Word: yun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...symmetries of scholarly painting, the inky brush spatters and runs on the paper in a kind of ecstatic exuberance-a sort of Oriental forerunner of action painting. The essence of Zen thought is satori -sudden enlightenment. It comes unpredictably; meditation prepares the artist, but guarantees nothing. One ancient monk, Yun-Men, achieved satori when his teacher slammed a door on his foot. Another, Wen-Shu Ssu-yeh, had it while butchering a pig, and celebrated the occasion in verse...
...plucky South Korean government is under constant threat from the Communist North, and so its fears about spies are justified. Still, Yun insisted that he had gone to East Berlin only to inquire about an old friend in North Korea. His illegal "espionage" trip had been merely to examine a 4th century tomb at Nangnang, which was to be the locale of Butterfly Widow, the second part of Dreams. Unimpressed, a Seoul tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment; it gave his wife a three-year term, then suspended it and allowed her to return to their two teenage children...
After 24 composers-including Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen-had signed a petition on his behalf, Yun was allowed to resume composing behind bars. The Bonn government, angered by Seoul's cloak-and-dagger tactics on German soil, threatened to suspend its $25 million program of economic aid. South Korea first reduced Yun's stiff sentence to 15 years, then to ten, and last month decided to free him. He is expected to leave for Germany next month...
Giant Butterfly. A cultural hero's welcome awaits him. At the premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that...
Despite the ingenuousness of the plots, Yun's serial music, with its Oriental overtones, is so inscrutable that the orchestra and offstage chorus required no fewer than 30 rehearsals. Yun's use of twelve-tone rows is as free as his theatrical fantasy. The singers often had to master unaccompanied vocal lines, and the orchestra itself was augmented by whips, rattles and bells. At the end, as color projections were flashed onto a transparent curtain, boulder-size clusters of tone shot from the orchestra, and twelve percussion instruments went wild with pings, thumps, roars and growling glissandi. Then...