The music of Younghi Pagh-Paan for flute, guitar, and soprano leads us through a lifetime of openness and the search for identity.

This portrait album contains mainly premiere recordings of Pagh-Paan's works for soprano, flute and/or guitar, composed between 1975 and 2022. Angela Postweiler, Carin Levine and Tobias Klich present a compelling selection from Pagh-Paan's music, which so strongly reflects her Korean roots and her life in Europe. By connecting her own persona with the foreign, she came to discover and develop an identity that continues until today. And it is a feminine identity. The female voice for which Younghi Pagh-Paan mostly likes to compose also speaks for her own self, but not necessarily about herself.

Younghi Pagh-Paan was born in 1945 in Cheongju, in what is now South Korea. She came to Germany on a DAAD scholarship in 1974 to continue her studies with Klaus Huber at the Freiburg University of Music. With her orchestral piece Sori she attracted wide public attention at the Donaueschingen Festival 1980. After visiting professorships at the music universities in Graz and Karlsruhe, she was appointed professor of composition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 1994 – the first woman in Germany. There she founded the Atelier Neue Musik, which she led until 2011.