more jobs. Since 1995 it is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes, 1999 begins with Miroirs des temps an artistic collaboration with conductor Kent Nagano, who has so far premiered five of their works.

Chin's Violin Concerto, for which she was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award 2004, premiered in Berlin in 2002 with Viviane Hagner as soloist. Since then, the piece in ten countries - have been played, among other things, Christian Tetzlaff, the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic in April 2005 - in Europe, Asia and North America.

In addition to Kent Nagano Chins works were, inter alia, premiered by the conductor Simon Rattle, Esa -Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Neeme Järvi, David Robertson, Peter Eötvös and George Benjamin, and of leading orchestras and ensembles in Europe, America and Asia. Her clients include Kronos Quartet, Radio France, BBC, musikFabrik, South Bank Centre, Los Angeles Opera, IRCAM and the Bavarian State Opera.

Program priorities with Chin Music 'offered at the Festival Musica in Strasbourg and at the Settembre Musica in Italy.

In the 2001/2002 season Chin was Composer in Residence at the Deutsches Symphonie -Orchester Berlin, since 2006 she has been Artistic Director of the New Music series and composer-in -residence of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

In June 2007, Chin's first opera Alice in Wonderland premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007 and at an international critics' poll of the journal Opernwelt selected for the premiere of the year.

Awards

Works

Chin Un -Suk refuses strictly from their music as a particular culture, eg Korean belonging to understand. As a personally important composers of the modern age calls them particularly Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy, Webern and Ligeti. As important influences Chin calls her work with electronic music and gamelan music with which they dealt with their stay in Bali. The tone, such as the drums dominated Instrumentation their orchestral works, can perhaps explain to gamelan music with affection Chins. But is unmistakably the importance of the European avant-garde, whose techniques Chin selectively used.

In orchestral work Miroirs des temps Chin Un -suk has dealt with medieval music. It was obviously not stylistic bonds, but the adoption of some complex compositional procedures by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut or Johannes Ciconia, techniques such as musical palindromes or cancer canon. In 3.Satz Mon fin est mon commencement, Mon commencement est ma fin the canonical forms are extended to the 14 - polyphony.

Characteristic of Chin's music is a fascination with virtuosity, which are expressed in the immense instrumental and vocal challenges of their work. However, this also prevails in tape pieces such as the Gradus ad infinitum for 8 pianos. Ever rejects Chin Un -suk from a sharp distinction between electronic music and instrumental music. " As a starting material using sounds of musical instruments or those that could belong to an extended percussion apparatus, for example, clock sounds, rustling paper or falling water drops. (...) Your field of action relates, even if it operates electronically, to another area, on the traditional sound space of the classical and romantic music. with this apparatus, however, the composer develops a musical cosmos, which has broken away from the traditional bonds in many ways. It is based on mathematical methods and contrapuntal and serial techniques and collage principles that the be relevant compositional idea following selected and carried out. " ( Hanno Ehrler )

A predominant facet of her vocal works is the desire for experimentation and playfulness; the lyrics are often based on experimental poetry and sometimes they are also self-referential. Chin Un -suk has, for example, Poets such as Inger Christensen, Gerhard Ruhm and Unica Zürn set to music, and the title of Cantatrix Sopranica is borrowed from a nonsense paper by Georges Perec. " To set poems to music, transporting the concrete contents or feelings, I do not like much. Music and literature are heavily own laws " languages ​​" that are in their connection often each other's way. The advantage of combinatorial experimental poetry is in my eyes ( and ears) not only their lack of precise meaning and "messages", but also their proximity to compositional processes. " ( Chin Un -Suk )

A language playful facet comes in Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland clearly. In Lewis Carroll's classic Chin has less fairytale theme - " an illusion it would be to want to see them in fairy tales " - as the " twisted logic, which is a ' different ' physical law based on " fascinated. In certain scenes of this opera a stylistic pluralism is expressed, which is otherwise not found in Chin's music. The composer points out that this is - is musical parodies - in correspondence with Lewis Carroll's puns and malapropisms. It explains the different musical language of the opera also with the fact that the main role is a child.

In some vocal and instrumental works Chins theatrical actions come to light, such as in Allegro ma non troppo for percussion and tape, in Double Bind? for violin and electronics, and in Cantatrix Sopranica for voices and ensemble.

