In yesterday’s post Rain, as snow fell the introduction uses “Korean Unison”.

I associate the term with the American composer John Cage, who wrote Evergreen Club a piece called Haikai which uses Korean unison. I am not sure where the term comes from but plan to research it. In the mean time here are two performance videos of his work, Ryoanji for instrumental ensemble, New York City, March 1984. The performance notes follow.

The parts are lettered A-T for any twenty instruments. All of the instruments are in “Korean unison”. That is to say, care is taken, since everyone is playing the same thing, not to play exactly together.

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Arrow-like notations and indicate very slightly before or very slightly after the beat. Their absence means that the tone should be played more on the beat than not. The conductor’s function will be to keep the beat in the air, so to speak, not to bring down to earth. These tempo deviations should be “microrhythmic”. Each player may make any instrumental sound or aggregates of sounds. Having made a choice he will repeat his sound(s) faithfully throughout a single rehearsal or perfomance as though he had became a percussion instrument.

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Microtonal pitch glissandi are analogous to the notations given … The pitch range used for these glissandi shoud be very small. Tones are either short, accompanied by a notation (.) above the notehead, or tenuto, without any added notation.