Isang Yun was born at Sancheong in Korea on 17 September 1917, the son of the poet Yun Ki-hyon, and the family moved to Tongyeong when he was three. He began the violin at thirteen and composed his first melody then; his father opposed a musical career but relented once Yun agreed to enrol in business school alongside his studies with a military bandsman in Seoul. In 1935 he studied cello, theory and composition briefly at the Osaka College of Music, and in 1939 went to Tokyo to study with Tomojiro Ikenouchi. When the Pacific War began he returned to Korea and joined the independence movement, was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned for two months, and was in hospital with tuberculosis when Korea was liberated in August 1945. After the war he founded an orphanage and taught in Tongyeong and Busan, and from 1953 at Seoul National University; he won the Seoul City Culture Award in 1955 and left for Europe the following year. He died on 3 November 1995.

He studied at the Paris Conservatory with Tony Aubin and Pierre Revel from 1956 to 1957 and then in West Berlin with Boris Blacher, Josef Rufer and Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling, attended the Darmstadt summer courses in 1958, and began his European career with the premieres of Music for Seven Instruments at Darmstadt and Five Pieces for Piano at Bilthoven. The oratorio Om mani padme hum in Hanover in 1965 and Réak at Donaueschingen in 1966 made his name internationally; with Réak he brought the sound of Korean ceremonial music, and imitations of the East Asian mouth organ, into the Western avant-garde. He settled in West Berlin in 1964 on a Ford Foundation grant, and the rest of his career was made in West Germany.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isang_Yun
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q153611