백병동의 Passacaglia for Solo Violin(1997)을 통해 본 음조직의 주제적 가능성에 관한 고찰

In 20<SUP>th</SUP> century music, it is not infrequent to find a work full of empty logic and necessity, excluding sensitivity or emotion. The composer Byung-dong Paik, however, has been taking a somewhat conservative attitude toward music which lays more significance on content or substance than on mere pursuit of a technical novelty.<BR> As a melodist, he creates lyricism and fluent streams by making instruments sing spontaneously, whatever sort of music he composes. `Line (melody)`, `various changes of lines`, and `linear flow`, thus, are the intrinsic factors of his music. Lines presented in his works, different from `melody` of western music, are defined as `self-sufficiency of an individual tone itself` formed through `various changes of an individual tone itself`. As strokes of a brush in Oriental painting make diverse expressions such as thin (solo), thick (piling up of instruments), subdued (consonance), intense (severe dissonance), straight, winding, soft, strong, etc., so his musical lines draw the traces of a tone that one is born and goes through all sorts of changes.<BR> His tone material is based on the following three methods: `sound produced by contrapuntal combinations of individual lines`, `control of tension by changing grades of dissonances, density, and register`, and `convergence and diffusion of tones, mainly used since the 1990s`. In his pitch system, notes are chosen by intuition, which takes the `influences of individual pitches on integrated sound` into consideration, beyond a consistent logic.<BR> Concerning the structure of pieces, his music is close to a `sound-organism founded on intuition and emotion` rather than a `logical sound-construction` with a rational and precise structure. More essentially, `confrontation and unity of dualistic elements` such as YIN and YANG, static and dynamic, passive and active, East and West, build the fundamental structure of his music.<BR> More intuition and emotion than logicality, elastic flow rather than structural precision, and inner change and its stream rather than surface gesture, probably he inherits the spirit of music from Expressionism and Impressionism.<BR> `Passacaglia for Solo Violin`, composed in 1997 for the DONGA International Music Competition, is comprised of a theme, 17 variations and a closing section (recurrence of theme), The essential factor of the theme is `horizontal and vertical augmentation of intervals`, which is represented around the central pitch D: a chromatic motion from d` to ab`, a tritone distant, with repetition of d`/d” (a vertical extension of intervals), is followed by a downward motion from ab” to b, enlarging the interval gradually (a horizontal extension of intervals between the adjacent tones). This Passacaglia is focused on enlarging intervals, but he takes a step further not to get stuck by it but to adjust it variously to a musical need. By this work, the composer is suggesting a method of balancing `the emotional need and th