Isang Yun in-between: An analytical study of selected violin compositions

The Korean-born German composer Isang Yun (1917–1995) has been a highly regarded composer in Germany since he began his compositional career with the premiers of Fünf Stücke for piano and Musik für sieben Instrumente in 1959. Yun’s native country also slowly began to realize his significance as a musician after his death. Nonetheless, Yun’s music remains comparatively little-known in the United States. There has been much published about him and his music in Germany and Korea where his music is also frequently performed, but there has been almost no significant literature entirely dedicated to him in English; the exceptions include a small number of dissertations written on Yun in the United States. Yun’s innovative aesthetics and compositional approaches, a by-product of his cross-cultural experiences as a post-colonial diasporic intellectual in Europe, should interest more audiences in the U.S. where, in the words of Jeongmee Kim, “multiple ethnicities intermingle resulting in numerous aesthetic hybrids.” In this research, detailed analysis of selected violin compositions by Yun including Gasa for violin and piano (1963), Königliches Thema for solo violin after The Musical Offering by J.S. Bach (1976), and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1983–86) will be provided. Through study of these works, each of which represents different periods and genres within Yun’s overall corpus, I map out his stylistic development and the social and cultural contexts that fostered it. Informed by these analyses, I explore how the stylistic changes supported his unique ideas of integrating two cultures, East and West