YUN, ISANG  BIOGRAPHY

The Korean composer Isang Yun (Yun Yi Sang) was born in 1917, the son of the distinguished Korean poet Yun Ki Hyon. He showed an early interest in music, and studied at Osaka Conservatory with the Japanese composer Tomojirō Ikenouchi, himself the son of a leading Japanese poet and trained in French musical traditions. Isang Yun's participation in secret anti-Japanese activities in the war led to his imprisonment in 1943 and to a subsequent period in hiding. After the war he was able to play a part in the revival of Korean culture, teaching in Chung Mu, Pusan and Seoul. An award from the last city allowed him to travel to Paris, where he studied from 1956 to 1957 with Pierre Revel, and thereafter for a year at the Berlin Musikhochschule with Boris Blacher, Josef Rufer and Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling. The meetings at Darmstadt provided a formative influence, and there were performances of his works there, and in Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin. By 1964 he was again in Berlin, on the invitation of the Ford Foundation, and in 1966 his orchestral composition Rak (Ritual Music) was given its premire at Donaueschingen, an occasion that secured Yun's international reputation. His abduction to Seoul by agents of the South Korean rgime of Chung Hee Park in 1967 led to international protest at his imprisonment and he was eventually, in 1969, granted an amnesty and allowed to return to Germany as a political refugee. He taught at the Hanover Musikhochschule and from 1970 at the parallel institution in Berlin. In Germany he held a position of some distinction, receiving a number of awards, while in North Korea he was honoured by the establishment of an institute bearing his name. He died in Berlin in 1995.

Isang Yun did much to encourage contemporary music in North and South Korea, and his students included members of the younger generation of Korean composers, who worked with him in Hanover and in Berlin. His aim as a composer was to provide a synthesis of East and West, developing essentially Korean ideas through Western instruments and avant-garde techniques. From the 1960s he began to refine a system of composition that he derived from oriental heterophony, a procedure that leads to monophony, and, in the music of Isang Yun, to what he described as 'Haupttne', an essentially linear approach, as he pointed out. He explains how traditionally every tone starts with a grace note and when it is established it gradually takes on vibrato, leading to an explosion of sound, a final ornament and a continuation on another level. At the same time his work was influenced by his political ideals and desire for Korean unification, by elements of Korean and Chinese culture and Taoist philosophy. His many compositions include four operas, the first two based on the work of the twelfth century Yuan dynasty poet and playwright Ma Chi Yuan.