On Nov. 11 and 12, the Korean Experimental Music Festival made a stop at UC Berkeley for four concerts, premiering compositions by students and faculty alike from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University. Musicians from the South Korean National Gugak Center joined forces with the San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet to bring these compositions to life.
The four concerts, held on campus in both the Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall and in Hertz Concert Hall, highlighted how instruments used in gugak, a Korean word referring to traditional Korean music, might encounter and produce music in tandem with other forms of musical production. The first two concerts used the instrumentation of one or two gayageums — long plucked-string instruments consisting of a wooden body and horizontal strings — with Del Sol’s string quartet. The remaining two concerts featured Korean wind instruments mixed with electronic effects.
The composers’ experimental techniques stuck out in every piece, creating effects ranging from ear-grating to transcendent. During UC Berkeley professor emerita Cindy Cox’s composition “A Vine Follows the Path,” the violinists sounded almost exactly like birdsong. In UCSC professor Ben Leeds Carson’s piece “So Slight,” gayageum player Ji-Eun Lee pulled out a mallet and struck it on an army helmet worn by cellist Kathryn Bates.
Aside from acoustic experimentation, the combination of gugak and electronics created fascinating textures. As musicians on stage played piri, saenghwang and daegeum — all different types of Korean wind instruments — the composers laid out harsh noises, reverberating soundscapes and other effects to complement and highlight the performers on stage.
Although the festival centered on Korean instruments, composers often brought a variety of other cultural perspectives to the music. Nina Barzegar and Siamak Barghi brought their Iranian heritage to the festival by adapting folk songs and Middle Eastern microtones for the gayageum and quartet, while Maisha Lani used the medium to retell Hawaiian folklore.
A somber consciousness of the current American moment also permeated the proceedings. Festival director Matt Schumaker, a professor at UCSC, prefaced the first night’s performances with an acknowledgement both of the current instability of institutions in the United States and of recent detentions faced by Korean workers. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley professor Edmund J. Campion infused his composition “Simple Songs (for a Broken America)” with a sense of pervasive decay.
Carson, who has traveled to the National Gugak Center in Seoul to study with Korean musicians, appreciated the transformative value that composing for gugak instruments had for him.
“When you’re a student of another tradition, it’s not like you’re trying to get the license to write in that tradition,” he said. “It’s changing how I think about musical information.”
Aside from cultural synthesis, much of the music was also an academic synthesis with other disciplines. Several compositions featured spoken or sung renditions of poetry in different languages, while others emulated the process of pleating fabric or explored mathematical structures.
One example of this academic cross-pollination was Schumaker’s “A White Lopsided Moon,” which derives its name from a poem by UC Berkeley English professor Cathy Park Hong. As Chi-Wan Park screeched violently on the piri, a distorted voice read the poem from the speakers, all amid a dystopian electronic soundscape.
The festival was first conceived by UCSC professor Hi Kyung Kim, who had previously organized the Pacific Rim Music Festival bringing the National Gugak Center’s Creative Traditional Orchestra to the United States. For the past two years, composers from the three participating California institutions worked with National Gugak Center musicians both online and in person, producing the music that premiered at the festival last week.
For the National Gugak Center musicians, working with American composers was a new but positive experience.
“I think they understand Korean instruments well,” said Lee, who also teaches in the Department of Korean Music at Seoul National University.
The result of all this experimentation and fusion wasn’t always pleasing to the average ear, but it still reflected a fascinating dialogue between musical worlds, ideas and concepts. Many pieces beg the same question: “What counts as music anyway?” Each experimental composer answered in their own way.