Hey everyone! Happy last-week-of-the-semester!
This week, I want to focus on the fresh, ethereal music of Unsuk Chin. Chin is a South Korean composer
born in 196 and currently resides in Berlin, Germany. She studied with Ligeti in Hamburg, which is quite evident in her writing style. Her musical language is uncompromisingly vivid and modern.
I decided to take a closer look at her piano etudes because I’m already familiar with and quite enjoy her piano concerto and violin concerto—two beautiful pieces of music everyone should listen to! These etudes cover a vast amount of musical territory for only six pieces. Chin even explores what granular synthesis, a digital process, might sound like at the piano.
A frequent theme of Chin’s music is the exploration of the harmonic series–and this is particularly evident in her Etude No. 1. You can hear how she outlines the partials of the C overtone series in the opening bars, and all her material for the etude is derived from those explorations. The influence of Ligeti is also quite apparent in these etudes; I notice it most in how she organizes her rhythms.
The German term “sequenzen” serves as the title for Etude No. 2. This translates to sequence of course, but Chin’s use of sequences are not limited to traditional harmonic or melodic sequences, rather they are used as a means for generating a wide variety of musical material. The initial motive is continually altered via ornamentation, diminution, and expansion. Chin creates interest by varying the registers and articulations used for each iteration of the motive. The piece unfolds as an arc; it swells to a climax then fades away through dynamics, tempo, and rhythms.
The Toccata, or Etude No. 5, is certainly my favorite of the set—the opening bars are particularly charming, and as in Etude No. 1, these measures reflect her interest in the harmonic series. Somehow this fifth etude reminds me of an inverted version of Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata. Chin centers the piece around a C major-minor 7th chord. In addition to the components of a C major-minor 7th chord (which are also the lower partials of the C overtone series), Chin uses harmony derived from the upper partials of the C overtone series quite a bit in this etude. I love her harmonic language here—it feels organic and fresh at the same time.
Etude No. 6, “Grains” confirms Chin’s fundamentally organicist approach to writing music. The piece is structured around the electronic music idea of granular synthesis–where small cells of sound are digitally manipulated, edited, and ultimately synthesized together. “Grains” is organized as a theme and variations—the “theme” states each “grain,” while the rest of the piece goes on to develop and synthesize these materials in a wide variety of ways.
To wrap things up, here’s a sketch from one of Chin’s compositions. I always love seeing inside the notebooks of other composers and gaining insight into their artistic process. You can listen to Chin’s music here on the her kind playlist!
semester ends)!
This week, I had the pleasure of researching and listening to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina—a composer whose studies took place in Soviet Russia. Born in 1931, Gubaidulina is considered one of the foremost Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century.
She makes use of simple ascending and descending scales in layers and layers of canons with the upper voices of woodwinds. The piano’s melody returns, and strings enter in the low register, echoing chords we’d heard earlier in the piano–then echoing the scales we’d just heard in the woodwinds. This time, richer and fuller, the scalar gesture opens up to a brief bassoon/piano duet which evolves into a call-and-response between the piano and the orchestra.
or as a metaphor in line with the “Introitus” title, ascending from the secular to the sacred at the beginning of a religious event. This idea of ascent is also apparent in smaller motives throughout the piece; particularly in the sweeping gesture of the strings that serves as a pillar Gubaidulina keeps returning to. There’s a constant rise and fall that drives forward the concerto until we arrive at the end, suspended above.
Nguyen uses the poems titled Triptych and Gyotaku to experiment with form—there are three of each. Gyotaku is a traditional Japanese method of printing fish that dates back to the mid-1800s. The Gyotaku poems vary widely in how they’re arranged, but I chose the one below because I love its simple elegance—and again, there are themes of sound and music present. Nguyen’s poems sound and feel like music themselves; in this collection, each poem is its own brief elegy. You can see an example of it off to the side, and a sample of her take on the art form below.
Most of you are likely no stranger to Ada Limón. She was named 24th poet laureate of the United States back in July, becoming the first Latina to do so. I decided to talk about her here (despite her popularity) because her poems provide a respite from the cold weather we’ll be facing soon—critics have often described them so:
Her poems are best digested in the larger context of their collection, so do check them out if you feel inspired to do so. All the poems featured in this post come from her book “Bright Dead Things”, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection centers around Limón’s move from New York City to Kentucky for her love of a man—and the rewilding that came along with it. The racehorses, open fields, metal, and the moon to make us feel like we’re out there with her, all while exploring themes of death, identity, and how we carry on through loss.
