ISANG YUN IN-BETWEEN

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." 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. 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.