Unsuk Chin

Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul. She studied composition with Sukhi Kang at Seoul National University and won several international prizes in her early 20s. She studied with György Ligeti in Hamburg 1985-1988. Ligeti dismissed Chin's early pieces as unoriginal, which led her to stop composing for a few years. In 1988 Unsuk Chin moved to Berlin, where she worked for years as a freelance composer at the Electronic music studio of the Technical University of Berlin, realizing seven works. Her first large orchestral piece, Troerinnen, was premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in 1990. In 1991, her breakthrough work Acrostic Wordplay was premiered by the Nieuw Ensemble - since then it has been performed in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Chin's collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which has led to several commissions from the latter, started in 1994 with Fantaisie mecanique. Since 1995, Unsuk Chin is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. In 1999, Chin began an artistic collaboration with Kent Nagano, who has since premiered five of her works.

Unsuk Chin doesn't regard her music as belonging to any specific culture. Chin names Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy, Webern, Xenakis, and Ligeti, among others, as 20th century composers of special importance for her. Chin regards her working experience with Electronic music and her preoccupation with Balinese Gamelan as influental for her work. The colour of her music might perhaps be explained through Chin's affinity for non-European music. However, Chin has also clearly been influenced by musical modernism.[citation needed] In her orchestral work Miroirs des temps Chin has also used compositional concepts of Medieval composers, such as Machaut and Ciconia, by employing and evolving techniques such as musical palindromes and crab canons.

Characteristic for Unsuk Chin's music is a fascination with virtuosity, which is reflected in the difficulty of her works. Virtuosity is an important feature also in Chin's electronic pieces such as Gradus ad infinitum for 8 pianos. In general, Chin doesn't prefer to make a strongl distinction between electronic and instrumental music.[citation needed] A dominant aspect of Chin's work is playfulness. In some pieces, theatrical actions are employed: e.g. in Allegro ma non troppo for percussion and tape, in Cantatrix Sopranica for voices and ensemble and in Double Bind? for violin and electronics.

source info : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsuk_Chin

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