Korean Composer Unsuk Chin Wins Grawemeyer Award

[Ralph]

From The Telegraph:

Success brings no rest from the intervals
(Filed: 28/07/2005)

Korean composer Unsuk Chin has just won the classical world's biggest prize. Ivan Hewett met her

It might seem in poor taste to describe an oriental composer as "inscrutable", but in the case of Unsuk Chin that really is the mot juste.

Her music may be entrancingly direct in its bright, bejewelled colours, and fascinating in the way it makes familiar chords and patterns seem new. But apart from an occasional moment of childlike savagery, it never drops its pose of aloof, glittering mystery.

As for the composer, she greets me with a distracted smile and a stiff handshake, and has the air of a person desperate not to be noticed, a feeling borne out by her response to my opening gambit about the Grawemeyer Award, the musical world's richest prize for composers, which Chin won last year.

Never before had a Korean composer made it so big in the West, and back home it was headline news. I suggest that after her long exile in Berlin, where she went in 1986 to study on a German government scholarship, she could now return to her roots and enjoy her celebrity status. The idea horrifies her.

"Oh no," she says, with a staccato laugh. "I don't want all that pressure, being looked up to by all those people who want to admire me." Winning the Grawemeyer marked Chin's transition from promising newcomer to established name. Commissions now come from big-league institutions; now she's working on an opera for the Los Angeles Opera based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

A few years ago she married the Finnish pianist Maris Gothoni and has a three year-old son. So she could afford to relax a little. But there's no sign of relaxation in the neat figure sitting bolt upright before me. She seems permanently on edge, perhaps because the struggle to achieve her present status was so protracted and so full of setbacks.

Born in 1961, she showed an early talent for music, but her parents couldn't afford piano lessons. A chance remark from her music teacher sowed the idea in her mind that being a composer was the best musical career of all. "I read books to learn about harmony and counterpoint. I was always listening to music - even in class I would play music over in my head and work out all the intervals I could hear."

At Seoul University she discovered modern music by Stockhausen and Nono, and naïvely imitated it, not realising just how dated it had become. She was in for a rude awakening when she went to Berlin to study with that great magician among the modernist masters, György Ligeti.

"He told me everything I had written was rubbish, it was completely lacking in personality, and that I had to start again. He was really very tough with me. It was only years later I realised everything he said was right."

The immediate effect was traumatic; Chin didn't compose anything acoustic for three years, instead burying herself in a study of electronic music.

The breakthrough came in 1993 with Acrostic Word-play, a piece that showed her teacher's fondness for startling juxtapositions and fastidiously worked surfaces, but with a distinct personal voice. "My music comes out of my dreams," she says. Chin's fondness for dreamlike grotesquerie is revealed in her obsession with Lewis Carroll, a writer she has loved since childhood.

Her new piece, snagS & Snarls, is an offshoot of the Carroll work she is writing for LA Opera. Chin was planning to expand it for the Proms performance before her summer work-schedule was interrupted by her mother's illness.

I say how much simpler it seems than most of her pieces. "Simpler on the surface, yes, but there is complexity underneath. People think I am interested in sound, but for me nothing can be just sound or gesture. There has to be a real musical thought connecting the sounds."

I suddenly realise it's time to go, and as Unsuk Chin smiles and shakes my hand, she seems more relaxed. She's free to go back to her privacy and anonymity, and those sounds reverberating in her head.
# Unsuk Chin's 'snagS & Snarls' can be heard in the BBC Prom on Aug 10.