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| Violinist Won Hyung-joon will give a speech at the Basel Peace Forum, sharing his experiences promoting inter-Korea relations through music. Courtesy of Won Hyung-joon |
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Korean violinist Won Hyung-joon will give a speech at the Basel Peace Forum, the first Korean to speak at the event, which promotes peace building initiatives.
Won, the artistic director of the Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra, will speak during the "Emotions, Art, and Peace" session on Jan. 21, along with other artists.
Won will talk about his experiences bridging different ideologies through music.
Back in 1990, Won performed at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, which was celebrating Germany's reunification. The experience led him to recognize music as a medium of reconciliation and he then performed under the theme of world peace at the U.N. General Assembly Hall in 1996.
He founded the Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra in 2009 with the aim of bridging North and South Korea through music and promoting peace. Won tried to create a joint orchestra of young people from the two Koreas, taking inspiration from Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of musicians from Israel, Palestine and other places around the Middle East.
In 2019, Won organized a historic joint concert with North Korean soprano Kim Song-mi at the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai, China, and the Musikaliska Theater in Stockholm, Sweden.
Founded in 2016 by the Swiss Peace Foundation, the annual Basel Peace Forum offers a platform for discussions on peace by bringing experts from politics, business, civil society and academia.
"Won's attempt to connect the two Koreas goes well with the theme of the session, presenting the persuasive power of art in contexts affected by conflicts and violence," Maria Vogelbacher, the communications officer of the Swiss Peace Foundation, said.
Won's spirit of taking on challenges continued when the COVID-19 pandemic first swept around the globe. The violinist joined hands with MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Markus Buehler to create a "musical antibody" for the coronavirus. They translated the spike protein of the virus into a musical scale and created "antibody music" through researching the vibrational frequency of the proteins. Won premiered "COVID-19 Antibody Music (Protein Antibody in E-minor)" in March 2021.
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