The music of the Japanese composer Kondô is often referred to as a Japanese variant of American minimalism. His works clearly display the influence of John Cage, whose work, in turn, was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism.
Isang Yun’s works combine Far Eastern and Western European music, the free use of twelve-tone music and serial techniques.John Cage’s piece “Ryoanji” was written between 1983 and 1985. It transports the visual impression of the famous rock garden in the Ryoanji Monastery near Kyoto to the realm of sound. The seemingly chance contours of the stones amidst artistically “measured” lines are set as glissandos in a grid of time and pitch and rendered as natural sound events rather than as musical tones. Jô Kondô will comment on his works played by the ensemble L’ART POUR L’ART. His most recent work, “Six Poems of Mokichi Saito” for soprano and piano, from the year 2000, is a setting of short poems by one of Japan’s most famous Tanka poets, Mokichi Saito (1882 – 1953). Isang Yun’s piece “Gagok”, composed in 1972, premiered that year at the Festival Internacional in Barcelona. Gagok is an ancient Korean singing style in which the melody and the text are independent of one another: the music existed already, while the words were found as required. The performers
Astrid Schmeling (flutes), Ariadne Daskalakis (violins), Michael Schröder (guitar),
Hartmut Leistritz (piano), Stefan Schäfer (contrabass), Matthias Kaul (percussion)
Norma Enns (soprano)
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