T hough some points of contact with the theatrical surrealism of Ligeti’s ‘Aventures/Nouvelles’ might be detected, ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’ gives much more emphasis to wit and exuberance than to menace. The third movement, ‘Die Spielregel—strawkcurtieZ’ (Zeitruckwarts - reversed time) is a dazzling scherzo with appropriate palindromic elements. But the most sheerly beautiful music is in the fifth movement, ‘Domifare S’, whose beguilingly repetitive descents are magically offset by the simple device of destabilising a bass line, which is in any case slightly out-of-tune. A similar process is applied to the initially stable, inflected Bs at the start of the last movement.”F or the relatively apolitical Unsuk Chin it is not a question as to how frequently performed or widely noted a piece may become. Instead, what matters most is that it be performed empathetically and be understood, no matter how esoteric its content or intentions.
— Arnold Whitall, Musical Times, 2000.
A nalysis assumes that music is a metaphor for ‘literary’ meaning—analysis aims to clarify relationships, customarily using methods that closely parallel ‘literary’ theory.
A nd the Unsuk Chin piece performed at Lincoln Center last night is nominally ‘literary’. The texts that informed/inspired Akrostichon-Wortspiel come from Michael Ende’s ‘The Endless Story’ and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. The selected texts have been redacted so as to juxtapose consonants and vowels to form novel, surprising patterns. In some places (e.g., Mvt. 3) the letters comprising the words are reversed, playing tricks with the things signified. It is a different sort of fantasy—entirely different from the ‘grotesqueries’ of Ligeti’s ‘Mysteries of the Macabre’, which was the first piece of the program.
Y et, analyzing ‘Akrostichon’ in a ‘literary’ way seems wrong somehow. And why always draw parallels between Unsuk Chin and Ligeti or Lutosławski or others, anyway? To me, seems like a ‘stretch’. Not that resemblances are hard to find; they are not. But the ‘stretch’ has for me more to do with the motivations that seem to underlie the music and why it came to be written. For example, I enjoyed the intensely physical passages in ‘Akrostichon’, where modernist and classical idioms violently oppose each other.
K ommt der öffentliche Druck, das ist sehr schwierig, die Qualität zu halten, die Öffentlichkeit will immer mehr, man versucht die Gunst der Stunde zu nutzen...
[The public pressure... it is very difficult to maintain real quality... the public wants more and more, of whatever is en vogue...].”
— Unsuk Chin, interview with Hanno Ehrler, Berlin, 2008.
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