Yun, I :: Images

In 1968, while Isang Yun was imprisoned in Seoul, the South Korean regime gave him permission to compose. During that time Yun worked successively on three pieces. In an unheated and drafty prison cell he completed the one-act opera Butterfly Widow (1967/68), which he had begun previously in Berlin. Upon its completion, Yun wrote Riul [Law] for clarinet and piano (1968) and Images for flute, oboe, violin and piano in a guarded hospital room into which he been transferred following a physical breakdown.

Lasting approximately twenty minutes, Images is based on a twelve-tone row and displays, on a larger scale, a two-part structure whereby a rest in all instruments functions as a caesura. Each part may be subdivided respectively into three formal sections. Within these sections, Yun tends to articulate relatively static sheets of sound (in several phases), developing them to a turning point or point of culmination before leading them back into the lower registers. Within this process, Yun very often proceeds from a paired yet heterophonic grouping of voices and, corresponding to the character of the instruments, confronts the gestures in the strings with those in the winds. Individualized figures emerge repeatedly out of the collective stream of sound: solistic, monologue passages and, occasionally, dialogue-like duet passages. With each new level of development, there are rivaling and diverging, but also unifying and merging sound processes.

Parts only. Score available upon special request.