Jinwook Jung - Plan à vol de corbeau, poème n°8 : La dissection (2022)

Plan à vol de corbeau, poème n°8 : La dissection (2022)
For Brass Quintet

Abschlusskonzert Konzertexamen on the 5th of February 2025, performed by Yiwen Chang (tp.1), Jan Andres (tp.2), Robyn Blair (hrn.), Jens Terporten (tbn.), Fuchsia Reinartz (tba), Christian Brandenburger (cond.)

Plan à vol de corbeau : “Breath” — free, sometimes sharp, light, yet transient. The arrow of breath opens the beginning of the music, draws attention, and carries memories and resistance.
This series of pieces is inspired by the Korean poet Yi Sang (1910–1937) and his poem cycle Ogamdo (오감도, 烏感圖, Plan à vol de corbeau, Crow’s Eyes View), which consists of fifteen interconnected poems. Yi Sang, one of the most experimental figures in modern Korean literature, was trained as an architect — a background that deeply informed his poetic language of lines, points, numerical systems, equations, and diagrams. His writing explores the separation between the inner self and the external world, reflecting the suffocating and oppressive atmosphere of the Japanese colonial period.

In this project, I seek to translate into sound the hidden words, obscure metaphors, and the suffocating tension, fear, and alienation that permeate Yi Sang’s poetry. Breath serves as the central material — unstable and ephemeral, yet a vessel of memory and resistance. Through the voice, Plan à vol de corbeau inhabits the space between the visible and the invisible, between existence and disappearance.

I believe that the most terrifying and oppressive condition for a human being is when breathing — the very act of life — is controlled and threatened. Within Yi Sang’s precise and intricate sentences, I perceived an acoustic space in which one could barely breathe under colonial oppression — where breath becomes both the trace of life and the echo of its disappearance.