Name: π (pi) – Echoes of the Unseen Thread by Nahyun Kim
Duration: 5 min 19 s
Description: It’s inspired by the number pi, 3.14159, a number that goes on forever without repeating. To me, it felt like the perfect metaphor for memory — or emotional loops — how we keep returning to certain moments or feelings, never quite the same, never fully resolved.

This is a song cycle about the hope, pleasure, and love that the coming of spring inspires.

I. Spring is coming   

The first movement employs three different pentatonic scales and tonal centers, based on traditional Korean folk tunes. In this work the underlying presence of the folk tunes is subverted by non-traditional means, sliding between tonality and dissonance.  Also, rhythm is a fundamental driving force in this work, handled primarily by a traditional Korean drum called the Jangu.

I. Spring is coming

This is a song cycle about the hope, pleasure, and love that the coming of spring inspires.

II. Spring is the beginning

The second movement introduces a variety of traditional Korean rhythms by the Jangu.  The jangu displays its skillful solo improvisation for several tens of measures of introduction and end. The voice component of the piece is quite prominent and drives both syllabic on 6/8 and melodic motion on 4/4. The clarinet also has its own theme which occurs continuously by transposition.  The setting of the text emphasizes its importance, and its meaning: spring is the beginning of all things.  The last stanza of poem utilizes mimicking echoes between soprano and clarinet, simultaneously Jangu plays a quite distinctive in terms of timbre and rhythm using by symmetrical meter.

II. Spring is the beginning

This is a song cycle about the hope, pleasure, and love that the coming of spring inspires.

III. Spring is here is spring here

The final movement is characterized by its composer as a lighthearted, fun movement, employing an arbitrary, free sort of compositional technique.  Much of the melodic movement is scalar and is complemented by contrapuntal movement in the piano.  This movement exhibits poly-metric/compound-rhythmic features and the jangu forsakes its traditional role as a stabilizing force, and instead varies its rhythm throughout the movement.  The primary text is cyclical in nature: Spring is here.  Here is spring.  Is spring here?  has been transformed into the title: Spring is here is spring.   In the middle of this collage of sound, a moment of familiarity: the composer quotes Schubert’s Frühlingstraum (Winterreise Op. 89) and Chopin’s Impromptu No. 4 simultaneously.  The piece ends with a brief piano passage building to a final, spoken statement of the original cyclical text: Spring is here is spring.

III. Spring is here is spring

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It’s inspired by the number pi, 3.14159, a number that goes on forever without repeating. To me, it felt like the perfect metaphor for memory — or emotional loops — how we keep returning to certain moments or feelings, never quite the same, never fully resolved.

π (pi) – Echoes of the Unseen Thread

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π (pi) – Echoes of the Unseen Thread

Nahyun Kim

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