21st Century Patron Saints!
by Victoria Roth
- NEWSLETTERS
Vol.4 -
CONTENTS
A vital aspect of the exciting world of composers and performers is eager listeners. And for many listeners it is interpretive artists such as Midori who capture our attention and bring us along with them into their world of sound, ideas and adventure. Exploring repertoire from a period when Midori herself was just becoming musically aware is one such adventure, not only for her but also for her audiences. Midori has also embarked on another adventure: performing new work written especially for her.
How does a new musical composition come to life? For new works to exist, not only must there be composers, performers and audiences, but there must be patrons who provide the funds that allow composers to write a new work while keeping a roof over their heads. The role of patrons in the past 375 years of western music has been as varied as the musical expressions themselves. For J.S. Bach, the church was his employer and kept him not only busy but well compensated; for Haydn, it was Prince Esterhazy; and for Beethoven, there were enlightened individuals, many of them serious amateur musicians, who recognized his genius, tolerated his outbursts, and provided lodging, work space and/or a stipend. Their names are part of history as the dedicatees on a great number of sonatas and chamber works.
One of the inspired American patrons of the early 20th century was Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a serious amateur musician whose generosity provided the Library of Congress with a jewel of a performance space, funding for the Chief of the music division, and an endowment for the ongoing commissioning of new work. Among the many works she commissioned was Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Long after her death in 1953, the fund she established continues to support new composition.
More recently there has been a resurgence of individuals coming forward to support composers through commissions. Depending on the size and scope of a work and the renown of the composer, the costs of a new work can be quite reasonable. To be involved as a private patron no longer requires a Prince's or Queen's great fortune. Meet The Composer, a national organization founded in 1974, has been at the forefront of working with patrons to design and manage a wide range of commissioning projects and/or to provide interested patrons with information on how they can be more involved with helping to bring a new work to life. The organization produced an engaging and informative publication, An Individual's Guide to Commissioning Music, which can be viewed on its website.
A wide range of events can be the inspiration for an individual or group of individuals to commission a new work: birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, memorials, institutional milestones and often, admiration for a particular performer. The current Midori/Repin Commissioning Project has attracted private patrons with a dual interest in new work and in helping performers realize significant projects. Since the project involves two performing artists with international careers, Midori and Vadim Repin, the works will be given broad exposure within a relatively short period of time. Another project funded by private patrons is the Flute Book for the 21st Century. This initiative is the idea of flutist Marya Martin who, as a performer and teacher, saw the need for significant new works for flute and piano. The project will culminate in a published collection of eight new works for flute and piano that will introduce young professionals to some of the expanded techniques and styles being used by contemporary composers. These are just two, performer-inspired projects currently being managed by Meet The Composer.
Individuals have commissioned work to honor and feature a much-admired teacher, to commemorate major events, and to serve as a catalyst that would encourage more performance of new orchestral work. While the impetus behind an individual's desire to commission a composer will be very personal, the work itself is a gift that can be performed, heard and enjoyed by many hundreds - even thousands - of people.
With information and help provided by organizations like Meet The Composer, and with inspiring artists at all levels of their career, anyone can commission music and be an active participant in creating repertoire for the future. A new age of patronage has arrived and composers, performers and audiences are reaping the rewards.
Victoria Roth, Director,
New Music, New Donors,
Meet The Composer
• Making New Work
Happen: 21st Century Patron Saints!
by Victoria Roth
• Midori on the Music
of Isang Yun
• European Techniques,
Korean Sources and Character: Gasa and the Violin Sonata
of Isang Yun
by Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer
• 20th-Century Timeline:
an Eclectic Overview
Readers
are invited to submit questions, about contemporary music in general or
Midori's all-contemporary program in particular. Time and space permitting,
Midori will answer some of the questions on these Newsletter web pages.
Please address your questions to
violin@gotomidori.com
Isang Yun's background strikes me as being by far the most turbulent of all the composers whose works are included in the all-contemporary program. At the same time, many people who knew Yun often said that he was gentle and elegant, very cultured and sophisticated, and that he spoke Japanese even more perfectly than some native Japanese. He was very much respected by the Germans and we must remember that he was in his forties when he first set foot in Europe. He was certainly a man of many surprises.
I knew, when I was learning Yun's violin sonata, that the composer was not writing traditional Korean music yet that his music was influenced by it. I became intrigued by the folk culture of the Korean court, which in turn was influenced by the Chinese court, from pansori to folk instruments like the p'iri. It was a very different sound palate that I encountered when I learned to play this work and one that I very much enjoyed. I became completely mesmerized by p'ansori (a type of traditional Korean music which tells a story in the form of music theater, performed by two musicians: a singer and a drummer) and, even though I don't understand the Korean spoken language, the feeling, the articulation, the drama, the depth of the emotion of p'ansori seemed to come across very clearly in Yun's music.
