*30.11.1945 Cheongju / South-Korea

Younghi Pagh-Paan was born in 1945 in Cheongju, South Korean. From 1965 to 1971 she studied at the Seoul National University. In 1974 a DAAD scholarship took her to Germany. Despite moving to Germany, even today her compositional output is deeply connected, both intellectually and emotionally, with the traditional music of Korea. Here one can draw particular attention to the influence of Byung-Ki Hwang and Tae-Suk Oh, the former being a profound connoisseur and interpreter of the Korean music tradition, within which he composes, and the latter an innovative theatre director and modern playwright.

At the Freiburg im Breisgau Musihochschule, her teachers included Klaus Huber (composition), Brian Ferneyhough (analysis), Peter Förtig (music theory) and Edith Picht-Axenfeld (piano); she completed her studies in 1979. In 1980/81 she held a scholarship from the Sudwestfunk’s Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung, and in 1985 from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg. After guest professorships at the Conservatories in  Graz (1991) and Karlsruhe (1992/93), in 1994 Younghi Pagh-Paan was appointed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. There she founded the Atelier Neue Musik (New Music Studio), which she has directed ever since. She gained international attention with the performance of her orchestral work Sori at the Donaueschingen Music Days in 1980. She had further premieres at this festival in 1987, 1998, and again in 2007. In january 2011 she officially retired and has awarded emeritus status.

She has received numerous international awards for her work, most recently from her homeland, namely the Lifetime Achievement Award of Seoul National University (2006), the Order of Civil Merit of the Republc of Korea (2007) and the Lifetime Achievement Award of Korean Broadcasting Systems (KBS)(2009).