Works
Unsuk Chin doesn't regard her music as belonging to any specific culture. Chin names Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Anton Webern, Iannis Xenakis, and György Ligeti, among others, as 20th century composers of special importance for her. Chin regards her working experience with Electronic music and her preoccupation with Balinese Gamelan as influential for her work. The colour of her music might perhaps be explained through Chin's affinity for non-European music. However, Chin has also clearly been influenced by musical modernism. In her orchestral work Miroirs des temps Chin has also used compositional concepts of Medieval composers, such as Machaut and Ciconia, by employing and evolving techniques such as musical palindromes and crab canons.
Characteristic for Unsuk Chin's music is a fascination with virtuosity, which is reflected in the difficulty of her works. Virtuosity is an important feature also in Chin's electronic pieces such as Gradus ad infinitum for 8 pianos. In general, Chin doesn't prefer to make a strong distinction between electronic and instrumental music. A dominant aspect of Chin's work is playfulness. In some pieces, theatrical actions are employed: e.g. in Allegro ma non troppo for percussion and tape, in Cantatrix Sopranica for voices and ensemble and in Double Bind? for violin and electronics.
The texts of Chin's vocal music are often based on experimental poetry, and occasionally they are self-referential, employing techniques such as acrostics, anagrams and palindromes, all of which are also reflected in the compositional structure. Consequently, Chin has set music to poems by writers such as Inger Christensen, Harry Mathews, Gerhard Rühm or Unica Zürn into music, and the title of Cantatrix Sopranica is derived from a Nonsens treatise by Georges Perec. However, in Kalá Chin has also composed works with less experimental texts by writers such as Gunnar Ekelöf, Paavo Haavikko, and Arthur Rimbaud, and Troerinnen is based on a play by Euripides.
Playful aspects are dominant also in Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland, which is based on Lewis Carroll's classic. The opera's libretto was written by David Henry Hwang and the composer. The Munich production, which has been released on DVD by Unitel, was directed by Achim Freyer, and it was selected 'Premiere of the Year' by an international critics' poll, which was conducted in 2007 by the German opera magazine "Opernwelt".
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