The Korean-born German composer Isang Yun (1917-1995) has been a highly regarded composer in Germany since he began his compositional career with the premieres of Fünf Stücke for piano and Musik für sieben Instrumente in 1959. Yun’s native country also slowly began to realize his significance as a musician after his death. Nonetheless, Yun’s music remains comparatively little known in the United States. There has been much published about him and his music in Germany and Korea where his music is also frequently performed, but there has been almost no significant literature entirely dedicated to him in English; the exceptions include a small number of dissertations written on Yun in the United States. Yun’s innovative aesthetics and compositional approaches, a by-product of his cross-cultural experiences as a post-colonial diasporic intellectual in Europe, should interest more audiences in the U.S. where, in the words of Jeongmee Kim, “multiple ethnicities intermingle resulting in numerous aesthetic hybrids.” Realistically seen, I’ve had two experiences, and I know the practice of both Asian music and European. I am equally at home in both fields. I’m a man living today, and within me is the Asia of the past combined with the Europe of today. My purpose is not an artificial connection, but I’m naturally convinced of the unity of these two elements. For that reason it’s impossible to categorize my music as either European or Asian. I am exactly in the middle. That’s my world and my independent entity.1 - Isang Yun From his childhood in Japanese-occupied Korea throughout his stay in Germany, Yun was always somewhere between the two cultures, East and West, and through this cultural displacement, he created his very own “hybridity” of ideas. 2 But, the problem here is not to look for traces of Korean or European characteristics in his music but to explain how the tension of the two cultures came to shape Yun’s music.
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ABSTRACT Tension of the Cultures “Exile and Creativity” Discovering Korean Pride Globalization Perception of Asian Sounds Hybridity of Cultures Identity as a Minority Dignity over Longing “For Whom Did He Compose?” Conclusion Works Cited
아시아에서 벌어지는 모든 음악활동을 연구합니다.
특히 아시아에서 일어나고 있는 유럽 음악 편중의 음악상황을 아시아음악 중심으로 전환하기 위한 연구와 운동을 합니다. 아시아음악은 아시아인이 가장 잘 연구할 수 있다는 점에서 아시아음악학 연구는 아시아 학자에 의하여 주도되어야 한다고 생각하는 사람들의 모임입니다.
이러한 목적 달성을 위하여 아시아음악의 역사 이론 연주를 연구합니다. 이 연구 성과는 Asian Musicology라는 영문 저널을 발행하고 있습니다.