A. Kori Hill
Unsuk Chin is a composer based in Berlin, Germany. She was born and grew up in Seoul, Korea, where she studied piano and initially wanted to be a concert pianist. But her family didn’t have enough money to get her piano, let alone keep paying for lessons. Her teacher recommended that she consider composition. If she couldn’t get regular access to a piano, she could get regular access to the music.
Chin would go to the library and literally study the scores of Brahms, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, pouring over them for hours. She applied to the Seoul National University twice before she was accepted into the composition program. There, she studied with Sukhi Kang, one of the earliest Korean composers to write a work of electronic music. She continued her studies in Germany from 1985–1988, where she was a student of György Ligeti, a major avant-garde composer.
Chin writes concertos, orchestral works, stuff for piano, and vocal and choral works. Her style is avant-garde and experimental; she doesn’t use a lot of standard tonality or focus on developing a melody. Instead, she’s very interested in how different parts interlock and create new textures and looking at practices and techniques common in the Middle Ages.
One of these pieces is Miroirs des temps (Time Mirror). Scored for alto, two tenors, bass, and orchestra, the work is inspired by the idea of mirroring: looking to the past for inspiration; looking to how a musical phrase can reflect itself when turned upside down or flipped – a musical palindrome.
A palindrome is where you take a word and flip it. It’s the same principle in music: you take a musical phrase or melody and flip it! But Chin doesn’t state the original theme and then the flipped theme; she layers the original with the flipped theme, so they’re played at the same time! That is a crab canon.
The third movement has several examples of a crab canon; and the whole Miroirs des temps was inspired by a medieval musical palindrome. The text used in this movement comes from “Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin,” a rondeau by 14th century composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut. Machaut’s rondeau is one of the earliest examples of a musical palindrome, with three parts that are related to each other. Chin takes it to the next level and then some: sometimes this movement has eighteen different parts!
Listen to the soprano recorder and piccolo, the tenor recorder and counter-tenor, and bassoon and second tenor in the second section of Movement III. How would you describe the textures created when Chin uses a crab canon? Is it only polyphonic, or is one part more prominent than the other? How do these parts interact with others in the texture?
Even better: pick out five notes, some rhythms and a meter and create a melody. Now flip that melody and align it with the original. What works and what doesn’t when you play it together? What do you need to change to get the sound and rhythmic interlocking you want?
