“It is hard to ‘communicate’ through music. What does that even mean?,” asked Jungyoon Wie. “Yet, it has been a journey to find out what I like and what I don’t, what makes me angry, and somehow put all of them together and create beauty.... I want to write about immigrants and children, whether it is an opera or something else. I hope to tell a story and convey emotions in a form of beauty.”

Korean composer and pianist Jungyoon Wie, born in Seoul in 1990, learned to play piano and violin as a youngster but did not become interested in composition until after she had moved to the United States in 2006 and was attending St. Andrew’s Sewanee High School in Sewanee, Tennessee. Needing credits in her senior year to graduate, she took a class in music theory and composition with James Carlson and discovered, she recalled, that “composition just felt right at the time — I really felt convinced that this was what I wanted to do.” Wie earned her undergraduate degree in composition at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and in 2020 completed her doctorate at the University of Michigan; her mentors include Bright Sheng, Gabriela Lena Frank and Derek Bermel. She is currently working as a staff member at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.

Wie’s rapidly expanding creative catalog includes works for orchestra (she was piano soloist with the Wooster Symphony Orchestra in 2014 in the premiere of her Jindo Arirang Concerto, based on a Korean folksong), chamber en- sembles, chorus and solo voice, most with referential or narrative qualities. Her music has been performed by leading chamber and contemporary ensembles, National Orchestra Institute, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Forum, Young Women Composers Camp, the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and in collaboration with filmmakers and dancers. Wie’s current projects include Watercolor Smudge, a commissioned work for the Korean Symphony Orchestra. Among her honors are First Prize at the 2014 Ohio Federation of Music Clubs Collegiate Composers Competition, Honorable Mention at the 2012 International Sejong Music Composition Competition, Second Prize at the 2016 Robert Avalon International Competition, selection for the 2016 New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Edward T. Cone Composition Institute, 2020 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and a fellowship at the Gabriela Lena Frank Academy.

Notes from Junyoon Wie
When I think of the end of time, I think about my 97-year-old Grandmother. Every time I visit her, and when it is time again to say goodbye, she gets tears in her eyes, as if she knows the end is near for her and this will be the last time we see each other.

My Grandmother is a mystery to me in many ways: a strong woman who crossed the border by foot from North Korea and never saw her family again; an illiterate woman who told me a doctorate degree is not for a lady, but who was proud of me when I earned one; a woman who lived alone after taking care of my Grandfather until the day he died; a woman who made my existence possible despite our rather distant relationship.

Though she is illiterate, she learned to read a Bible. I’m not religious, but I know that believing in God was the only way for her to get through everything she did.

The first movement of Songs of My Grandmother is Work Song from Across the Mountain, since my Grandmother spent most of her childhood helping on her family’s farm over the mountain in North Korea. The celebratory theme from the piano signals her marriage with my Grandfather.

In Water Song from the East Sea, I write about her transition into a new life with my Grandfather, who lived by the East Sea. Soon after they were married, my Grandfather, a court clerk at that time, told everyone that he was sick and he needed to take time off. One day he crossed the border and never came back. Later my Grandmother found out he had left for good, and so she travelled by foot to the South to find him, with my infant uncle on her back.

Christian Song from the South is about her Christianity. She suffered from chronic gastroenteritis after moving to the South. My Grandfather didn’t know how to help her, so he bought a Bible and told her to go to a church. She was miraculously cured, and now she is the most devout Christian I know. She told me that especially during the pandemic, she wasn’t able to talk to anyone in person. But she’s been talking to God every day, asking why she isn’t in heaven already with the others and if God loves her.

This piece was written in honor of my Grandmother, who turned 98 years old in January 2022.