Quotes

"My music is the reflection of my dreams. The visions of immense light and unlikely colors that I see in all my dreams, I try in my music presented as a play of light and colors that flow through space and simultaneously form a plastic sound sculpture whose beauty very abstract and is distant, but precisely by direct appeals to the feelings and joy and warmth conveyed. "

In the Press

"The works can be difficult to assign current stylistic or aesthetic phenomena directions. Isolation of the composer, their distance to the new music scene, reflected in a highly unique musical cosmos. Tag -like he can hardly be detected. ( ... ) Finally, leads the attempt into the void, to catalog Chin's music as a kind of Korean or Korean influence. regional and cultural boundaries are hardly appropriate criteria to describe the nature of a particular music mood. contemporary compositions measure rather on general and globally available prior technical means and the aesthetic discussion. rightly therefore Chin Un -Suk expressly protested against, to describe their music as a Korean. " ( Hanno Ehrler )

" Chin Has created her own sonic wonderland with the orchestra. She has always shown a fascination with puzzles and strange, intricate, interlocking structures did give her music a kind of MC Escher -like eccentricity ". (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times)

" The Violin Concerto to describe a synthesis of European and Far Eastern music, remain too abstract and did not say anything out. ( ...) For Chin Un -suk has grown up from childhood with European music. She is their more natural than some, of the Old continent comes. Violin Concerto is the individual performance of a highly sensitive artistry that draws from a rich pool of experience and curiosity, experimentation and methodology. " ( Habakuk Traber )

. " Chin's music has something very rare: a melodious sound, the ado makes also a larger audience inclined, without pandering to the gentle, seemingly aimless floating in time, which characterizes most of the pieces Chin, also found in fractures, edges, and the sounds so chiselled and polished precious they seem, are not without objection of smoothness, flexibility in their flash also moments of hard, elemental expressivity on, are driving underground of this music. " ( Martin Wilkening, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

"Her Violin Concerto ( ... ) is complex and fiendishly difficult to play and to hear. It so happens to be the first truly great work of this millennium. " ( Alan Rich, LA Weekly)

"The music of Alice in Wonderland testifies to the superior sound imagination of the composer, who has left the narrow confines of avant-garde music behind. What'd she noted, is the finest most powerful and in not stifling musical plasticity ... Chins synesthetic sense of color and flavor of the music is phenomenal, as their sense of shimmering increases for instrumental surprises and virtuosic special deposits, which are always associated with individual characters of the story. " ( Wolfgang Schreiber, opera world)

" Chin's aural imagination to put their mastery of contrapuntal treatment of instrumental lines or rival rhythms and their skill, seemingly impossible in relationship ( be it sound or compositional techniques ) must have been strengthened by her studies with Ligeti, whose teachings in the. clarity, the stimulus, the capricious energy and sheer tonal beauty of her music - at happy way - reflecting But listen carefully: they knows a different kind of darkness, of strength and remembering your music leaves no national appeals march. their preference for the sound of plucked strings and whipped, for slow glissandi and for compilations of bells and gongs have no specific cultural connotations, and that is one of its strengths. " (Paul Griffiths )

Catalog of works (selection)

• Trojan Women (1986) for 3 sopranos, female choir and orchestra, by Euripides ( rev. 1990)
• Gradus ad Infinitum for 8 Pianos ( 1989/1990 ) for tape
• Acrostic Pun (1991 /93) for soprano and ensemble
• Fantaisie mécanique (1994/1997) for trumpet, trombone, two percussionists and piano
• Etudes for piano (1995 - )
• ParaMetaString (1995 ) for string quartet and electronics
• Piano Concerto ( 1996-97)
• Xi (1998) for ensemble and electronics
• Miroirs des temps (1999/2000) for 4 singers and orchestra
• Kalá ( 2000-01 ) for soprano, bass, acc. Choir and Orchestra
• Violin Concerto (2001)
• Double Concerto for piano, percussion and ensemble ( 2002)
• SnagS & Snarls for soprano and orchestra (2004)
• Scenes from Alice in Wonderland for soprano, mezzo-soprano and orchestra ( 2004-07/2010-11 )
• Cantatrix Sopranica for 3 vocal soloists and ensemble ( 2005)
• Double Bind? for violin and live electronics ( 2006-7 )
• Alice in Wonderland ( Opera, 2004-2007)
• Rocaná for Orchestra ( 2008)
• Concerto for Cello and Orchestra ( 2008-9 )
• Šu for Sheng and Orchestra ( 2009)
• Gougalōn. Scenes from a Street Theater for ensemble (2009/2011)
• Fanfare chimérique for two spatially positioned wind ensemble and live electronics (2010-2011)
• Cosmigimmicks. A musical pantomime for seven instrumentalists (2012 )
• Graffiti for ensemble (2013 )
• Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (2013, revised version premiered on June 10, 2013, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich under Kent Nagano )

Media

• Chin Un -Suk: acrostic Pun and other works. Ensemble Intercontemporain. German Grammophon, 2005
• Chin Un -Suk: Rocaná / Violin Concerto. Viviane Hagner, Kent Nagano, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Analekta, 2009
• Chin Un -Suk: Cantatrix Sopranica. musikFabrik. In: Speech Songs - Speech songs. Wergo, 2010
• Chin Un -Suk: Xi and other works. (New edition of acrostic Pun and other works), Ensemble Intercontemporain. Cairo, 2011.
• Chin Un -Suk: Six Piano Etudes. Mei Yi Foo In: Musical Toys. Odradek Records, 2012

Image carrier

• Chin Un -Suk: Alice in Wonderland. Bavarian State Opera, Kent Nagano. Unitel Classica, 2008
• Allegro ma non troppo. In: Fifty Years Studio TU Berlin. EMF Media, DVD 054, 2008