Yoon Jeong Heo is so active that it’s almost surprising she doesn’t single-handedly generate combustible energy during the course of one of her average working days.
But there is nothing remotely average about this visionary master of the 1,300-year-old geomungo, an intricate, Korean string instrument whose legacy Heo simultaneously salutes and extends with singular skill, reverence and daring. That she has done so in such a conservative, patriarchal country as Korea — and had an international impact — makes her trailblazing achievements all the more impressive.
“Yoon Jeong Heo is an extraordinary musician of great artistry and heart,” said bass great and UC San Diego professor Mark Dresser, her periodic concert collaborator. “She is more than a world-class geomungo player. She’s a brilliant improviser and an innovator on her instrument, as well as a tireless activist who continues to find new voice for traditional Korean music in the world.”
As self-effacing as she is accomplished, Heo is a professor of music at Seoul National University, where she teaches composition, improvisation and such traditional Korean gugak music styles as sanjo and sinawi. She is also the art director of Seoul’s Bukchon Changwoo Theater, which hosts annual festivals of Korean and World Music.
Advertisement
To make her schedule even more packed, this married mother of a 23-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter is the leader of the Korean band Black String, which makes its area debut Wednesday at UC San Diego’s Price Center Ballroom East.
Formed in 2011, the one-woman, three-man group teams her with electric guitarist and electronic musician Jean Oh, percussionist and vocalist Min Wang Hwang (who also plays the oboe-like taepyeongso) and Aram Lee, who performs on various bamboo wind instruments and on the yanggeum, a Korean zither.
“As a musician as a teacher and as a director, it’s all connected,” said Heo, in a recent phone interview from her home in Seoul.
“It’s very hard to divide my roles, because I only have 24 hours a day, but my main position is as a musician and creator. This is my own goal in my life, because I really want to share my music and my vision of the Korean tradition in music, especially with the young generation. We have a lot of great music in this world, not just Western music or Asian music, but many types of music. I really want to share, and join together, all this music to make the world more warm, human and diverse.”
Advertisement
The combination of traditional Korean instruments with electric guitar is as unusual as it is fraught with challenges.
“Korean traditional music and the guitar are not a good match, because there are so many differences,” Heo said.
“So we have to make a good balance between the instrumental sound and also musical structure. I love to make details between the instrumental (parts), so I give them the right direction for the instrumental balance, not only the sound, but colors and everything else. We have a very detailed structure of the music we play, but the improvisation is very important. If we don’t talk with each other about the music, and life, we cannot make good improvisations.”
“From the 15th to to the 19th centuries, my instrument — the geomungo — was one of the symbols of the aristocracy and was a very conservative and gentle instrument,” notes Yoon Jeong Heo, shown above. “But I play it in a more modern and very aggressive way.”
(Photo by Nah Seung Yull)
Age-old and high-tech
Heo’s chosen instrument, the nearly 5-foot-long geomungo, is challenging by any standards.
A relative of the Japanese koto and the Chinese zheng, the geomungo’s six silk strings rest on top of 16 frets and three movable bridges that can be adjusted for each piece performed. The geomungo is played with a thin bamboo stick in the right hand, while the left hand is used to pluck, strum and dampen the strings. The geomungo can also be played with a bow and — like a piano — functions as both a melodic and percussive instrument.
Heo began learning the instrument in her mid-teens and underwent vigorous training. She joined a traditional Korean orchestra, both because of her passion for the music and because she did not see other young Korean women performing on the geomungo.
Her goal is to simultaneously salute the traditions of gugak music at the same time that she expands them. Yet, while she stresses her devotion to tradition, she also uses various electronic effects pedals on her geomungo, along with MIDI (short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows any number of instruments and computers to interact with each other.
Advertisement
“From the 15th to the 19th centuries, my instrument was one of the symbols of the aristocracy and was a very conservative and gentle instrument, But I play it in a more modern and very aggressive way,” said Heo, who earned a doctorate in philosophy of art from Sungkyunkwan University’s Department of Eastern Philosophy.
“I love (Korean) folk music, especially. The masters of it have amazing abilities, but they lose their improvisational skills and deep musical talent over time. I really want to feel free, even with the traditional music. So that’s a driving point of my music. Another is we that we have also have great masters of free improvisation on saxophone and percussion. As a student, I enjoyed going to free-jazz concerts.”
In 1986, Heo received the Korean Ministry of Culture’s top award for Korean Traditional Music. Taking those traditions into the future was not an easy task at the time. Even today, Black String — the only Korean group to record for the prestigious German label ACT — performs to receptive audiences abroad more often than in its homeland.
“It was a very hard time for me (in the mid 1980s),” recalled Heo, who two decades later was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation to be a resident artist for the Asian Cultural Council in New York.
Soon after arriving in the Big Apple in 2007, she formed the acclaimed Tori Ensemble, a genre-blurring group that also featured clarinetist/flutist Ned Rothenberg, singer Kang Kwon Soon, cellist Erik Friedlander, flutist/drummer Young Chi Min and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. Together, they created wonderfully eclectic music, fueled by the joy of improvisation.
“That’s why I went to New York in 2007 and 2008,” Heo said. “Because I really wanted to see what I am and what my music is in the world, not only in Korea. I wanted to play in front of the world! So, that was a big changing point in my life.”
