Composer Unsuk Chin honored with the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize
Published: Thursday, Jan 25th 2024, 00:20
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South Korean composer Unsuk Chin is currently Composer in Residence at the Basel Symphony Orchestra. "For a life in the service of music", she has now also been awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2024.
The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (EvS) announced on Thursday that Unsuk Chin, a composer whose works are performed worldwide, is to be honored. She has broken new ground in new music and inspired a wide audience.
For compositions of new music, it is remarkable that melody and harmony are not overridden, making it easy for the audience to access. But this is precisely what EvS attributes to Unsuk Chin's music.
Chin has composed for all musical genres and instrumentations. The EvS highlights her Violin Concerto No. 1 (2001) as a milestone in her career. The concerto Šu for Sheng and orchestra (2009) marks a turning point in her work. This concerto was Chin's first composition for a traditional Asian instrument.
The sheng is a type of mouth organ; it has been one of the most important instruments in Chinese music for around 3000 years. Chin's only opera to date, "Alice in Wonderland", has been a great success with audiences. The work was premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 2007 under the baton of Kent Nagano.
Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul in 1961. She studied in Hamburg with György Ligeti, among others, and has lived in Berlin since the late 1980s. It was there that she became acquainted with electro-acoustic music, which continues to shape her compositional thinking to this day.
The Ernst von Siemens Music Prize is endowed with 250,000 euros. Unsuk Chin will receive the award on May 18 at the Munich Residenz. The EvS is also awarding three composition prizes, each endowed with 35,000 euros. These will go to the composer and double bassist Bára Gisladottir from Iceland, the composer and mathematician Daniele Ghisi from Italy and the composer and pianist Yiqing Zhu from China.
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