Unsuk Chin

Unsuk Chin is a South Korean composer and respected leader in the contemporary music community. She is admired for her original style, which avoids references to specific historical periods or geographic regions. She was born in Seoul in 1961 and her father was a Presbyterian minister who taught her the basics of reading music. As a child she played the piano at her father’s church and accompanied her sister, who was a singer. During her elementary school years, she had a music teacher who recognized her talent and encouraged her to compose. She studied the scores of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and other great works, and by the age of 13, she had decided that she was going to become a composer. She also helped support her family by playing the piano for wedding ceremonies. After high school, she was accepted as a composition student at Seoul National University in 1981. There, she studied composition with Sukhi Kang, who introduced Chin to electronic music, and to avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen, Boulez, and Penderecki. She won several awards in competitions for new music, and when she graduated in 1985, she was also awarded a German academic exchange service scholarship from the German government, which enabled her to study composition with György Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. After completing her studies in 1988, she moved to Berlin, where she worked as a composer at the Technical University of Berlin. Around this time, she composed Gradus ad Infinitum, Die Troerinnen, and Acrostic Wordplay, which has been performed in over 20 countries since its premiere in 1991. Chin began collaborating with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1994 and she composed several works for the group, such as Fantaisie Mecanique and Xi. Beginning in 1999, she collaborated with Kent Nagano who commissioned and premiered many of her works, including Violin Concerto No. 1. For this piece, she was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2004. Nagano and Viviane Hagner recorded this work on the album Unsuk Chin: Rocaná; Violin Concerto, released in 2009. From 2006 to 2017, Chin served as the composer-in-residence for the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, and she also founded and directed the Ars Nova Series for contemporary music. Additionally, she oversaw the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series from 2011-2022, before beginning her appointment as artistic director of the Tongyeong International Music Festival. She remains in high demand as a composer, and in the 2020s, her music has been recorded by Alicia Lee and the Esmé Quartet.
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