Unsuk Chin in focus: Meditations & mechanics

Musical Times, Spring 2000 by Whittall, Arnold

ARNOLD WHITTALL SurVeyS the fastidious oeuvre of a Korean composer currently based in Berlin

THE FIRST PERFORMANCE of Unsuk Chin's Miroirs des temps for four singers (the Hilliard Ensemble) and orchestra, on 7 November 1999, was a disconcerting occasion. As a composition about death and the passing of time, it was dutifully framed by two crowd-pleasers, Saint-Saens's Danse macabre and Faure's Requiem. Both of these are quite at home in London's Royal Festival Hall, but Chin's work is far less so, using substantial instrumental forces with great restraint, and creating the kind of meditative atmosphere, needing closelyfocused listening, that cries out for a smaller, more flexibly structured performance space. The rich resonance of a large church would not have been suitable, either. Here was a score that seemed to need the relative intimacy of a workshop environment in order to communicate effectively with an audience.

There are disconcerting aspects to the score of Miroirs des temps, too. The title's indication of an interest in mirroring takes Chin straight to Machaut, and the third of her six movements works with the rondeau `Ma fin est mon commencement'. Two of the others offer arrangements of `early' sources - a fourteenth-century Cypriot love song, and Johannes Ciconia's `Merci, o morte': and there are various palindromic relations, for example, between the first and last movements, and within the fourth movement, described in the score as an `eleven-voice crab canon'. The fact that the musical style employed is not simply cod-medieval is signalled with the very first vocal phrase, whose mirrorings generate considerable chromaticism and dissonance (ex.l): and the instrumentation involves such exotic sounds as double bassoon, tuba, cimbalom and harmonium. Yet Chin is not interested in melodramatic oppositions between past and present. The music's unobtrusively even flow of time suggests that she is more concerned to establish, and then sustain, expressive states than to shape or transform them with decisive intensifications or juxtapositions. There is more of ritual than drama here, and, as a result, Miroirs des temps has less to do with traditional forms of Western vocal music than might at first appear to be the case. While Chin's reliance on repetition suggests a not altogether convincing sympathy with minimalist routines, the music's intricate technical details have little in common with more fashionably static meditative procedures - whether written for the Hilliard Ensemble or other groups. UNSUK Chin, born in Korea in 1961, moved to Germany in 1985, and studied with Ligeti: she is a long-term resident of Berlin. In many of her works before Miroirs des temps, certain parallels with the ideas and music of her teacher can easily be found: for example, Ligeti's delight in the nonsense world of Lewis Carroll is mirrored in the materials Chin chose for Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991-93). In these `seven scenes from fairy-tales for soprano and ensemble' there are also hints of the later Ligeti the Violin Concerto, in particular - in the simple malleability of the material, and the amusing yet delicate fantasy with which text and music combine. That is not to say that the sound resources employed are unsophisticated. In asking for piccolo/alto flute, clarinet, harp, violin and double bass to be `tuned anywhere between a quarter and sixth of a tone higher than concert pitch. Each instrument may take a different tuning', Chin is working with the kind of refinements in pitching that come most easily to the electro-acoustic composer. These refinements undoubtedly enhance the sense of subtle blurring, of reality and fantasy present side-by-side, that obtains throughout. The opening of the first movement, `Versteckspiel' (Hide and seek), shows how these processes blend in with Chin's normal technique of developing variation, a succession of related statements gradually elaborating the sonic spectrum of the first `moment' (ex.2).

The basic texts for Akrostichon-Wortspiel, the composer writes, come from The Endless Story by Michael Ende and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. The selected texts have been worked upon in different ways: sometimes the consonants and vowels have been randomly joined together. At other times [and this anticipates Miroirs des temps] the words have been read backwards so that only the symbolic meaning remains. In practice, however, that `symbolic meaning' might be thought to matter less than the general atmosphere of fantasy consistent with the fact that each of the seven pieces `portrays a different situation or emotional state, as described in the fairy tales, ranging from the bright to the grotesque'.

Chin also points out that `all seven pieces are constructed around a controlling pitch centre': the beginning shown in ex.2 makes this clear. The solo soprano is encouraged to fluctuate between the normal and modified tuning systems used by the instruments, `depending upon which she is aware of at any time' - and this requirement, coupled with the extended registral range of the vocal line, seems likely to ensure relatively infrequent performance, even though the music has considerable aural appeal. Though some points of contact with the theatrical surrealism of Ligeti's Aventures/Nouvelles aventures might be detected, Akrostichon-Wortspiel gives much more emphasis to wit and exuberance than to menace. The third movement, `Die Spielregel - strawkcur tieZ' (Zeitruckwarts - reversed time) is a dazzling scherzo with appropriate palindromic elements. But the most sheerly beautiful music is in the fifth movement, `Domifare S', whose beguilingly repetitive descents are magically offset by the simple device of destabilising a bass line which is in any case slightly `out of tune' (ex.3 shows the ending). A similar process is applied to the initially stable inflected Bs at the start of the last movement.