Hun

Composition Sketch

Hun is one of five compositions completed in Spring of 1992. The original recordings were lost in my migration from Manhattan to Chicago. Recently I found a DAT tape of the compositional sketches for these five pieces. The first one: Hun, are the ideas for the upper end of the music sans bottom drone. The plan will be to recreate a new drone for the bottom end and extend the piece to it’s original length of 15 minutes.

I believed the instruments I used to create this were: Roland D-70, Korg Wavestation SR, Yamaha TG77, Yamaha TG33 and a Kawai K1r.

Hun (‘cloud-soul’) and Po (‘white-soul’) are types of souls in Chinese philosophy. Within this ancient soul dualism tradition, every living human has both a hun spiritual, ethereal, Yang soul which leaves the body after death, and also a po corporeal, substantive, Yin soul which remains with the corpse of the deceased. Taoism proposes a soul structure of “three hun and seven po“. Hun and Po are “two pivotal concepts that are key to understanding Chinese views of the human soul and the afterlife”.