(Composer)
"As I raise my own children, I realize that nothing is more important than that. The kid who's in middle school now and the baby in this recording are the same person, but they're living in different times. It's usually much more vivid to hear a recorded voice than it is to watch a video. I would translate your question, 'Un/contemporary', as 'Bi-Contemporary'. I've always thought that time is like polyphony, with multiple layers going on at the same time, and that's how the world works.“
What sounds did you grow up hearing?
There were a lot of accidents in my family, so I can't forget the sounds I heard at the scene of an accident. For example, when I was 5 years old, my brother fell into the water shortly after he was born and almost drowned, my mother and father weren't there, so my grandfather urgently called me and ran with my brother. This happened a lot when I was a kid, so the first thing that came to mind was a sound that broke the peace of the house, psychologists call it trauma, but I don't care, yesterday and this morning I heard a sound like a hallucination, like my deceased mother was calling me.
It's a sound that creates a sense of urgency.
It's also a tragic sound, which is very memorable when something bad happens.
Can you think of a moment in your life when you had an unforgettable auditory experience?
The first is my mother's voice. The second is the sound I heard in the Abbaye du Torone in the southern France. It's one of the iconic places in Europe to record classical music, and the acoustic experience there was really amazing. When you sing there, the sound reverberates in the space for a long time. I tried it once, and I realized that once I make a sound, it has a very long duration, so I can add another sound on top of it. So I tried playing different harmony on my own. The sound I make already has series of overtones, so I have to sing a note that goes with it. While singing there, I realized, 'Oh, this is how polyphony has developed. The third experience was in the anechoic chamber at Daewoo Institute of Industrial Technology, which is not for musical research but to solve the problem of noise between floors, and I made sounds by myself without anyone else. It was the opposite of Le Torone Abbey, where all the echoes disappeared and only the sound of my body remained. It was a very strange, lonely, and unique experience, and I realized that the state we usually think of as normal is actually dependent on the resonance of sound to some extent.
You are considered one of the most active composers working on theater music in Korea. I know you got your start in theater through your work with the Yeonhee Street Troupe, but I'm curious about how you became interested in theater music after composing classical music.
From a young age, I attended a church founded by Professor Bong Ho Son, which was a socially engaged church that practiced Christian ethics and worked with people with disabilities. The church atmosphere made me think that classical music was a kind of bourgeois luxury, and I wondered if my music was too out of touch with the real world. In college, I had social activist friends around me, participated in Christian clubs, and spent my time passively wondering what I could do. Then I saw a performance of Yeonhee Street Troupe's <Stupid Bride> at the Sanwoolim Theater, and I was fascinated by three things. First, it was very similar to musical theater, which was very different from the Western realist theater that was popular at the time, and it was a synthesis of many different parts of the performing arts, so I thought there's a lot I can do. Second, I had a burden of Korean tradition when I was composing, and the actors in Yeonhee Street Troupe were using traditional music to communicate in a very engaging way, even though they weren't musical professionals, and I was fascinated by that. Third, they were telling a socially engaged story through art that I felt was lacking. I found all three of these things in their work that I felt I was lacking, and that's how our relationship began, but it ended when the troupe disappeared in disgrace.
Most composers at university have been working on contemporary music, but your theater music is very popular and has a very clear tonality. Did you feel any pressure when you first presented these works?
Not much. I didn't think much of it because I thought I was quitting classical music and started doing theater music.
You've done a lot of theater and opera in your career. How has your perspective changed between your early work and your more recent work?
In fact, I've lost interest in theater music recently. I realized that no matter how well I write music, the story is someone else's story.
Then, are you getting prepare to tell your story?
There's a project I've been working on lately, and it's actually about listening to someone else’s story. It's a project to bring back the voices that have disappeared or are hard to hear. For example, there are so many voiceless people in my university. I'm going to do a project to interview them, collect their stories, write songs about them, and perform them. But the 'someone else' here are really the 'others' I don't know. That kind of ‘someon else’s story’ is good for me. I don't want to tell more stories about writers who are similar to me. I don't want to make someone's voice louder than it already is.
I think that project would also lend itself to theater.
Why don't you join me? Back in the day, when I was in my 30s and 40s, I came to university very early. I take public transportation, and at five o'clock the bus is full of people who work at the school. But then they leave early again, like ghosts, and once they're gone, students, staff, and professors come.
You've been working with music theater for a long time, but you've also worked with contemporary music. You were the artistic director of the ensemble TIMF for a long time, which specializes in contemporary music. What kind of love and responsibility did you have for contemporary music?
