German School of Music Weimar flute professor Philipp Jundt appears in a new documentary portrait. Directed by Dorothee Binding and Benedict Mirow of Nightfrog Productions, the film provides a brief glimpse of Jundt’s professional life and explores some of the components that make up his sound, playing style, and musical philosophy.
Jundt has been teaching at Kangnam University’s German School of Music Weimar since 2008, offering Korean students a music education in the German tradition. It’s an experience that has been a “wonderful challenge”, requiring him to reexamine music and even change the way he plays.
His time in Korea has also allowed him to bridge a perceived gap between European and Asian culture, acknowledging different but equally valid points of view. As Jundt explains in the documentary, “In Europe our understanding of music is very much based on communication. We speak to each onstage, we show our feelings and we are confrontational about it. . . . That’s our way of living, and we also express it onstage. If we travel to a different cultural area — to Korea, for example — our first impression is that people don’t play this kind of music onstage, but a more descriptive representational kind of music, with other emphases to it. But if you examine this culture more closely, you see it coincides exactly with the way in which these people think and live.”
Performances of Paganini, Telemann, Franck, Morlacchi, and Weber make up the soundtrack for the documentary. Videos of all the performances can be seen in their entirety on Jundt’s YouTube channel.
He will be spending August 20-30 teaching masterclasses at the 2014 St. George International Music Festival in Asprovalta, Greece.
For more on Philipp Jundt, visit his new website.
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