When World War II erupted across Europe in 1939, Olivier Messiaen, then organist at Trinity Cathedral, a teacher at the École Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum, and a composer of rapidly growing reputation, was called up for service but deemed unfit for military duty because of his poor eyesight. He was instead first assigned as a furniture mover at Sarreguemines and then as a hospital attendant at Sarrabbe before ending up with a medical unit in Verdun, where he met Henri Akoka, a clarinetist with the Strasbourg Radio Orchestra, and Etienne Pasquier, cellist in an internationally renowned string trio with his brothers, violinist Jean and violist Pierre. Inspired by the dawn bird songs that marked the end of his night watch at Verdun, Messiaen composed the Abyss of the Birds for solo clarinet, but even before Akoka could try it out, the Germans invaded France in May 1940 and all three musicians were captured the following month and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp — Stalag VIIIA — at Görlitz, Silesia (now in Poland). At Stalag VIIIA, they met the violinist Jean Le Boulaire, who had graduated from the Paris Conservatoire but spent much of his life in military service (and who would become a successful actor under the name Jean Lanier after the war).

Though Messiaen later recalled “the cruelty and horror of the camp,” conditions were not nearly as bad at Görlitz as in the Nazis’ desolate and deadly concentration camps: he and his musician friends were in no immediate mortal danger (except from lack of food), the camp had such amenities as a library and a theater, and the commander encouraged stage and musical performances to occupy the prisoners with preparations and entertainment. One of the German officers, a music-loving lawyer named Karl-Albert Brüll who was fluent in French, found a battered piano for the theater and instruments for Le Boulaire and Pasquier, and supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper, writing materials and a quiet place to work, where he composed a trio for his fellow prisoners that served as the seed for one of the most remarkable pieces in the chamber repertory — the Quartet for the End of Time. After they had read through that Interlude, Messiaen prefaced it with the Abyss of the Birds he had written for Akoka at Verdun and then revised a section from his Fêtes des belles eaux for six ondes Martenon (created in 1937 for a son et lumière show on the banks of the Seine) as Praise to the Eternity of Jesus for cello and piano (for Pasquier) and a 1930 organ piece titled Diptyque as Praise to the Immortality of Jesus for violin and piano (for Le Boulaire); the remaining four movements of the Quartet were completed by November 1940. The sympathetic German commandant scheduled the premiere for January 15, 1941, granted the musicians four hours a day to rehearse, and even ordered programs printed for the event. Though Messiaen claimed that “5,000” of their fellow inmates heard the concert, the camp theater could have held no more than about 400 (outside performance would have been impossible in Silesia’s frigid winter), but he was accurate in describing the heterogeneity of the audience, many of whom he thought may have been hearing chamber music for the first time: “The most diverse classes were mingled: farmers, factory workers, intellectuals, professional servicemen, doctors and priests.... Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.” Messiaen’s incarceration ended the following month, and he joined the faculty of the Paris Conservatory in May 1941.

(For further information on the background, composition and premiere of the Quartet for the End of Time, there is an illustrated study by Rebecca Rischin titled For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet, published in 2003 by Cornell University Press.)

Messiaen, a deeply religious Catholic, provided the following introduction to the score of the Quartet for the End of Time, which bespeaks the interpenetration of cosmology, religion and music in his visionary musical universe:

“I saw a mighty angel descend from heaven, clad in mist; and a rainbow was upon his head. He set his right foot on the sea, his left foot on the earth, and standing thus on sea and earth, he lifted his hand to heaven and swore by Him who liveth for ever and ever, saying: There shall be time no longer; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be finished.

“I. Liturgy of crystal. Between the morning hours of three and four, the awakening of the birds; a thrush or a nightingale soloist improvises amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills that lose themselves high in the trees. Transpose this to the religious plane: you will have the harmonious silence of heaven.

“II. Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time. The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of that mighty angel. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven.

“III. Abyss of the birds. Clarinet solo. The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song! There is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

“IV. Interlude. Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references. “V. Praise to the Eternity of Jesus. Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word.

“VI. Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or ice-like frenzy.

“VII. Cluster of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time. Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelopes him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, of wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound).

“VIII. Praise to the Immortality of Jesus. Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus — to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love.

“ — And I repeat anew: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject!”