When one looks at Isang Yun's music, one is daunted by the markings, including the accents and the triple fortes. On first glance, the violin sonata seemed to be a loud and angry piece but, as I learned it, I actually found it to be full of passion and very romantic. The dynamic markings should be taken as gestures of emotional involvement. The music is sensitive at times and always dramatic and deeply felt. The structure of the sonata is very interesting too. It is like an epic, with a turbulent beginning going through an entire cycle, through a process of increasing enlightenment or experience. It is rather like a life cycle in which one struggles with his or her fate but eventually comes to terms with it. At the end, there is a sense of deep relief.
Gasa and the Violin Sonata of Isang Yun
by Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer
Isang Yun, born in
1917 near Tongyeong in South Korea, was the first Asian composer to make
a career within the circles of (West-) European avant-garde music. He
studied in Osaka, Seoul, and Tokyo, and later in Paris (1956) and Berlin
(1957-59). In Berlin he adopted Schoenberg's twelve-tone-technique, and
the idea of a musical work as an individual and original piece of art.
For Yun a musical work was always a kind of organism, a microcosm belonging
to a greater macrocosm.
Yun's music rests upon a great and well balanced gesture, which the composer
himself called "monistic". The continually streaming sound is
carefully calculated and finely tuned, woven out of small and smaller
cells that divide into countless streams and gather to form rivers. The
music is always in motion; there are dams and rapids to be mastered, and
they are rarely only "natural" phenomena.
The basic element of Yun's music is the one long-held tone, which he considered
to be life itself. "How I construct my music so the listener has
no second to rest, but is forced to follow the musical flow, is my secret.
It is connected with a seamless and incessant phrasing and dynamization."
The principle of this long-held tone derives from East-Asian traditional
music, above all Korean court music. "In old Korean music there are
very clear linear elements, the art of a circular movement around one
tone in a given period of time. I called this phenomenon 'main-tone',
and did not more than develop characters which I discovered in the traditional
Sino-Korean music. I actualized it to bring this old language to new life."
With words such as these Yun intended to evoke the sound of wind instruments,
which are typical in Korean music: the bamboo flutes tanso and
taegûm, the oboe-like p'iri, etc. And Yun exposed
his very characteristic style most clearly in compositions for flute,
oboe and clarinet.
Photo: Hans Poelkow
Korean musical instruments
(click to enlarge)
by courtesy of NCKTPA
Korean court music
(click to enlarge)
by courtesy of NCKTPA
Gasa for violin and piano (1963) is one of the first compositions in which Yun developed the Korean character within a piece of western art music. Gasa or kasa is the name of a Korean traditional art song; the voice of the violin refers in a very abstract and stylized manner to the voice of a woman, and the part of the piano to the traditional accompanying instruments, the transverse flute taegûm and the drum changgo. At the very beginning of Gasa we see some distinct accents even in the dynamic range of mezzo piano, and then, in bar 2, there is a rather abrupt and contrasting change to forte:
(click to enlarge)
Gasa for violin and piano (1963), bar 1-8
©Bote & Bock / Boosey & Hawkes
The intensive gesture of this music leads upward; its quiet and lyrical attitude is evident. Highly differentiated is the vibrato technique with the four ranges: non vibrato, poco vibrato, vibrato, molto vibrato. The function of the piano is to give punctuation to the violin protagonist, to support its voice and to play short interludes or "sound bridges" (in Korean: "yônûm"). There is an exciting, dramatic development in the middle section (b. 68-116). The quiet and lyrical distanced atmosphere returns again in the third part.
The Korean idioms include numerous elements like trills, short glissandi, accents, a specific manner of phrasing (the phrases are exposed as single events one after another, and should not be connected with each other). Yun's specific dynamic seems to be similar to the vocal style of p'ansori. While the gesture and expression in general draw on Korean traditional music, the intervals are completely different and derived from Western twelve-tone-technique. So his idioms merge with traditional European techniques. Yun learned the twelve tone technique that he used until the mid 1970s from Schoenberg's disciple Josef Rufer in Berlin; the "developing variation" he studied in works of Brahms and Schoenberg. Also important for his individual style are processes of symmetry and reflection that he adopted from Bartók, and later "model variants" and Debussy's art of veiling as well as the estrangement techniques of Stravinsky.
by courtesy of NCKTPA
(click to enlarge)
Desiring more accessibility Yun gave up the use of row tables in the second half of the 1970s, and gradually developed a "suspended tonality" that oscillates between the tonal and the atonal. Its characteristics are chords comprised of three or four notes, which he complements with dissonant seconds - a technique that can be analyzed as estrangement in the western sense and as the heterophone dissection of a single note in the eastern.
