Completed my Isang Yun introductory page, with presentation and table of correspondence between the original, 11-CD Camerata serie “Compositions of Isang Yun”, and the 9-CD reissue, “Art of Isang Yun”. A good deed done. But Jeez’ is WordPress a nightmare to use when you want to do things even only remotely sophisticated. Inserting a link within a page (rather than from one page to another) is a nightmare, there is no automated, user-friendly process to do it, you’ve got to go fiddle with the html code. WHY? Do I fiddle with codes when I want to set a text in italics or bold? No, I just press a key, and the computer takes care of the damn codes, it translates the key into codes, that’s what computers and word-processing are for! So why can’t WordPress do it? “Insert a target here”, “insert the link to target there”, done! Forcing you to fiddle with html code will is really prehistory, it’ll be looked upon in a few years with bemusement. Remember when you needed to crank up your automobile with a handle to get it started? Yeah, sure, we see that in oldies from the 1910s or 1920s…
Okay, I needed to vent that. Creating this website is really a labor of love. Now I know the answer to the question often asked: “why don’t you create your own website?”. ‘Cause it’s a helluvaloto’work!
After the indication of Yun’s nationality, “Korean”, I added “German”, because after all it’s a point of fact: Yun settled definitively in Germany in 1969 after the international protest led to his liberation from the South-Korean gaols, acquired the German citizenship in 1971 and never returned to his country of birth. I hesitated to originate him as “South”-Korean – and decided against it: Yun was born in a unified country called Korea, fought the Japanese occupation during the war and paid the price for it, and his inclinations towards the Northern side after the partition forbids, in his case, to slot him on one or the other side of that border.
And after repeated listens, reviewed the magnificent Violin Concerto No. 1, “Compositions of Isang Yun-2“. Despite the absence of barcode, I even found a bypass to create the entry on Amazon, so that I could post my review there too.
Listened to “Compositions of Isang Yun-3”, with Muak, Pièce concertante and Sonatina for 2 Violins. Magnificent. Need to listen again and review. Sometimes it takes more time to find the right words than to listen to the music, words not just to describe the music but also the emotions that the music stirs in you.