Isang Yun and the Hauptton Technique: An Analytical Study of the Second Movement from Duo für Violoncello und Harfe (1984)

• Main Author: Kim, Sinae
• Other Authors: Prevost, Roxane
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2012
• Subjects: Isang Yun; Hauptton Technique; East-Asian Musical Tradition; Taoism; Twentieth-Century Western Music; Theory; Analysis; Joseph Straus; Associational Model; Centricity; Duo für Violoncello und Harfe (1984)
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/22797; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-5663

Composer Isang Yun developed an idiosyncratic musical language that blends Eastern-Asian and Western-European art traditions. Exiled from Korea due to political conflict, he continued his compositional career in Germany, where his music is renowned for its use of the Hauptton (“main-tone”) technique. Yun was the first to discuss this technique, which he interprets as a process rooted in East-Asian musical traditions, including Taoism philosophy. His music is remarkable in that it fuses this process within the context of Western formal structures. I combine Straus’s associational model with Yun’s Hauptton theory to analyse the second movement of Duo für Violoncello und Harfe (1984) in order to show the inclusion of Eastern-Asian and Western-European musical elements in Yun’s music. I begin by analysing several Haupttöne at the surface level through associational relationships, followed by a large-scale analysis of the entire movement with one fundamental Hauptton.