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    Unsuk Chin on the Violin Concerto She Swore She’d Never Write

    Unsuk Chin was inspired by Leonidas Kavakos to return to the genre, and the result comes to Carnegie Hall on Monday.The 21st century has been a strong one for violin concertos. Think Jennifer Higdon, whose neo-Romantic showpiece for Hilary Hahn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. And Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Jörg Widmann (twice) and John Adams (the same).And also Unsuk Chin, whose exceptionally difficult, alluringly colorful 2001 concerto brought her prominence and won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004.That work, which still enchants, now has a successor, the Violin Concerto No. 2, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”). Despite the South Korean-born, Ligeti-taught Chin’s reluctance to write a second concerto for any instrument, she decided to make an exception for the violinist Leonidas Kavakos — who had met her but barely knew her music before she asked to write for him.After having its premiere delayed by the pandemic, the work was unveiled by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. It arrived in the United States last week for performances with another of its commissioners, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which joins Kavakos to perform the work under Andris Nelsons at Carnegie Hall on Monday, alongside Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” (That ensemble gives a concert performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” at Carnegie the following night.)Pages from the manuscript of the new concerto, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”).Unsuk ChinHeard in Boston on March 4, Chin’s concerto is striking in the intensity of its demands on Kavakos and the novel breadth of the palette it invites the orchestra to play with, both of which are typical traits of her works. Also impressive is the sense of narrative it creates over half an hour as it builds out a motif of just five notes: a flourish of three harmonics that settles down to two more tones.It’s entirely different from Chin’s earlier violin concerto, but equally powerful, and another worthy addition to the growing list of contemporary contributions to its genre.Speaking by phone from Berlin, Chin spoke about the inspiration behind the work, and particularly about its opening page. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Since your first violin concerto, you have written several concertos for other instruments. Has your thinking about the concerto as a genre changed at all, in these intervening two decades?Before my first violin concerto I wrote my piano concerto, which for me is also a very important work. They were not written for a certain soloist; they were very abstract, written for the instrument, rather than a person. Then I wrote my cello concerto for Alban Gerhardt and “Su,” my sheng concerto, for Wu Wei. I also wrote a clarinet concerto for Kari Kriikku.So my musical thinking changed a little bit because I became interested in musical personalities. Before that I didn’t have so much contact with musicians. I thought about my musical ideas in my mind in a very abstract way and then wrote the pieces.But this second violin concerto is again another turning point for me, because I was really enthusiastic about Leonidas’s playing, and it was something I’d never heard before. He plays music at an absolute level.How does what you admire in his playing translate into the concerto?I know all Leonidas’s repertoire, but especially his Beethoven concerto and all the sonatas. For me, it was a completely new kind of interpretation, really convincing and really strong. Through Leonidas’s playing, I rediscovered Beethoven’s music. Very often Beethoven’s materials and themes are banal, very simple, not very interesting, but he made huge artworks out of these small cells, small motifs. Then I thought, OK, I will take some very small material and try to go deeper.The music is quite different from all my other concertos. In my other pieces I have lots of ideas and a lot of colors and many movements, but this piece is just one movement, the longest one-movement piece I’ve written. The basic material is also extremely small.The first page of the published score of the concerto, which begins with a five-note motif for the solo violin, alone.Boosey & HawkesWe hear that material right at the start of the piece, for violin alone. Where does this motif go over the course of the work?The cell in total is five notes, but the first three notes are a kind of grace note; the main notes are the two after that. At the beginning they are the same note, but soon after, it changes. A semitone comes from the first cell.This small cell, or fragment, is permanently repeated through the whole piece, but every time with a different face. Sometimes it’s very melodic, Romantic; sometimes it sounds tragic; sometimes it sounds like abstract architecture. It is always the same thing, but in different layers, with different faces. It goes from beginning to end, but there is also abrupt change.A lot of concertos pit the orchestra against the soloist, but I didn’t get the sense that is what you were aiming for here.In this concerto the most important thing is the solo violin. The orchestra sometimes gives the violinist different colors, but it is mostly supporting the violin — except in one section near the middle, where everyone is doing their own thing and the soloist does not get any support from the orchestra. That is a huge fight between him and the orchestra.Previously you had banned yourself from writing more than one concerto for a given instrument. You have now broken that rule once; can we expect you to return to the piano or cello?I don’t think so. This is a very special, exceptional case. I don’t think I will be able to write a second piano concerto, even a second cello concerto. But you never know. Maybe in 20 years. More

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    Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

    For all their shared experiences, each of these five artists has a unique story of struggles and triumphs.Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.Tan DunMusic is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.Du Yun”If I’m a spokesperson,” Du Yun said, “it’s for my own voice.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOne thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.Bright ShengWhen someone asks Bright Sheng whether he’s a Chinese or American composer, he responds, “100 percent both.”Nora Tam/South China Morning Post, via Getty ImagesWhen I left China, it was a time of economic and, in a different way, cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. But my agenda was to try to learn Western music and become the best pianist, conductor and composer I could be. I was fortunate to meet Leonard Bernstein, and I was under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I’m well-versed in both cultures.There has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were Asian people running orchestras? Yes, of course. My response has just been to try to write the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Eastern audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good music transcends.For example, a piece of mine, “H’un (Lacerations),” premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is subtitled “In Memoriam 1966-1976” — about the Cultural Revolution — and it is very harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to this very old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.Unsuk Chin“I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity,” Unsuk Chin said, “any style or any musical culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesThe Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.Huang RuoHuang Ruo said that if he spoke English with an accent, he composed with one, too.Rathkopf PhotographyWhen people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well. More