Isang Yun's music is dominated by Korean idioms, and yet always transcends them. The Distances for a quintet of woodwinds and a quintet of strings (1988) symbolize the reconciliation of heaven, earth, and man; the work seems to seek the loss of all sense of time and transmits a sound which Yun himself has called the "sound of space" or "nature" or the "cosmos". The Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet No. 2 (1994), one of Yun's three last compositions, is powerful and intense; full of suspense and colorful like fall foliage, it confronts musical memories of youth with the experience of the mature composer. The slow set for the clarinet quintet is unusually moving. The Novellette for Flute and Harp with Violin and Cello (1980) is metaphoric as well: two sets for the big flute frame the three central parts played by the alto flute. Here Yun offers a variation on the conception underlying his Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1977) and develops a parable on the transitory nature of all human action. Suggestions of dream, dance, and ecstasy occur in ever changing configurations. Teile Dich Nacht (Night Divide) for soprano and chamber ensemble (1980), which uses texts by the German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, who escaped the Nazis in Berlin in 1940 to find exile in Sweden, reprimands and appeals, takes issue with injustice, yet carries within it the hope for a better world.
Isang Yun died in Berlin on 3 November 1995; he had no possibility to see South Korea again. The Sonata for Violin and Piano (1991), a late work that he composed while he was ill, seems biographical and leads from a restless and agitated atmosphere to the meditation of inner peace. The work is in two parts, although outwardly written in a one-movement form of about twenty minutes. Each of the two parts is in three sections and each section is in itself tri- or duo-partite. The violin is the leading instrument. Though the piano part is difficult to perform, its function is only to give a discrete support to the linear, melodic development of the violin part. Sometimes the piano is even treated like a percussion instrument, like a rattle or the realistic sound made by a bundle of bells.
The beginning reveals the typical harmonic structures of Yun's late style, with triads that intermingle the characters of major and minor tonality. The first chord combines c sharp minor and E major: c sharp - e - g sharp - b; it is disturbed by the addition of the dissonant pitches d and f.
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1991), beginning (b.1-8)
© Bote & Bock / Boosey & Hawkes
If we compare the beginning of Gasa (1963) with the beginning of the Violin Sonata there might be some similarity concerning general elements of Isang Yun's style, but predominantly, in the Violin Sonata, we find gestures of more dramatic directness and emotional distress. Phrases with a far-reaching gesture, wide intervals (fifths, fourths, octaves), and very intensive dynamic degrees are confronted with shorter inserts of delicate gestures woven of small intervals. Though the first part of the Violin Sonata is twelve minutes in length, there is no real relief or suspension of tension, and the music brings no real development, but rather fragments of a process that stops repeatedly. The voice of the violin is fighting, and though there are many breaks, it does not give up. Musical example 3 shows the end of one such fighting section, then the interlude of the piano "very gentle (dolce)", followed by a new and even more intensive "beginning" for the violin. What Yun had in mind can hardly be expressed through the voice of a single string instrument.
(click to enlarge)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1991), bar 32-39
© Bote & Bock / Boosey & Hawkes
After a long process of dramatization (and new technical means and difficulties like trills, double-stops, etc.) with the already rather reduced vocabulary of late Yun, the music finally comes to a rest and seeks peace in the slow second part (or movement). An extremely reduced setting with very simple chords reminds us of the late Shostakovich, but we may doubt whether this is meant to indicate peace or resignation.
(click to enlarge)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1991), bar 143-148
© Bote & Bock / Boosey & Hawkes
"When I am writing music today, I am concerned with problems other than questions of purity of style or of East and West. I have become more free as a composer, much more free. Whichever way you might understand this: left or right, Eastern or Western. What matters is that I am always there. I am not sure how to put it ... I am a composer named Isang Yun, I am from East Asia and live in Europe." (Yun 1982)
Walter Wolfgang Sparrer, Chairman
International Isang Yun Society, Berlin
www.yun-gesellschaft.de
Photos: by courtesy of the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Art (NCKTPA) http://www.ncktpa.go.kr/eng/index_eng.jsp
20th-Century Timelie (pdf)
