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| Kim Yong-seong, a musician who plays ajaeng, a Korean string instrument / Courtesy of Kim Yong-seong |
Young musician challenges gugak tradition
By Jung Da-min
Kim Yong-seong, 28, is a young musician who plays a Korean string instrument called "ajaeng," and challenges old practices in the country's traditional gugak music circles by presenting his own musical compositions.
Kim surprised the gugak industry in 2018 when he presented his own sanjo, a type of traditional Korean music involving an instrumental solo. He gave the performance the title, "Kim Yong Seong Ryu," ― his own name plus the suffix "ryu" meaning style.
Sanjo, a word of Sino-Korean origin, is made up of Chinese characters that translate to "scattered melodies," but the style is perhaps better described simply as a freestyle melodic form. It is an important genre for Korean traditional musicians through which they are able to demonstrate their technical skills and the individual characteristics of their style while playing spontaneous solo music on their instruments, accompanied only by a percussionist playing the janggu, an hourglass-shaped drum.
As performing sanjo has been considered an area exclusively for authoritative or prestigious musicians, young Kim's decision to present his own sanjo brought both sensation and shock to those in gugak circles.
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| Kim Yong-seong, a musician who plays the ajaeng, a Korean string instrument / Courtesy of Kim Yong-seong |
Kim said he wanted to show that musical imagination should not be an area reserved for a certain class but an area open for everyone.
"In the Korean traditional music circle, it has been taboo to change the rhythms or melodies of a song. … This tendency stems from practice of passing down traditional songs like pansori," Kim said. "I respect the old generation's efforts to keep our tradition. I could develop my own musical imagination based on the music they passed down. … But when traditional songs have already been recorded and protected as cultural heritage, I believe the time has come for us to freely express our musical imagination, realized through our own notes."
(Ajaeng player Kim Yong-seong performs his sanjo composition "Kim Yong Seong Ryu," at a concert held in Seoul's Bukchon Hanok Village on Oct. 13, 2019.)
Kim wanders the somewhat grey musical area between composition and improvisation. If defined as composition "Kim Yong Seong Ryu" was presented as his third piece. His first piece in 2014 was titled "Haemu," meaning the sea's dance. He said he tried to put as many ajaeng techniques as possible into the song to make it rather dramatic.
"Haemu was the first song I composed and it was based on my imagination of a scene in which a person slowly walks to the seaside, starts dancing in front of the sea, gets caught up in something, falls into the sea and then dies in the sea. There are two parts of dancing in the song, the first is the person dancing in front of the sea and the second is the person in the sea before drowning," Kim said.
Kim said he tries to realize ideas in the notes when he makes music. He said he gets ideas from everyday life especially when he finds something different or beautiful by looking at things from a different perspective by slightly twisting his point of view.
"When I walk on streets and even if I take the same path I do not go the same way but I zigzag, twist or take big steps and then I can see the same path anew," Kim said. "I see many people these days are trying to achieve things, feeling pressure that they should have some kind of a dream. …But I want to tell people that they could just stay there or go backwards. I hope people will love themselves more while focusing on themselves. Actually, you can go backwards, or you do not have to go at all."
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| Photos taken by ajaeng musician Kim Yong-seong at a Hanok in Seoul's Bukchon Hanok Village, Nov. 14, show different shadows of a tree cast on the same window at different times. Courtesy of Kim Yong-seong |
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