One who seeks for contemporary gayageum music that is graceful, sensual, detailed, and played with sharpness and concentrated strength should pay close attention to this album.
Gayageum player Se-youn Park, who made herself and the instrument known as a solo instrument for contemporary music in the gayageum solo album <Embracing the Zither> (Akdang Eban, 2012), has released a second solo album based on her repertoire from her recital in May 2020, <Gayageum, Wandering the Forest of Myth>.
This album contains five original gayageum pieces carefully written and arranged with four contemporary music composers. The texture of the silk thread and the resonance of the wooden body manifests sounds of various colors in contact with the nail and flesh. The album contains works of the four composers, Geon-yong Lee, June-hee Lim, Donald Reid Womack, and Thomas Osborne who started their career with Western music, but proved their love and knowledge of Korean music through many achievements. This contemporary gayageum album is a masterwork, with pieces that cross over the borders of Western and Eastern music, written by the best of our times in perfect chemistry with the performer.
This album by Se-youn Park goes beyond the expansion of her gayageum music repertoire, and offers a mysterious attraction throughout the music. Through dialogue and collaboration with the composer, she wandered through the mythical forest in search of a way to add charm to the sound of gayageum. She resolved the clues of gayageum into a refined language found in mythological and literary works mixed with dreamlike imagination. The inspiration from the process became the image, the score, and the music of the album.
This experience is something like that special feeling you get from subtle differences and reading literary works. The ‘meaning’ of a ‘sentence’ is changed with a ‘period,’ and an ‘exclamation mark’ expresses the ‘motive’ of the movement. When a word loses its meaning, the power of speech is weakened. But adding the will to a work strengthens the meaning. She tells the story of how the labyrinth of difficult notes, the invisible footnotes that hang from every measure, the dense sheet of music that fills the mind were made her own, with her efforts and the hours she passed in her practice room, alone with just the gayageum on her lap. Finally, the notes writhed with vitality and manifested as sounds at her fingertips. As observant as a bird on a branch in the forest, she added a story to each piece with sensitive perception and detailed description to complete the composer's intentions. For her, contemporary music is a fun and exciting game that is eventually expressed as a sweetly happy ending.
Se-youn Park's perfectionism and literary sensibilities unleash the five contemporary gayageum pieces with bold interpretation and technique at its peak. She goes beyond trials and shows a new level of gayageum's diverse expressiveness and artistic techniques. It is of great concentration, dazzling, excellent, and beautiful music. With this album, Se-youn Park will be recognized not only for her technique, but also for her outstanding musicality and sincere performance. This is valuable in a sense that it is the result of much time invested in collaboration with composers, with critical mind on original gayageum music. It is also important as it is not just a personal achievement, but the process to the next level over the current boundaries of gayageum music.
Se-youn Park’s greatest strength is the ability to perform a contemporary gayageum piece with extreme beauty of musicality.
Music Critic, Kyungchae Hyun.
<Review by Composer>
Geon-yong Lee-
Se-youn Park’s performance is beautiful and intelligent. <In the Garden of Summer> portraits a Seonbi (scholar) resting in a gazebo, and she played this very naturally expresses with gayageum.
Thomas Osborne -
I wanted to take time to listen to the files her sent me. I just finished listening, and I'm impressed! She play these pieces beautifully. Not only do her play them with precision, but – most importantly – she bring her own voice to them. It's clear to me that she has spent a lot of time with this music, because she play it in a way that is uniquely her own.
She has brought out the poetry in each piece.
Donald Reid Womack -
Without a performer, a composer is incomplete. Whatever musical ideas a composer might come up with, it takes a performer to bring to them to life. Any composer relishes the opportunity to work with great players, since doing so opens so many possibilities of what one might create. Thus, I was happy when Seyeon Park approached me with the very ambitious project of commissioning not just one, but two solo pieces, one for sanjo gayageum and one for its 25-string counterpart.
The resulting works, Haetae and Gumiho, were conceived as a complimentary pair of sorts, a balance of good and evil from Korean mythology. Both works call for great virtuosity, not just in the many fast and acrobatically exciting passages, but, perhaps less obviously, in the slower passages as well, which, at various times, call for a multitude of techniques, nuanced textures of layered voices, rhythmic complexity, and multiple simultaneous tempos, among other demanding facets. The player rarely has a moment to relax, as each hand is required to constantly leap around the instrument and perform numerous functions – a complex musical juggling act of sorts.
Beyond sheer virtuosity though, the true abilities of a performer shine through in the musicality they bring to a work. A great performer can take all those very challenging notes and not just play them correctly, but somehow make them speak expressively, tell a story, turn the notes into music. This is what Seyeon Park has done. She has brought my work to life, told the stories of Haetae and Gumiho, and turned my mere notes into actual music, the experience every composer hopes for. It has been my privilege and honor to work with her on this project, for which she has my gratitude.
June-hee Lim -
Comment on Se-youn Park’s <Wet Sleeve>
Se-youn Park’s fingertips play each note of <Wet Sleeve> with a elaborate and delicate touch, and they are colorful enough to take away the audience’s breath.
This piece portrays a woman, weaving cloth while trying the weave her deep thoughts and wrestling into the loom to reach the state of selflessness.
Se-youn Park interprets the deep sorrows and the complex, diverse emotions in <Wet Sleeve>, forming a consensus with the audience with sometimes clear, and sometimes passionate playing.
As a composer of this piece, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the new world of <Wet Sleeve> that she created, this piece was made as though baking a porcelain, through her most dedicated efforts and polishing.
