I/You won’t/haven’t/had’t know[n] Which Doors You/I Will/do/did Open [2019]
for Three(Four) Instruments
Supported by HMTMH
Instrumentations: Saxophone, Violin, Piano || Flute, Oboe, Violin, Piano
World Premiere: August 2019 || Kalv International Music Festival, Kalv, Sweden
Mimitabu
Duration: 14 minutes
Concerts history
Trio Comet in April, 2019, Hannover, Germany
Trio Comet in June, 2019, Wurzburg, Germany
Barcelona Ensemble in June, 2019, Barcelona, Germany
Ensemble Mimitabu in August, 2019 for Kalv Festivals, Sweden
Ensemble Mimitabu in November, 2019 for Levande Musik, Sweden
Ensemble TIMF in April, 2021 for Tongyeong International Musik Festivals, South Korea
This piece is an exploration of Carl G. Jung’s Theory of Psychological types and gestalt psychology. This piece is composed to resist the linguistic way of conventional structure and frame in order to represent a stream of consciousness/unconsciousness/ preconsciousness. At the beginning, there are lists of cells that resemble motivic figuration. The motivic figures become degraded, then each of the cells be reinstated with each successive moment. Through this process, the composer doesn’t allow the audience time to ruminate on how this textural interplay relates to the processional temporal unfolding of the preceding moment, so that the audience consistently get into new spaces with their memories. In the middle section, each cell dissembles and has its own weight, then take on a different meaning in a new temporal space. Interestingly, these temporary new sonic spaces give the audience the perception of confusion and illusion from the memories of the first section. Then, each of the cells reunite, transform and modify through processing towards the end. In terms of the perception of sound, this piece is written based on the Gestalt psychology, which is a school of thought that looks at the human mind and behavior as a whole. The word “Gestalt” is used in German to mean the way of a thing that has been “placed,” or “put together.” There is no exact equivalent for the word in English; “Form” and “shape” are the usual translations. In psychology, Gestalt is often interpreted as “pattern” or “configuration”. When trying to make sense of the world, Gestalt psychology suggests that human being do not simply focus on each of small components. Instead, the human brain tends to perceive objects and sounds as part of a greater whole and as elements of a more complex systems. This piece is a reaction against the structural schools’ atomistic orientation such as linguistic and traditional sense of classical/contemporary structural formula. Instead, this piece adopted an approach, which fragmented experience into distinct and unrelated elements. This piece is the succession of apparent motions. This apparent movement enables the audience to fill in missing information into the sonic environment. This belief that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts led to the discovery of various different phenomena that occur during perceptions, heavily influenced by musical motivations and expectations and based on each audience member’s musical experiences and their cultural backgrounds. Through a sequence of still frames, the illusion of movement is created. There are wholes, the musical gestures and textures of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.
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Hunjoo Jung 