Korean composer Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) was born in Seoul, and has lived in Berlin since 1988. She has been commissioned by major festivals, orchestras, and concert series all around the world. Her music is singularly cosmopolitan, with a wide-ranging sound palette that is evident in today’s #CurtisIsHere video: Allegro ma non troppo, for solo percussion and electronics.

Allegro ma non troppo is a visual piece; one way to think about it is that it’s as much theatrical as it is musical. Its first version, written in 1994, was purely electro-acoustic, woven together electronically out of sound recordings. To create the piece, Unsuk Chin recorded the sound of silk paper, clocks, drops of water, and various percussion instruments. She then subjected those sounds to many electronic transformations and overdubbings, focusing on (as she put it) achieving “the smoothest possible transitions from one colour to the next.”

In 1998, Unsuk Chin revisited Allegro ma non troppo, creating this version for live percussion and tape. Here she imagines “the musical material of the tape is being brought to life and made concrete by the stage actions of the percussionist.” What emerges is a “surreal dialogue” between the live performance and the pre-recorded sounds, at times creating a sense of a “super-instrument,” and always imbuing the physical actions of the performer with a halo of surreal sound.

Unsuk Chin was composer in residence at Curtis in 2015. This performance took place during an Ensemble 20/21 concert deicated to her music in November of that year.

—Nick DiBerardino

Watch the full performance: [ Ссылка ]

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