Ken Ueno's Music for Korean Instruments

Composed for and performed by the Korean master of the daegum (Korean bamboo flute), Kim Jeong-Seung, and recorded on his CD, Contemporary Daegum.

Notes: 
from a single calligraphic stroke, a vision of N’Shima emerges (2010)
for daegum, viola, and cello

Five years before writing this piece, when I wrote a piece for kayageum, the Korean zither, I was confronted with two main possible approaches: either to compose music that adapted stylizations of traditional Korean repertoire, or to manipulate the traditional instruments to speak in the grammar of the contemporary music of the West.  What I decided to do instead was to create a middle ground by imagining a fictitious folk tradition.  In writing this piece featuring daegum (Korean transverse bamboo flute), I returned not only to this approach, but also to the image of the cosmology I invented when I composed my earlier piece for kayageum.  The myth of N’Shima follows.

On the island of N’shima, native Ainu people play instruments imported from Korea.  The people of N’shima are tree weavers (in fact, the whole island is a boat whose hull is the complex woven roots of the Gingko trees – the fruits of which are the only export of the island).  The natives, living on such an island (the island constantly floats between oceans and time) have developed a great sense of memory, but have no sense of beginning or end (or East or West) or chronology.

From A Single Calligraphic Stroke, A Vision Of N'Shima Emerges

Alation (2017)
Commissioned by Geori

My body is inscribed with texts.

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

The epigraph to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tatooed on my left forearm. Joyce invokes the moment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the inventor Daedalus “turns his mind to unknown arts,” the moment when he was inspired to invent flight. The magic of that instant speaks to all creative moments, the transcendence of terrestrial boundaries. This tattoo reconciles seemingly opposed kinds of knowledge that my art practice seeks to balance: one that is mediated through our bodies and the other that is firmly anchored to logos, that is, knowledge acquired through language. The aesthetic tradition of the West has long privileged the headiness of logos and sublimated notions of the body. I want to inhabit--I do inhabit--a democratic landscape where both can inform each other. On my body, the canvas of my flesh is as much part of the message as the Latin that floats on its surface.

“Alation” is the condition of having wings. Besides the Joycean connotations of striving for flight, there was something about pitting a piano against a Korean instrument, in this piece an ajaeng, which also aligned with how I have come to think of different performance traditions as representing different kinds of thinking. The piano is the non plus ultra of equal-tempered structural hearing, whereas East Asian instruments represent a more embodied kind of thinking. What I wanted to investigate were ways in which the piano could be coopted into what I think of as an earthier mode of sounds – natural overtones and the highlighting of what are usually thought of as artifacts of production noise - pedaling as a sound and key noise (without letting it strike a note!) – in the hopes that that space of earthier sounds would also be a space where the ajaeng and piano might mutually be foreign.

Alation

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Alation

Ken Ueno Composer