It was difficult because it was more of a responsibility than a love. To quote Leonard Bernstein, I think classical music is a rigorous music where the composer writes the score with all the details and the performer plays it, and contemporary music is music that takes that rigor to an even greater extreme. Of course, there were reactions, and there were experiments with improvisation, electronic music, and so on, but on the whole, I think modern music in the 20th century was a creative activity that was practiced in the context of classical music, which is a product of the Western modern spirit, and I think that music pretty much came to an end around 2010. First of all, after 2010, YouTube was acquired by Google, Facebook Korea was created, and the iPhone came out, which completely changed the way we experience music, and it became a very different environment than before. I think that's when the 21st century really began in classical music, and I think that in that situation, there was no place for music where the composer had an enlightened attitude and awakened a certain lost sensibility, or where people knew the composer's name more than the music.
Can you elaborate on the idea of a changed environment in classical music?
About a decade ago, Deutsche Grammophon, one of the most conservative and central players in the classical music industry, started releasing albums by musicians like Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson. I felt that something was changing, and then, of course, there were recent releases by John Williams and Joe Hisaishi. These are names that Deutsche Grammophon would not have thought of in the past. Although there are still European school systems and many composers writing contemporary music in the 20th century style, no major label produces such recordings anymore. I think that fact alone explains a lot. In a way, classical music is just another commodity in a capitalist society. From an industrial point of view, classical music is actually a commoditized form of education dressed up in fancier clothes. I'm not to deny the value of such music, but we have never had the experience to relativize the value itself. Music was accepted with a value already assigned to it, and the music that was valued there was all European and American music. I think we need to relativize those values a little bit more, and even when we think about foreign music, I think we need to educate people about music from other regions, not just the West. If you learn African rhythms from a young age and grow up in that way, I think something new will come out later.
One of the debates around contemporary music is that it's such a highly intellectual activity that the audience doesn't matter. It's more of a pure research activity that schools and institutions should protect and support. Do you think audiences matter?
Yes, the audience is important, there's so much music being made that people don't listen to and doesn't get performed. Of course, I also think there's a need for research where researchers from different disciplines come together to study music, not just musicians, and there are already many places like that.
Let's talk about composition. I saw your interview in 2013, and you said that composers should focus on mastering techniques so that they don't fall into dogma. Perhaps it was wary of the dangers of becoming attached to a certain school of thought.
I don't know what I was thinking when I said that, but now when I talk about composition, I tell my students to write at least five bars a day. It's really easy to write five bars, you can draw five commas and it's music, but they don't do it well because they have different ideas of what composition is, for example, the composition department at Seoul National University has to do contemporary music, so it has to be similar to Ligeti or other contemporary masters, so it's stuck in this way. What I want to tell my students is to put that aside and just make a product like an athlete, like a craftsman, set a time and make a habitual product every day without thinking about it, so that you can look at it objectively because you can see your natural inclination, stubbornness, and bias when you step away from it. I think it's unavoidable for people to have dogmas, but just like sweating gets rid of toxins, you have to know what dogmas you're in so you can get rid of them, relativize them, and make good music.
I understand to a certain extent, but I wonder if it's possible to compose without thinking, and I know that you study a lot while composing. Doesn't it seem like a contradiction to compose without thinking and to compose while studying?
I think it's good to start without thinking at the beginning, because well begun is half done really. In classical composition, people think too much before write a note or start a piece. Instead, just write down a few notes on a paper, and then you can't help but think about it. It's the same thing with improvisation. You have to start without thinking, and then you have to discover, study, think, and repeat the process over and over again.
Traditional music is an integral part of your music. You also said that your favorite music is Gagok and Court Music of Korea. I'm curious how your love for traditional music came about.
When I was in high school, a friend gave me a tape of Yun Yunseok's AJaeng Sanjo, and I listened to it, and from then on, I fell in love with traditional music by listening to Kim Sohee, Cho Gongrye, Park Byungchun, and others. As an adult, I studied Yun Leesang's music and searched for a vague concept of “Korean identity,” but I liked the original traditional music much better than the classical music that pursues the so-called “Korean identity.” After that, I met various traditional musicians while working in a theater company.
You've often spoken about the importance of breaking away from Western conventions in music education, and I'm guessing this is related to your interest in traditional music. I'd love to hear more about why this is important to you.
Specifically, there are tons of notes between note C and C#. and people who only learn Western music can die without experiencing the notes in between. In India, for example, the process of indigenizing the violin is very rich in subtle notes. As a musician, it's very important to recognize these differences.