River Flows in You-Yiruma

Professor
ENC 1101 2:00-3:15pm
9 September 2011
River Flows In You: Yiruma “River Flows In You” by the South Korean composer Yiruma is a calming and beautiful contemporary classical melody. The song is presented very simply, a single artist with a piano, but this simplicity effectively reaches the audience and creates for them a mood and background to the song. In essence, this work is a love story that is translated into a romantic refrain that combines the use of the senses and dynamics to convey the feeling of the melody. Like many other pieces of classical music, when words are not there to convey emotion the composer wishes the audience to rely on their senses and the feelings that come to when listening to their piece of work. In this piece Yiruma’s melody taps into the senses by giving images of beauty and safety to the audience. When listening to the melody a warmth is felt throughout the entirety of the piece. This warmth is directly related to the theme of love that most audience members feel. The tune conjures up images that relate to love, whether it be a romance between a woman and a man, a widowed lover remembering a moment with their lost loved one, or a mother for her son. The tune is the exact mixture of love and loss in a set of notes repeated in phrases and can be interpreted into the many different forms of love that a person feels. Because the song is an instrumental piece the listener must use their own lyrics that they feel as well as the composer’s tools to translate the meaning of the song. In this piece of music Yiruma relies heavily on the use of dynamics throughout the work. The calm feeling that settles the audience in the beginning of the song is created by the slow tempo and as the song progresses the tempo then increases to a slight climax before going back to its original pace. This use of dynamics in the tempo sets the mood for the entire song, starting with a calmness that relaxes the listener, then as the tempo of the melody progresses through the phrase, a yearning or want is instilled in the audience. Yiruma also utilizes dynamics in the volume of the song. The beginning of the phrase starts off soft, a perfect combination to the slow tempo, and as the tempo progressively gets faster the volume also increases which further enunciates the feeling of need or want that the tempo gave to the audience. Because the song is mostly made up of repeated phrases the dynamics are what bring the music to life and give the feeling of a love story into the melody. The many different forms of love still conjures up the same feeling and emotions, and in this piece Yiruma combines the use of the audience’s senses and the dynamics of the song to create a beautiful love story in “River Flows In You” that can be interpreted uniquely by the listener.