KoreaTimes 2000/05/29

Fulbright Scholar Dedicated to Korean Music


2000/05/29(Mon) 19:18

Fulbright Scholar Dedicated to Korean Music

By Lee Yoon-soo

Staff Reporter

To meet a foreign national through the normal course of one's everyday
life even in this day and age is still a rare event in Korea. To find a
foreigner who speaks Korean with virtual fluency is rarer still. But to
discover one who also possesses an intimate knowledge of Korean
traditional music and expertise in playing that most representative and
cherished of Korean instruments, the kayagum, is virtually without
precedent.

Jocelyn Clark is an American, a Fulbright scholar, a festival
co-director-producer and a humble student of the kayagum, or 12-string zither.
The Alaskan-born 30 year-old is currently living in Korea, studying and
performing under the wing of acclaimed kayagum player Ji Ae-ri and
national living treasure-in-waiting Kang Jong-suk.

Last year, she won first prize in the KBS TV Korean Folk Arts Contest for
Foreigners in the kayagum byongchang (playing and singing) category, a
prize she was also awarded in 1993, and recently she was invited to
perform at the U.S. ambassador's residence to celebrate the 50th
anniversary in Korea of the Fulbright Commission, a prestigious U.S.
academic grants institution. All this, while researching a dissertation on
the traditional instrument for her Harvard doctorate.

``I love the kayagum,'' she explains simply. ``I believe I have a special
affinity for it.''

Clark has sparked a good deal of media attention during her stay in Korea.
She has appeared on the popular prime time KBS show ``Experience the
Scene of Life'' and on the Arirang cable TV station several times to
perform and give interviews. A spate of national dailies have run features
on her, an indication, no doubt, of the fascination she arouses in this
country as one of the few foreigners who have in one way or another
shown more interest and dedication to things Korean than most Koreans
show themselves.

She relates how recently on a television show on Arirang called ``Dreams
Come True,'' she was asked by the producers what dream she wanted
fulfilled. She immediately replied that she was living her dream,
somewhat scuppering the whole point of the program. ``I have been lucky
enough to study under the teachers that I wished to, learning the
instrument that I love,'' she declares.

Her experiences, however, have had a double-edge. If on the one hand a
foreign kayagum player arouses keen interest, she has learnt that her
foreignness bring to the surface certain native prejudices that continue to
be held and moreover accepted in Korea.

``There is a prevailing attitude here that foreigners cannot really play
Korean music -- the belief is that it somehow needs to be in the blood,''
she says. She explains how this year her teacher tried to enter her for the
Chunhyang Festival. She was rejected because she was not an ethnic Korean,
though nowhere in the rules did it state that foreigners could enter the
competition. ``It is threatening to people for a foreigner take up their
instrument as it brings up all sorts of problems of identity (for me too).

Clark is more understanding of her situation than she might be otherwise,
and fully aware of the significance traditional music holds for many Koreans. ``It
has turned into a kind of music of suffering for this country and a reminder
of a past that is fast disappearing,'' she says. She is the first to admit
that Korea is not the only country in the world to harbor prejudices, though
that is not to excuse it.

She also describes her first hand experience of the hardships and personal
politics that are involved in studying in Korea. But that is something she
says she willingly accepts.

``The word for musician in Korea `je-ja' means disciple. You rise when your
teacher rises and in a way you live for your teacher. The disciples
compete among one another over who practices the most, who rubs the
teacher's back, who carries her instrument for her. At a concert, you help
to dress your teacher, iron her clothes and carry her instrument onto the
stage. And you feel proud of that. It's a great feeling.''

It's also a type of dedication and servility that she admits, many
Westerners would not be able to endure. Clark, however, says that her
upbringing and influences have made her as much Eastern as Western in
character.

Raised and educated variously in Japan, and Alaska as a
child, she studied the koto, the Japanese version of the kayagum, at
Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the Chinese zheng at the Nanjing
Arts Academy in China. In 1992 she received a scholarship to study the
kayagum at the then National Classical Institute (now called the Korean
Traditional Performing Arts Center) in Socho-dong, southern Seoul.

In 1994 she left to take an MA course in Regional Studies in East Asia at
Harvard University, and returned to Korea with a Fulbright scholarship in
May last year to complete a dissertation for her Ph.D.

As one of the few people with expertise and knowledge in a wide range of
Asian traditional music, she plays regularly with koto and zheng art
ensembles in New York, she has been asked to produce concerts of East
Asian music for Harvard, and founded an annual festival in Juneau, Alaska
with her husband, a German professor of music and composer,
showcasing a mix of Asian and Western instrumentals and artists, as well
as a number of specially commissioned works from composers around the
world.

Last year, the ``CrossSound'' festival saw the participation of her teacher
Ji Ae-ri, once described as ``the new star that the kayagum community
has so long awaited'' by celebrated composer and kayagum master
Hwang Byung-ki, who also took part in the event. This year's festival,
scheduled for the first two weeks of September, will feature
commissioned works by such distinguished and world-renowned
composers as Luciano Berio and Bernard Rands as well as performances by
a medley of artists from Italy, Switzerland, China, Japan and America.

``Musicians are challenged at the festival to play with instruments and in
styles they have never played with before, and also in strange
combinations, while composers are asked to write music for instruments
that they have never written for before,'' she explains. Another challenge
posed by the festival involves is how one can keep an instrument's own
voice while at the same time mixing it with others, she adds.

Such questions of identity and new combination might very well be
applied to Clark herself. Dressed in black leather jacket and denims, at
one point narrating an excerpt from a recent kayagum byongchang
performance, she is a peculiar mix of signals and influences. The word
that she uses to describe her sense of identity is ``torn.''

But on one matter she is clear. In the same way that she feels an affinity
for Eastern traditional instruments, she says she has an affinity with the
East as whole, despite all the difficulties that she has come across here
and the complex relationships that she stresses as being a defining
characteristic of her experience in Korea. ``I feel very much at home
here,'' she says. ``It is a natural feeling that has grown in me over time.''

For further information on the ``CrossSound'' festival visit
``crosssound.com'' online.

2000/05/29 19:18