San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
UP TO THE TASK
The four-piece group, led by geomungo master Yoon Jeong Heo, reveres Korean music traditions while also expanding on them
Black String leader Yoon Jeong Heo is an expert on the difficult geomungo
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 1,300year-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.
To make her schedule even more packed, this married mother of a 23-year-old son and 18-yearold 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 oboelike 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,” Heo said 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.”
Heo’s chosen instrument, the nearly 5-foot-long geomungo, is challenging by any standard.
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. 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 salute the traditions of gugak music while also expanding 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 one another.
“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.
In 1986, she 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.
“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 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-optic technology — played together for audiences in San Diego and Seoul, despite being 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 musicians, while the San Diego group was co-led by bassist Dresser and trombonist Michael Dessen. The borders-leaping results were frequently mesmerizing, particularly during Heo’s extended composition “Re-birth.”
“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,” Heo said. “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.”
george.varga@sduniontribune.com