Korean Performers with Art Director and Conductor of the Gugak Orchestra Lee Yong Tak. Pic by Salim Matramkot/The Peninsula
Doha: It would take a person roughly six months to learn how to properly blow and sustain a note out of the Daegeum, a traditional Korean woodwind instrument.
To produce a melody that evokes images and feelings that can only be described as “Korean,” that takes a lot more.
Art Director and Conductor of the Gugak Orchestra Lee Yong Tak revealed to The Peninsula that in order to master melody, “Performers have to absorb the feelings, understand the soul of the music.”
The performers must to be able to ride the highs of life, maneuver the anxious lows, and articulate the journey through sounds that can be elegant, abrasive, joyous, desperate; sounds that imitate life’s own rich tapestry. To Lee, performers must “absorb feelings and understand the soul of the music.”
The Gugak Orchestra had recently wrapped up a performance at the National Museum of Qatar titled “Eolssu! Korean Traditional Melody to the World,” in honour of the 50th anniversary celebration of Qatar-Korea relations.
Lee, when asked about how he comes up with his melodies, took a considerate pause before revealing that there were multiple means to do so.
“Typically, one would start with something like a children’s nursery rhyme, as they are easy to memorize and are catchy,” he told The Peninsula.
“After that new elements are added to the melody, some variations, before going back again to the main melody.”
The main melody is a safe harbor that a composer travels back to after a suspenseful journey. It eases the listener back to familiarity and it is where all the tension in the piece delicately resolves.
Lee is a classically trained musician with great admiration for Bach and Mozart, particularly the latter’s most well-known opera piece “Don Giovanni.”
Despite his classical training, he admitted to allowing elements of jazz-like improvisation in some parts of his compositions, as experienced by audiences during the Samullori Instrumental Music Concerto performed here in Doha.
The Peninsula asked the conductor about the significance of a Korean upbringing to traditional music performance, and he affirmed that, while it would be easy for anyone to read and play the notes on a music sheet, an understanding of the “feeling” that is meant to be induced can only come through experience. It is imperative the performer learns to feel as they learn to play.
Lee’s Gugak Orchestra boasts a wide range of musicians who are split between vocalists and instrumentalists. The conductor has been on a mission to spread the appeal of Korean traditional music abroad, mainly through incorporating traditional musical instruments from different countries and cultures.
The approach has been a success as people have come from all over the world to study traditional Korean music at the National Gugak Center.
When asked if the Oud, a Middle Eastern musical instrument, would eventually make its way to his orchestra, Lee said that “all Korean instruments are basically Oud.”
Lee’s traveling Gugak Orchestra has taken him to different places around the world, serving global audiences slices of a humbler Korea, with images and sounds from a simpler yet powerfully resonant past. He intends to keep on doing so for as long as he can.
