ISANG YUN
(born 1917 in Tongyeong, Korea; died 1995 in Berlin)

Sonata for Violin and Piano (1991)
(no movement markings)

As the Sonata for Violin and Piano by Isang Yun begins, listeners immediately experience a sense of urgency and confrontation. The two instruments interact dramatically with a continuously growing intensity. At the first climax, the violin shrieks, and the piano dictates. The protagonist (the violin) is losing its mind; the antagonist (the piano) enforces the atmosphere of violence.

One can argue that music shapes a musician's life, or conversely, that life experiences shape a composer's music. An examination of the interplay of Yun's personal and political background confirms that both arguments are true and valid.

Yun was born in Korea at the end of World War I and came of age there at the height of the brutal colonization by imperialist Japan. He became a political activist in his youth and remained one throughout his life. Liberation, democracy, and unification of the Korean Peninsula were the most pressing issues for him. He was abducted and tortured twice for his political activism, first by the occupying Japanese military, and later, in the 60s, by the Korean secret police during the military dictatorship of General Park Chung-hee. Yun was given a death sentence that was subsequently lifted as a result of pressure exerted by the international artistic community, led by Herbert von Karajan and Igor Stravinsky.

Yun was already an established and decorated composer in Korea nearing the age of forty when he first traveled to Europe to study in Paris and later in Berlin. Yun said, "I was born in Korea and project that culture, but I developed musically in Europe. I don't need to organize or separate elements of the cultures. I am a unity, a simple person. It's a synthesis." During an interview in 1986, he also contemplated the stylistic origins of his music. While aware that his music might sound "foreign" to European ears, he did not attribute that strictly to his Korean heritage. He pointed out the atonality and rhetorical aspect that is central to his works and commented that he did not write for Korean instruments. Nonetheless, he concluded, "what my music contains in a concrete sense, in terms of its stylistic elements, you definitely have to investigate to find out where that all comes from."

Indeed, connections have been made by musicologists and analysts between Korean traditional (or Chinese/Korean) court music and instruments and Yun's music. Specifically in the Violin Sonata, references are made to Piri, the Korean oboe-like instrument, as the origin of the numerous trills in the work and to a calligraphic brush stroke as a way to visualize the stroke of the violin bow. Yun never hears a note as stagnant but as full of changing expression and energy.

Structurally, the Violin Sonata, which was written in his final years, follows a programmatic and possibly autobiographical line, which is also the form he uses in his String Quartet No. 5 (1990). After the first climax, sweetness and bird songs take prominence albeit briefly. While this section remains rather lyrical for some time, the articulation of the notes continues to bring increasing momentum through the festive section in which the violin, the protagonist of the musical process, is thrown into the maelstrom of life. Searching for liberation, he experiences highs and lows. He eventually finds inner peace in the stillness in the three-part final section in which he accepts the complexities of injustice and the powerlessness of being. This is by no means a happy ending; rather, it is a recognition of the tragedy and the inner tranquility gained through 'having lived.' The Sonata fades away with two deep sighs.