InterviewBerklee music professor breaks silence on suicide loss

The digital album cover of Ray Seol's "The Prison of Language" / Courtesy of E REUM

In the spring of 2006, Ray Seol was a 31-year-old jazz student in New York, at a time when Asian musicians were still a rarity in the jazz scene.

Four years earlier, he had stunned his family in Korea by announcing that he was traveling halfway across the world to pursue a career in music, all because of a chance encounter with guitarist Wes Montgomery’s spellbinding rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”

“I experience music through images,” Seol recalled. “When I heard this piece, I couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended. It felt completely unbound, like this dazzling image with no sense of logic.”

Then, during finals week, an unexpected international phone call came.

His mother had taken her own life.

“I’m 51 now,” he said quietly, “the same age my mother was when she died.”

Seol, now a jazz bassist and professor at Berklee College of Music, spent the next decade carrying a grief that never seemed to loosen its grip. In many ways, it felt like part of him remained imprisoned by the day she died.

But like many bereaved ones, his family retreated into silence. “Once ‘it’ happens, no one brings it up,” he said.

That silence extended to his father, who, like Seol, had lost his own mother to suicide as a baby.

“So he lost his mother, and then his wife, in the same way. Once, almost in passing, he wondered out loud whether it was some kind of family curse. I still can’t fully imagine what he must have gone through,” Seol said.

Ray Seol, a jazz bassist and professor at Berklee College of Music / Courtesy of E REUM

In search of her voice

It took years before Seol realized that, despite carrying the weight of his mother’s death, he had never truly tried to understand what had brought her to that point.

A Fulbright scholarship gave him the chance to retrace her life, not in pursuit of answers that could undo her death, but of the story she had never been able to tell.

In the summer of 2025, he traveled to his parents’ hometown of Seocheon, South Chungcheong Province, as well as Gwangju, speaking with relatives, neighbors and childhood friends.

There, he uncovered a painful truth: his mother had never learned to read or write.

“I had always thought she was simply shy and introverted. I was such a foolish son. How could I not know?” Seol said.

Like many firstborn daughters in rural Korea during the 1950s and 1960s, she was never sent to school. Instead, she was expected to care for her younger siblings and shoulder the burdens of the household.

“She never had access to the language that allows a person to make sense of their own existence, to express it and to be heard by others,” Seol said.

The discovery also changed how he saw himself. As a first-generation immigrant in the U.S., he often felt erased by speaking a language that was not his own. Jazz presented another barrier. As an Asian musician, he frequently encountered the stereotype that Asians simply could not “swing.”

In different ways, mother and son had both experienced what it meant to live without the words.

What began as an attempt to learn her story became a new kind of mourning, a final ritual in her honor. And the story he could never ask his mother to tell became one he would have to compose himself — through music.

From that emerged “The Prison of Language.”

Ray Seol's showcase of the music drama "The Prison of Language" / Courtesy of E REUM

'The Prison of Language'

In what Seol describes as a “music drama,” “The Prison of Language” is part autobiography, part collective memorial.

The work revisits the loss of his mother while weaving together 150 thematic keywords drawn from interviews with 14 Korean survivors of suicide loss.

One particular sentiment stayed with him above all.

“Everyone told me it felt as though that person was still somewhere out there — not fully gone, but somewhere between life and death. I knew that exact feeling. It was as if my mother were someone I simply hadn’t called for a very long time,” he said.

That liminal feeling became the emotional foundation of the performance.

Drawing on the Korean shamanic ritual of “gut,” a ceremony intended console the dead and the living alike, Seol combines bebop jazz with “pansori” (traditional musical storytelling).

“This isn’t fusion for the sake of fusion. It’s about bringing two traditions together at the level of spirit,” he said.

For Seol, the work is also a response to the way suicide is discussed. Too often, he argues, the conversation begins and ends with diagnosis or pathology, leaving little room for the lived stories behind a person’s suffering. Shame and silence, in turn, discourage survivors from speaking openly about their loss.

He believes art can create a different kind of open space. Rather than retraumatizing audiences, he wants the performance to offer room for reflection, connection and even moments of joy.

At its heart, Seol hopes the production leaves audiences with a simple message.

“Life has value," he said. "That value is different for everyone, and finding it takes time. But you have to stay alive to discover it.”

A full-scale production of “The Prison of Language” is scheduled to premiere next year in Seoul before traveling to Boston.