Composer imagines unified Korea through music

Yang Bang-ean, a composer and pianist, speaks about his upcoming concert “Yang Bang-ean Utopia 2018” during a press conference at a restaurant in Seoul, Thursday. Courtesy of PRM

By Park Jin-hai

Yang Bang-ean, a composer and pianist who delivered a message of peace in the opening and closing ceremonies of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics earlier this year, said his heart raced with excitement when the two Koreas announced an agreement to connect their railways in April.

“A new era has opened. It seems like the Gyeongui Line linking Seoul through Sinuiju of North Korea all the way to Europe lies in front of my eyes,” Yang said during a press conference last Thursday.

“My father came from Jeju Island, my mother from Sinuiju and I was born and raised in Tokyo. When I heard the railroad will be reconnected, I was so much moved by the news. I thought that now is the right time to perform my 2012 music 'Dream Railroad.'”

Yang will hold his fourth “Yang Bang-ean Utopia 2018” concert later this month.

The ethnic Korean, born to a South Korean father and North Korean mother who migrated to Japan, performed an introductory presentation for the PyeongChang Olympics during the handover at the closing ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and later was appointed as music director for the PyeongChang Games.

“The part I was supposed to perform was for the torch carrying,” he said. “Initially only a South Korean athlete was supposed to go up the ski slope and pass the torch to the final lighter, but two days prior to the event it was decided that two athletes from South and North Korea would come up the slope. Now the inter-Korean railroad I imagined looks like a possible dream.”

Yang's other project is creating music for the upcoming KBS documentary “Arirang Road,” which visits the ethnic Korean minorities overseas who were displaced from their home country during the 1910-45 Japanese occupation and the 1950-53 Korean War and finds the traces of “Arirang,” Korea's most popular folk song, in them. He created its theme music “Diaspora” and will perform it along with “Dream Railroad” during his concert slated for Nov. 21 at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

“Technically, I'm in a sense a diaspora. So I felt close to the stories of those ethnic Koreans in Russia and Kazakhstan living away from their homelands,” said Yang, who confessed he had his own identity crisis as a marginal man, wondering where he truly belongs. “I think Arirang is the song that brings together all those displaced ethnic Koreans.”

The medical doctor-turned-musician, who has been busy performing going between Korea and Japan for the past 22 years since his 1996 debut, crisscrosses freely between pop, traditional Korean folk music, new-age and rock. His music starts with the sounds of taepyeongso (a Korean double reed wind instrument) and wraps up grandiose with piano and orchestra sounds joining.

He composes music for films, commercials and games. He says he always “leaves the window open.”

“I wish I could let in many things and fresh wind always breezing inside of me,” Yang said. “As one on a mountain peak sees another peak around, I go to rock and EDM festivals. In a sense, I've left my window open.”

He says his utopia is the stage. “Music is an art of time. I write music and do the rehearsals, but I cannot predict what will go on at the stage. Those things like on-stage communication and live reaction from audiences at the moment make the stage my utopia.”