Music HERstory: Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945)

Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945)

Younghi Pagh-Paan was born in Cheondu, South Korea, in 1945. As a child, she learned how to play the piano and accomplished her first composition at the age of twelve. She studied music at the Seoul National University (Korea) from 1965 to 1971, and at the Freiburg Musikhochschule (Germany) from 1974 to 1979.

Despite moving to Germany, Younghi Pagh-Paan maintained her compositional output connected with the Korean traditional music. In fact, the distance acted as a catalyst, releasing her creative powers. Among her influences, one can cite Byung-Ki Hwang and Tae-Suk Oh, the former being an interpreter of the Korean music tradition, and the latter an innovative theater director and modern playwright.

While in Germany, she received scholarships from the Sudwestfunk’s Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung (1980/81), and from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg (1985). She also received professorships at the Conservatories in Graz (1991) and Karlsruhe (1992/93) and, in 1994, she was appointed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. There, she founded the New Music Studio, which she has directed ever since.

Younghi Pagh-Paan won many awards throughout her career: in 1978 the 1st Prize at the 5th Composers Seminar in Boswil (Switzerland), in 1979 the 1st Prize at the Rostrum of Composers (Unesco, Pads) and the Na-Pa Music Prize in South Korea, and, in 1980, the 1st Prize of the City of Stuttgart. She was also awarded the Heidelberg Artists Prize in 1995.

Younghi Pagh-Paan officially retired in January 2011 and has awarded emeritus status.

Compositions:

Younghi Pagh-Paan’s most lasting musical impressions came from the small town Cheondu, South Korea, where she grew up. There, she learned the folk music of Korea: songs, instrumental music, Shamanist rituals, and, above all, pansori, the popular form of song epic in which an actor or actress, alternating between recitation and singing, can hold the spectators entranced for hours.

Generally, her works intended to renew the nature of Korean musical culture by means of various Western composition techniques, which aroused great interest throughout Europe. The immersion of Korean music in her work is evident not only in the way she handles material, but also in terms of content and traditional genres. For instance, the series of “Ta-Ryong” pieces is built on the principle of rhythmic repetition and the cyclic structures often turns into a sonic ritual, alluding to the music’s Korean sources. In addition, the composition “Tsi-Shin-Kut” relates to a traditional Earth Spirit ritual.

Her most famous composition is the orchestral piece “Sori”, which brought her international recognition during the Donaueschingen Festival (Germany) in 1980. In “Sori”, it is possible to see the main features of the compositional aesthetic that she formulated in a fundamental text in 1983 (“On the Way: Reflections on my Activity as a Composer”), where she explains how the handling of parameters in her compositions derives from the structure of Korean music. The essential points are: the structuring of sonic space and harmony through “mother chords”; working with rhythmic modes; shaping lines on the basis of expressive Korean vocal music; a unified concept of sound which, following Korean tradition, makes no distinction between pitch and noise; and finally, a specific form of polyphony which the composer describes as heterophonic counterpoint.

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