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Music Department presents Festival for Korean Gayageum and Western Instruments

The UC Santa Cruz Music Department presented a Festival for Korean Gayageum and Western Instruments in collaboration with the UC Davis Music Department and Old First Concerts in San Francisco during the week of April 22-28, 2007.

Korea trip
Seventeen graduate students and faculty members from UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley and Davis traveled to Korea to perform and present their music and to give conferences on a project that combined an ancient Korean instrument with Western instruments.

The gayageum is one of Korea’s oldest musical instruments. A string instrument with a long, rectangular, wooden sounding board that is laid across the performer’s lap, the gayageum has 12 strings that are plucked using the right hand while controlling the pitch with pressure on the string from the left hand. It has a long and venerable history of performance of ancient court and folk music in Korea.

Professor Hi Kyung Kim, a composer with the UCSC Music Department, had the idea to take this ancient instrument and combine it with Western instruments to create new musical compositions. She organized workshops at UCSC taught by one of Korea’s best gayageum performers and teachers, Eun-Ah Kwak. Graduate students, undergraduates and faculty members participated in order to learn about this ancient instrument and were then invited to write new works for any combination of gayageum and Western instruments. Graduate students from UC Berkeley and UC Davis also participated.

The preparation included 25 hours of intensive workshops in February 2006 and work-in-progress rehearsals in November 2006 and February 2007 with Korean gayageum performers Professor Eun-Ah Kwak and her associates.

The resulting compositions were subsequently performed at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and Old First Concerts in San Francisco, as well as in Seoul, Korea. Seventeen graduate students and faculty members from UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley and Davis traveled to Korea to perform and present their music and to give conferences there on the project. Events were presented in Seoul, Korea, in collaboration with Ewha Women’s University, the Korean National University of the Arts, and the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts from June 18 - June 22, 2007.

Korean gayageum virtuosos Eun-Ah Kwak, Hee-Jeong Kim, and Yu-Sun Kim from Ewha Women’s University with Western musicians presented world premiere compositions by UC faculty members Andrew Imbrie, David Evan Jones, Yu-Hui Chang, David Cope, Hi Kyung Kim and Korean composers Young-Ja Lee and Sung-Ki Kim. In addition, 10 new compositions by graduate students of UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley (including Daniel Brown, Monica Lynn, Young-Shin Choi, Simon Hutchinson, Sylvain Carton, Joel Ford, John Seales, Sue-Hye Kim, Jean Ahn, and Jesse Berkowitz) were also presented.

This was the first attempt by an institution outside Korea to learn a Korean instrument and create contemporary pieces for it in solo or ensemble forms along with Western instruments. The project was greeted enthusiastically on both sides of the Pacific. Several of the pieces were recorded for release on upcoming CDs, and several of the students have already completed their second compositions for the instruments to be performed by the Korean artists. Compositions by graduate students Monica Lynn and Jean Ahn were selected to be presented at the International Women Composers’ Festival in Beijing, China, in April 2008. As Professor Kim commented, “This was a pilot project toward the development of new cultural forms, and it was more successful than we could have dreamed.”

The project was supported in part by the grants from the Arts Research Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Porter College, Diversity Funds from UC Santa Cruz, the Korea Foundation, and the Arts Council Korea.

Please contact Hi Kyung Kim at hkim@ucsc.edu to learn more about her role in the Korean Gayageum.