Unsuk Chin

Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul, South Korea, on 14 July 1961. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and her family lived modestly in a country rebuilding after the Korean War. As a child she accompanied the hymns in her father’s church on the piano and taught herself piano and music theory almost entirely, reading borrowed books and copying scores by hand. Her parents could not afford lessons, but she first dreamed of becoming a pianist.

She failed the university entrance exam several times but was finally admitted in 1981 to Seoul National University, where she studied composition with Sukhi Kang, a composer who had himself studied in Germany and introduced her to the European avant-garde. In 1985 one of her works was performed at the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and she won a grant to study in Germany.

From 1985 to 1988 she studied in Hamburg with the great composer György Ligeti. The beginning was hard: Ligeti, very demanding, harshly criticised her first works, which he thought too close to the fashionable avant-garde. She went through a crisis and stopped composing for nearly three years. Above all Ligeti taught her to find her own path and to open herself to the music of the world. She remained ever grateful to this demanding master.

In 1988 she settled in Berlin, where she still lives. For several years she worked at the electronic music studio of the Technical University of Berlin, composing electronic works. In 1991 she composed Acrostic Wordplay for soprano and ensemble, on texts inspired by Alice in Wonderland and The Neverending Story, a work full of humour and fantasy that made her known internationally and has been performed in more than twenty countries.

Her music is renowned for its virtuosity, imagination, dazzling instrumental colours and humour. She draws on very varied sources: traditional music of Asia and Africa, Balinese gamelan, literature, mathematics and science. She composed a Piano Concerto (1997) and in 2001 a Violin Concerto, premiered by Viviane Hagner, which won her the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004, one of the highest distinctions for a composer.

From 2006 to 2017 she was composer in residence of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, where she created and directed a series of contemporary music concerts that introduced Korean audiences to many composers. In 2007 her opera Alice in Wonderland, after Lewis Carroll, was premiered at the Munich Opera, opening the festival. She also composed a Cello Concerto (2009), premiered by Alban Gerhardt, and Šu (2009), a concerto for the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ more than three thousand years old, for the virtuoso Wu Wei.

In 2020, for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, she composed Subito con forza, a short, energetic orchestral piece quoting Beethoven motifs. She has received many awards, including the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2024. Her works are played by the greatest orchestras in the world, and she is regarded as one of the most important and original composers of our time.