The Oboe Works of Isang Yun

135 p.Thesis (A.Mus.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.Isang Yun (1917-1995), a Korean composer who lived most of his professional life in Germany, was a musician who pursued his art in the face of political, cultural, and personal turmoil. His solo, chamber, and orchestral works represent an enormous contribution to the oboe repertoire, although these pieces are barely known to most American oboists. This paper analyzes Yun's oboe works in terms of tonal language, formal construction, historical genesis, relationship to East Asian musical thought, and European contexts. Yun wrote music in a Western idiom which was deeply colored by East Asian aesthetics and philosophy. Drawing upon a central idea of Korean traditional music, Yun's treatment of musical tones as living entities developed into a practice he called Hauptton technique. Adeptly fusing this technique with European twelve-tone procedure, Yun produced music of great intensity and richness. Works examined in detail include: Piri (1971); Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Violin (1973); Rondell (1975); Sonata for Oboe, Harp, and Viola (1979); Images (1968); Festlicher Tanz (1988); Blaserquintett (1991); and Quartet for Oboe and Strings (1994). Exploring a total of twenty compositions, this paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive resource for oboists performing Isang Yun's works.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD