Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer

Isang Yun

This book is the first pictorial monograph about the Korean-German composer Isang Yun, who was born in southern Korea in 1917 and died in Berlin in 1995. It was first in Germany, with influence from what around 1960 was then the avant-garde that he developed an individual musical language of his own. A little later Yun was drawn into the field of tension between political advocacy motivated by humanitarian, societal concerns and responding to ideological incitement, between imprisonment, torture, and reparation. It was in his compositional work that he found a place of refuge. His music proceeds from the primacy of melody and the sustained tone, which he found preformed in the traditional music of his native Korea and then succeeded in developing heterophonically and spatially. The resultant works were characterized by unusual intensity and rich tone colors.