Unsuk Chin

„Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely,
„and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 12

The Music of Unsuk Chin: Transcultural Kaleidoscopes of Sound and Orchestral Illusion Machines

Virtually every review of Unsuk Chin’s compositions immediately homes in on her music’s most impressive qualities – its immediacy, sensuality and vividness. Glistening and sparkling, gleaming and flickering, its polyphonic instrumental textures shift and metamorphose, giving rise to constellations of sound that astonish us again and again. After 300 years of orchestral music, this is a feat worthy of admiration in and of itself. But what makes Unsuk Chin’s compositions so very special cannot be broken down solely to the dazzling surfaces and seductions of her art of instrumentation. Rather, it has to do with the complexity and multidimensionality of the means she employs – their ambiguity and imaginative potential, the interplay of construction and dynamic expression, of solidity and movement, of obvious beauty and latent inscrutability. All the more so because in Chin’s concept of sound, colour and structure are two sides of the same compositional coin.

The large orchestra is unmistakably the composer’s favourite and most effective medium. Undaunted by contemporary music’s predilection for fragments, Chin has for decades now elicited from the orchestra an energy and richness of sound that only few current composers can match. One of her music’s outstanding qualities is its ability to steer clear both of aesthetic trends and of commercial superficiality. Unsuk Chin’s speech at the 2005 Arnold Schönberg Prize award ceremony in Vienna formulates one of her key artistic premises: that “complexity and communication need not be incommensurable variables.”

For more than 30 years, Unsuk Chin has kept a noticeable distance to the music business and its institutions. The reasons for this lie in her manner of working among other things. Chin is not a prolific composer, but takes her time, scrupulously honing even the tiniest complexes of sound to translate her imaginings as precisely as possible into something that can be experienced by the senses. This is conspicuously at odds with the demands of the annual round of festivals and its commissions. But Chin’s unhurried creative process has not detracted from her international success, which first took off not in Germany, but in the United Kingdom and France and is closely associated with the conductors George Benjamin and Kent Nagano.