It was also an eye-opening experience for fellow Tori Ensemble member Rothenberg,
“I immediately found Yoon Jeong Heo to be super impressive and a really excellent improviser,” Rothenberg said from New York, where he teaches at The New School.
Advertisement
“She is one of the first prominent women playing her instrument and I’m not aware of any other group in Korea, like Black String, that is led by a woman. In Korea, they are trying very hard to work out a crossover of traditional Korean music and Western music, and Yoon Jeong Heo is doing as interesting work in this area as anyone I can think of. She’s a total musician and has encyclopedic knowledge. To put together a group like Black String or the Tori Ensemble, like she did, is a tall order.”
Rothenberg holds Heo in high regard for another reason.
“I was so impressed with her, in that she brought her two children over with her when she came to New York,” he said. “When you talk about struggling to establish her career, she raised two children in a very traditional Korean society. And, yet, she had this whole musical career at the same time.”
Heo acknowledges that she faced a number of challenges.
“Yes, that is true,” she said. “It’s not easy as a woman. I’m also a mother, a wife and a daughter. And Korea has a very strong family tradition, in which the woman takes a role of duty, so it is really hard. But those challenges make me stronger. I think woman leadership is very special. It’s different from a man leadership. I’m the leader of Black String and, before that, the Tori Ensemble, and I have a different role as a leader that is very natural for me. But I work with many, many men. It’s very rare to work with women. There are so many men in the music field, so it’s very strange!”
The innovative Korean music group Black String, led by Yoon Jeong Heo (third from left), fuses the traditional music of its homeland with Western styles and an emphasis on improvisation.
(Photo courtesy of ArtPower)
Globe-spanning Telematic concerts
In contrast with Japanese and Chinese traditional styles, Korean music lends itself to improvisation in general and the improvisation that propels Black String’s performances specifically. Why?
“I also am curious about that, and many of my friends in Japan and China have wondered about that,” Heo said. “Basically, it’s because Chinese and Japanese traditional music is very different than Korea’s. A big difference is within (rhythmic) patterns. In China and Japan, their traditional rhythmic patterns are based on two beats: Dat-dat, dat-dat. But Korean music is based on three beats: Dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat.
“Three beats of rhythmic music can make for a tremendous amount of variations and it’s very complex. That is why we can do such strong improvisations in Korean music.”
Rothenberg, her former band mate in the Tori Ensemble, can attest to those differences first-hand from his experiences as a performer and musicologist.
“It’s absolutely true,” he said. “Chinese and Japanese music is very limited, rhythmically. All of music, if you think of it metrically, is just made of twos and threes. Even Indian music, with its 127-beat cycles, is in two and threes when you break it down. In China and Japan, its mostly in twos and they are not comfortable combining twos and threes.
“Korea is unique in the rhythmic breadth of its music. I also think they are very comfortable exploring sonically, because the ornamentation in Korean music is so wide. You have big vibratos and the expressive range on Heo’s instrument — and how how you bend and alter notes — is quite high compared to its counterpart instruments in Japan and China.”
Rothenberg chuckled.
“I have a funny take on this,” he said. “I think what Heo is doing (with Black String) is difficult, just not for the usual reason. Because, with Chinese or Japanese music, when you spice it up, it gets more spicy specifically because the traditional music is kind of straight in Japan and China. With Korean traditional music, trying to spice it up does the opposite, because Korean music is pretty wild. So I find most of the Korean crossover stuff pretty mild. Heo’s trying to keep the edge, but — even orchestrally —Korean music is simultaneously wild and subtle. It’s hard to keep that going when you mix it up with electric guitar, but Heo is really doing a yeoman’s job.”
Heo stands out in any setting, as she most recently demonstrated during the Feb. 13 “Changing Tides II: A Telematic Translocational Concert.” The live, real-time performance featured Korean and Californian musicians who — thanks to cutting-edge, fiber-optics technology — played together for audiences in Seoul and her at UC San Diego, despite being 17 hours and 7,000 miles apart.
The musicians in Seoul, led by Heo, and their Korean audience saw and heard the San Diego musicians streaming live, just as the San Diego musicians and their audience here saw and heard the performers in Seoul. Heo headed an ensemble that teamed the members of Black String with two other Korean musicians, while the San Diego group was co-led by bass great Mark Dresser and trombonist Michael Dessen. The borders-leaping results were frequently mesmerizing, particularly during Heo’s extended composition, “Re-birth.”
“My first Telematic concert with Mark was in 2010 and we met again in 2013, long distance, through another Telematic concert,” Heo recalled. “Then, Mark came to Seoul last year and we could meet, offline, and do a concert together in person.
“If I am just a ‘Korean traditional musician’ and only play traditional Korean music, it’s very hard to connect with other musicians, because Korean music is so different. So, I really want to reach other musicians and audiences through their music. That way, they can walk to me and I can walk to them, and we can meet at some point.”
Black String
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Price Center Ballroom East, UC San Diego, 3500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $13 (non-UCSD students); $25 (general admission)
Phone: (858) 534-8497
Online: artpower.ucsd.edu/event/black-string/
"traditional" - Google News
February 22, 2020 at 09:02PM
https://ift.tt/2wvKfL5
Black String, straight outta Seoul, mixes traditional Korean music, edgy improvisation and electronics - The San Diego Union-Tribune
"traditional" - Google News
https://ift.tt/36u1SIt
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Black String, straight outta Seoul, mixes traditional Korean music, edgy improvisation and electronics - The San Diego Union-Tribune"
Post a Comment