Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
I get up between 6-7am if I am not too tired. Most mornings, I teach private lessons on Zoom until 10. If not, I go to a nearby café, or a lounge in the residential building and I work on my book. I do free writing in my journal, which gives me clarity and sets me up for the day. Then, I alternate between reading books, emails, and writing.
I usually block 2-5 hours a day to work on any type of writing. When I focus more on practicing piano, I start after lunch before I go outside for a walk. I can't practice for many hours in one sitting. At best, I do 2-3 hours. I do yoga and Pilates twice a week and a short hike on Saturdays with my parents. I take a stroll in the city, checking out my surroundings. Sometimes I buy books or items on a whim but those usually become great sources for creative activities I do.
These days, I am spending most of my time working on my book. It’s about how Korean ancient philosophy gave systemic foundations to Korean traditional music, discussing aspects of language, breathing, harmony, scales, rhythms and numbers. I finished the first draft in Korean last year and now I am translating it to English while editing at the same time. This is one of the most challenging tasks I have undertaken in my life.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
I can talk about my new release, End of Time vol. 1. It’s a live recording I did right before the pandemic hit everywhere, at Lilypad in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Big shout out to Franciso Mela, Allison Burik, Max Ridley and Mina Kim, who were collectively all at the helm!
I do mentally design how the entire performance would flow and what sort of core energy, like a seed -- I know, the seed analogy again -- idea to it which will take shapes and unfold in time in relation to the psychological spaces of other musicians and the audience. And that’s the case with this particular performance/album.
There were two graphic scores, and others were performed open. I have not settled on a term to refer to the type of scores. Sometimes I call it a visual score or a grim score. Grim means a picture or a painting. What I’m trying to develop is to have each figure and the entire composition of my scores to carry symbolic meanings and to function like languages and letters.
I feel that when we discuss symbolism, we tend to simply list an array of words that describe a certain symbol. We care less about the physical and energetic information directly derived from its shape. Translating this into simple words will lead them far away from their origin, I think. I want musicians including myself to examine the different layers and dimensions of the visual scores and create music while infusing their own unique creative imprint onto them. Whether you agree or disagree, I'm doing exactly that with the visual scores.
On volume 1 of End of Time, the solo cello piece performed by Mina Kim is a great example of that and another track called “KM-53” which will be in volume one is based on another graphic score. Wadada has developed a far more sophisticated score system, as many already know, called Ankrasmation, which also influenced me to develop my own as well.
When it comes to the seed energy of this record, it’s inspired by a half moon bear numbered KM-53 (Korean Male number 54). Since it was released into the wild, this bear has been unable to stay in one territory. He is always on his way to another region, moving mountains to mountains. One day I saw a report that he had been hit by a bus driving at 100km/h. His poo was all over the front of the bus, which showed how shocked and frightened the bear was at the accident.
As soon as it was rescued, it underwent surgery, recovered quickly and has kept its adventurous spirit strong until now. I still follow his news.
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
What is commonly believed is that all artworks are objects with fixed and closed frames. A visual artist or a painter I know once told me in a very patronizing manner that I should become an auteuristic musician / artist. His idea of high art is individualistic, completely independent from others in nature. I began to think he might not be well-versed in his own field, contemporary art.
Certain famous art installations let time and other natural causes influence the work, which is exactly what they were designed to do. There has always been a connection between music and nature, that is, it has always been a form that reveals the impermanence of nature. Both music and nature are always vulnerable to changes in the immediate future, uncertainty, and we are always bound to cope with what life presents us with.
As a musician, I believe in having my own private mental space in order to truly express my very honest self through my music. But at the same time, I fully embrace uncertainty, being vulnerable and reactive to the environment. I believe that while not compromising, I should let others in on my music. The others include fellow musicians I play with and the audience. We make a difference, and many different individualistic realities collide and co-exist.
To answer this question more directly, I would say I acknowledge both solidarity and communality.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
My definition of an artist is one who perceives the same phenomena in a new way, sometimes foresees what will happen, finds fresh, original, and sometimes bizarre meanings, and shows their vision through their own works of art. I think that artists can be instrumental in helping society find deeper meanings and to enliven their own spirits by making artworks or by-products of reality fused with their conscious selves, evoked and evoking their spirits, and speaking to them.
In my opinion, musical creation is able to affect people more directly and deeply than any other artistic form of communication. There are songs and music that are explicit about what their messages are. In the case of the type of music I do, it is mostly unidentifiable and undefinitable.
Although people attempt to classify music as styles and genres, really what we hear is their identity and what it is. I imagine musical creativity will have a mysterious influence on listeners. My role in the world as a music creator is to deliver messages that are uniquely expressed through music.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
Isn't life bittersweet? Recently, I saw a group exhibition that a new friend I made in Korea curated, which featured artists from Germany, Belgium, USA and South Korea. Each piece of art in the exhibition ties together the theme of emotional co-dependence. All of the work in the show was an intersection of innerscapes and outerscapes that we normally just pass through.
That's evident in a work by Marina Pinsky called 'Flight 714 to Sydney'. The piece of work is the result of her sketching a real-time scene over the sky as she flew to Sydney on scrolls of paper. There were just two scrolls out of six as the remaining four stayed in a museum in Sydney.
The one that made me break into tears was a film called The Demands of Ordinary Devotion by Eva Giolo. There were scenes of a woman flipping a coin, a craftman working, a mom breast pumping and so on. I wasn't the one peeping into their intimate lives but I was positioned to be so. At the same time, I felt I was invited to those private moments so I could feel the rhythm of their breaths and the warmth of their bodies. That invitation made me feel closely connected to other human beings. This artwork was more than what the film visually showed me. It almost seems like they cut a part of themselves to let me into their life.
I think that is also what I learned from music. There is always something beyond the subject, theme, or topic that music refers to that deeply affects me. It is about how powerfully, vulnurably and joyfully music can connect us as people. We all have to let each other in whether we are performers or listeners.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
Music is a physical phenomenon that humans create, period. There are many branches of science besides physics of course.
Regardless, I always hold on to this very basic idea that two objects must come into contact to produce sound. I am not sure what music does to the study of science. I’m curious what scientists would say about this topic.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
No. It seems to me that planning a day, going on a random excursion to another city, writing an email, text message, or making coffee are all inherently the same as making music.
However, there's a difference. The thing I am able to do when I am unable to conduct mundane tasks is to be fully, explicitly, existentially present through my music; mind, body, soul, present, past, and future all meet through music.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation for why it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
Unless we reduce musical and sonic materials to abstract information - such as chord names, meters, hz, bpm - each song contains something unique, local, authentic and special. Music creators are the senders of that and the audiences are the receivers.
We live in an era where a phone can be wirelessly charged. There has been invisible energy transporting information around the globe for more than a century. A keen, sensitive listener who hears beyond what appears on the surface can detect some sort of message, some design imprints etched into the sonic 'material.' A well-tuned listener would like a reliable radio that receives the signals well enough.
It is a mentality that enlivens music by connecting the present, past, and future, as well as physical and metaphysical worlds, and adapting oneself to the here and now while imprinting a part of who I am on the outside world, cherishing ephemerality at its fullest.
