In the field of studying Korean Contemporary Music, we need a lot to look into the composers who were born in 1940s. Throughout the history of Korean music in the 20th century, composers put great efforts to create new music reinterpreting the spirit and the idioms of Korean traditional music. The composers, who were born in 1910s and 1920s, were still surrounded by the musical environment in which they could experience Korean traditional music of their grandfathers. Therefore they tended to focus their music on expressing the spirit and emotion of their past and present.
Then the composers, who were born in 1930s, were exposed more to the western music, and had to meet the general tendencies and needs of developing skills to establish a modern music society and to be a part of contemporary musical world. However, the composers, who were born in 1940s, grew with 4.19 student demonstration, 5.16 revolution and then 5.18 Kwangju movement. So the composers were comparatively more interested in social identity, national identity as well as musical identities of themselves. Consequently, composers of this criteria wanted to develop quite individual, but all different kinds of musical languages of their own. And Young-Jo Lee was one of them.
Unlike other peers of his generation Young-Jo Lee was born in a musical family: his father, his brother, and his son are all composers. He was a composer to be from the early age. Throughout his life, Young-Jo Lee has been learning and practicing the musical language of the fore-generation, but did not fond of atonal music. Rather than atonality he preferred various colors of augmented chords and added chords. Then finally he found his path of music.
Young-Jo Lee's musical signature comes from two aspects. The first comes from the musical line in which he elongates the space between each tone of Korean traditional musical scale as long as possible, then he proceeds the space chromatically producing a sense of transcendental time. It is his typical way of modernizing the past. Then following the line, he chooses proper added chords his ear picks each moment. As a result, his music is not only originally chromatic but also quite coloristic in sound. It is an ironical pleasure that he gives to us.
This paper would provide the composer's musical background, the main blocks of his works and representative compositions which reveal his musical characteristics.