Images for flute, oboe, violin, and cello (1968), one of Isang Yun’s few works inspired by a work of visual art, is Yun’s musical response to the Goguryeo-era mural fresco, Four Guardian Deities (四神圖), which he saw on his trip to North Korea in 1963. The colors, lines, shapes, and other symbolic features of the mural painting are rendered into highly abstract sounds organized using serial techniques. While identifying and tracing its tone rows, tetrachords, or hexachords is one effective way to understand this work, this paper argues for a reading of Images as the music of gestures, breaths, and motions, which ultimately strives toward a blending of contrasting elements present in the fresco. Such reading is important because, throughout his career, Yun articulated the significance of Taoism, especially the notion of the harmonious balance of yin and yang, as the philosophical backbone of his music. This aspect manifested as the well-studied Haupttöne (main-tone) technique, which ascribes a work’s structural and expressive import to a single tone, embellished by surrounding effects such as vibrato, glissandi, and other ornamentations. Yun himself, as well as scholars of the composer, have made connections between the technique and calligraphy, underscoring the shared fluidity and wholeness of each tone or stroke.

However, many studies engaging with the Haupttöne technique primarily focus on establishing the central tone and explaining how the main tone defines the micro- and macro-level organization. While valuable, such readings stay shy of articulating how the technique achieves the philosophical goal of Yun’s music, namely the unity or balancing of contrasts. By highlighting events such as momentums of gesture, points of breath, and interweaving of heterophonic layers as the driving structural force, this paper shows that Images, as a rare case of visually-inspired work by Yun, allows us to understand how the composer expresses, explores, and reconciles the various contrasts of the visual work through calligraphic gestures.

By adopting cosmology as a basis of his own aesthetic ideology, Toshio Hosokawa crafts musical sounds and sonic relationships as an embodiment of Taoist and Buddhist philosophies in his contemplation of the physical universe and spirituality. Following Isang Yun’s concepts of Hauptton and Hauptklang, Hosokawa constructs sonic entities that are identifiable by their collective shape or gestalt in lieu of recognizable motive, rhythm, and/or harmony associated with the western musical canon. The sonic gestures, spanning from silence to sound, can be categorized into: (a) a written-out pause with a back-reaching slur—an ancillary gesture (abbreviated as AG); (b) an emergent, barely audible sonic gesture produced through controlling the dynamic intensity and/ or applying vocal techniques to an instrument (abbreviated as G1)—G1a refers to a sustained, linear gesture and G1b refers to multiple instrumental entries that produce a diffuse, ethereal texture; (c) a composite attack followed by silence or a short response, often articulated in a sequence of three or more entries (abbreviated as G2); and (d) a sound mass texture generated by a sustained involvement of all participating voices, often with dynamic swells (abbreviated as G3).

Focusing specifically on Fragment I (1986) for shakuhachi, koto, and sangen, Landscape I (1992) for string quartet, and selected movements from Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima (1998-2001) for orchestra and choir, this paper identifies different instances of the four sonic gestures and how they shape formal processes that materialize Hosokawa's poetics of silence and sound on the one hand, and shadow and light on the other. In the meditative final movement of Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima, entitled “Temple Bells Voice,” Hosokawa creates a hazy, subdued imagery that centers on the moon and the temple bell that “sinks” to the bottom of the sea. The acoustical simulation of temple bells (梵鐘) is intended as a prayer for the dead and occupies a special place in Hosokawa’s cosmology of sound. Combining score-based analysis of post-tonal features with spectrograms of selected passages, I will demonstrate how this large-scale symphonic work further varies and transforms the gesture types introduced in his earlier works.

Over the course of his five-decade compositional career, Toshio Hosokawa has engaged with Japanese aesthetics and artistic traditions in diverse ways ranging from overt quotation to integration. In particular, his works that include traditional Japanese instruments bring issues of intercultural signification to the fore.

Utsurohi (1986), written for shō and harp, is Hosokawa's earliest work to include a Japanese traditional instrument. Not coincidentally, it is also one of the pieces in which he began to develop his concept of "circulating time." He translates the breathing of the shō player into rhythmic/temporal patterns and traces a cycle of one day in visual and musical terms, its trajectory taking us from morning to noon to night. Hosokawa's music casts the interaction as dynamic, led by a shō player who moves across the stage in contrast to a stationary harp.

My analysis connects the stage directions and the numerical cycles of the shō with the piece's overarching trajectory. As the shō player breathes in and out over exceptionally long spans—some well over ten seconds—the numerical cycles of the piece unfold. I describe the multiple kinds of permutations at work—numerical, gestural, and pitch-based—and how the combination of these with the differing voices of shō and harp creates subtle tensions that animate the musical discourse.

Conventionally, the shō is thought of as providing a slow-moving chordal background. In contrast to Christian Utz, who argues that Hosokawa maintains the shō's “mythical aura” in his works as a mere symbol of transcendence, I will demonstrate that in Utsurohi, Hosokawa casts the shō as the primary participant, generating and controlling the discourse, even though the harp’s more active part may, at times, obscure this role. My presentation ends by questioning what broader implications the work might have, not only for Hosokawa's later works involving the shō, such as Landscape V with string quartet (1993) or Utsurohi-nagi with orchestra (1996), but for the combining of separate musical traditions more generally, between traditional Asian instruments and those of the western concert music tradition, with the potential for uncovering dynamic, rather than static, relationships between these.

Isang Yun, on more than one occasion, remarked that a tone (and, by extension, music) exists before the act of composing from the East-Asian philosophical viewpoint. He writes that composing is like an antenna receiving frequencies that are attuned to the composer’s sense. This idea that music already exists prior to composition is manifested in Yun’s Hauptton technique, where a preparatory motive is required to settle into the main tone, like how finding a desired frequency requires dialing the knobs around the station.

In this talk, I explore the idea of music that exists before the sound by looking at Hosokawa’s Sen VI (1993) and Kwong’s The Forest Also Gazes into You (2019/2020). Sen VI employs extensive ancillary gestures, some of which end with a sound, some without. These gestures foreground the percussionist’s body as an integral part of the “whole sound movement,” making visible that, before any sound, there is the body of the musicians. Kwong’s composition instead highlights the instrumental bodies where the forest is symbolized as wood, the primary material for the instruments (violin, cello, and piano). By highlighting the wooden timbre of these instruments, the piece begins with the latent sounds in the instrument’s own resonance. The piece settles into an image of a quiet, windy forest, and the persona stands alone. Surrounded by the forest noises, the listener is transported to woods filled with tones from winds, scurrying animals, and breaking twigs. The forest’s gaze, in turn, makes known the instruments’ detachment from their natural origin, which serves as a metaphor for the listener’s own alienation. This way, there is a sense of recovering a forgotten connection with nature.

Whether it is a channeling antenna, bodily gestures, or forest’s gaze, these composers share an idea that a composition grows out of the elements that surround us, which echoes Kwong’s concept of “collective experiential situation” (集體體驗處境). This talk concludes with considering music as growth by looking at Sarah Allen’s interpretation of Tao (道) and De (德), where Tao is metaphorically conceptualized as water and De a sprout that receives nourishment from the Tao.