Composer Unsuk Chin wins the Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Music and Opera: “I still feel like a beginner” | Culture | EUROtoday

The South Korean composer Unsuk Chin (Seoul, 64 years previous) has been awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Award within the Music and Opera class, awarded by the BBVA Foundation, in recognition of a profession that has managed to articulate its personal voice with broad world influence inside the modern panorama. The jury highlighted in its minutes “her singular technique of great solidity” and, particularly, “her sonic refinement”, along with her “overflowing imagination” and her “masterful ability to transform sound into a game of illusions and metamorphosis”, traits that place her among the many nice innovators of our time.

The information of the award stunned Chin at his dwelling in Berlin in the midst of an interview about his participation within the competition. Prague Spring. “I looked at the phone and saw that someone was trying to reach me with an unknown number; then my editor wrote to me from London asking me to pick it up urgently. I went to another room and then I spoke to [la presidenta del jurado] Gabriela Ortiz,” she tells EL PAÍS by way of video name. “I started screaming, I couldn’t believe it. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, like a fairy tale.” The musical equal, he says, of “a great very strongand everyone orchestral accompanied by an effusive and overflowing choir.”

Initially trained self-taught, in a context marked by economic difficulties in accessing music education in South Korea, in 1985 Chin moved to Germany thanks to a scholarship and there studied with György Ligeti. “The starting was very laborious. In Korea I had a superb trainer, however my actual coaching started in Europe,” he remembers. “Ligeti was a tremendously demanding trainer, a longtime composer, with a really sturdy language, and plenty of instances I didn’t perceive his classes. But I stored his recommendation and I started to know his phrases over time. It has taken me a long time. Even now I proceed to study from him.”

This permanent search for his own language, foreign to ascriptions and labels, constitutes one of the central axes of his work. “I find it very difficult to define my own music,” he says. “In my beginnings I was more abstract, closer to the avant-garde, but I soon understood that that was not the path I wanted to follow.” Since then, his style has tried to maintain a “strong connection” with the listener: “I try to express complex things clearly, not make them simple, but make them understandable.” This tension between rigor and communicative will runs through a wide catalog that ranges from chamber music to the orchestral and operatic repertoire.

His work Acrostic word game (1991-93), for soprano and ensemble, marked the beginning of a sustained line of work in chamber and ensemble formats, and consolidated its presence in the main international circuits. Pieces such as Mechanical fantasy, Xi o Gougalonclosely linked to Ensemble Intercontemporainas well as ParaMetaString (1996), for quartet and electronics, commissioned by the Kronos Quartetand the cycle Studies for piano (1995-2003), direct heir to Ligeti’s teaching, where the reduced format functions as a laboratory for timbral exploration.

His writing for soloist and orchestra takes that ambition to a level of greater formal complexity and sound projection. He Violin Concerto No. 1 (2001), awarded the Grawemeyer Award, or the Cello Concerto (2006-08), which The Guardian included among the great works of the 21st century, they share the same horological precision mechanism, in which each detail responds to a rigorous internal logic. Added to these are pages like Shu (2009), for sheng and orchestra, or the Concerto for orchestra ‘Spira’ (2019), in which the treatment of color and texture generates sound surfaces in continuous mutation.

Chin’s music has been performed by important orchestras and, for more than two decades, he has maintained a particularly close relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic thanks to the trust you have always given him Sir Simon Rattle. “I consider them my friends,” he admits. “Working with an orchestra like this is always an adventure: they are extremely professional and also very critical,” says the composer, who has collaborated with orchestras and opera houses in Montreal, Munich and Hamburg with the help of another of her supporters, the maestro Kent Naganowhich in September will assume ownership of the National Orchestra and Choir of Spain.

Chin’s first opera, Alice in Wonderlandwas chosen in 2007 as “premiere of the year” by the magazine Opernwelt. “It was neither a typical contemporary opera nor a musical, but rather somewhere in between,” he recalls. In the second and last, The hidden side of the moonpremiered in 2025 at the Hamburg State Opera, deploys a darker sound universe with great psychological density. “It was a very intense experience, in which I wrote the script myself,” she explains. The work, inspired by the figure of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and his relationship with Carl Gustav Jungdelves into territories close to sleep, science and mental instability.

In recent years, Chin has gotten back in touch with his roots. “When I was young I couldn’t find a way to combine Korean tradition with European music, but now I’m starting to have some ideas,” he celebrates. “I’m working on a musical theater piece with a singer from pansori Korean, and also in a lighter and almost humorous short opera,” advances the composer, who does not hide her pride in the status of cultural power that she has achieved. South Korea. “There is a lot of audience and musical talent, but maybe we should contribute something of our own,” he reflects. “It’s not sufficient to play Mozart or Beethoven. You need to create one thing new. Otherwise, there is no such thing as a future.”

Chin approaches each new project from scratch. “I believe I can begin once more as a composer. I do not know in what route, however I nonetheless really feel like a newbie,” she says. Regarding the advance of artificial intelligence, she is cautious: “It can do many issues, however in artwork we search for feelings comparable to ache or pleasure. Without that, there can’t be an actual work.” In the end, it all comes down to the “human expertise” of listening: “I would love anybody to have the ability to discover one thing inspiring within the many layers and dimensions of my music. It shouldn’t be vital to know it fully: it’s sufficient that every listener can take away one thing of their very own.”

The Frontiers of Knowledge Prize, price 400,000 euros, has been awarded by a jury chaired by Gabriela Ortiz and with Víctor García de Gomar as secretary, together with the members Mauro Bucarelli, Silvia Colasanti, Raquel García-Tomás, Pedro Halffter, Joan Matabosch, Fabián Panisello and Santiago Serrate. In latest editions, the award has gone to Toshio HosokawaGeorge Benjamin, Thomas Adès and Philip Glass. As he highlighted in his minutes, Chin’s work “creates landscapes in constant transformation, where color and texture play a primary role” and generate “an unmistakable aesthetic within the field of current music.”