Bora Yoon - Sound Architect

The idea that resonated most with me from Bora Yoon was her interest in imbuing her music with a sense of transport, where the music can take the listener into a different space and/or time. When I hear new music and I’m alone (and my goal is to listen with an open mind), I often close my eyes – which places me in an inexorably individual and simultaneously infinite space: the space inside my imagination. Whatever memories, ideas, sounds, images, etc. that come up while hearing the song I tend to associate with the song and vice versa. Since Yoon’s goal is to write pieces that evoke specific imagery, she must have a strong understanding of this for herself. Yoon conceives of music as tangible, which motivates her to create pieces that employ imagery of the human experience, nature, and other facets of real life. There can be a tendency for many composers of a certain kind (a kind I believe to be myself) to really lean into the complexity of their musical ideas and they can end up with a piece that is perhaps technically or harmonically complicated and impressive, but at the same time unpleasant for performers and listeners alike. Yoon avoids these pitfalls, and her Sons Nouveaux, for example, achieves the goal of being a piece I enjoy and can glean a clear image from. She is inspirational to me in the way that she is so intentioned in her work. I feel I often can fall into the trap of sort of just writing a piece to write it; now that I think of it, this often happens when I’m attempting to finish a piece. I appreciate and admire the structure and organization to her compositions and her composition methods, such as the painting she made while writing the piece she presented. Yoon calls herself a sound architect, implying how devoted she is to creating sound in space and not just sound. It also implies the idea that music is intentionally structured by performers and composers, which is possibly the only intrinsic rule of music that everyone seemingly has agreed on since humans started making music. I liked how much she stressed the importance of the space that music is played in, because while she may have been preaching to the proverbial choir, she expressed the genuine need that all composers have, which is to have their music heard the way they want it to be heard. Some of Yoon's works are exhibits of music, where the music plays a central role in a fixed media or fine art piece. I like the idea of exhibits of music in the sense that they break down the traditionally strict concert protocol, which vastly effects the way the audience experiences the music. The audience or non-artists can only experience the sensory input from their environment, but it’s the artists’ job to make sense of all of it. Yoon's goals for composition sometimes seemed to verge on what I initially thought was outdated, quasi-programmatic music, but hearing her pieces felt more immediate than hearing the classic programmatic narrative musical piece. She uses music to explore the idea of simultaneous reality and holistic time; her ability to transport her audience is the key to Bora Yoon's compositional methods.